PASCAL, BLAISE.

Les Provinciales ou Lettres Ecrites par Louis de Montalte a un Provincial de ses Amis. Nouvelle edition.

(No place, nor printer), 1754.

12mo. In contemporary full mottled calf. Wear to extremities, spine ends with loss of leather. Hinges weak. Internally with light marginal browning, but generally good. LXXXII, 336 pp.

Later edition of the letters that make up Pascal's seminal "Les Provinciales", the hugely influential polemical magnum opus that constiutes "the first example of French prose as we know it today, perfectly finished in form, varied in style, and on a subject of universal importance." (PMM). Pascal's brilliantly written "provincial Letters", which humorously attacked casuistry and accused Jesuits of moral laxity, hugely influenced the prose of later French writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. The effect of the work was enormous, read by all of educated France, and condemned to burning by both the king and the Pope. Contemporarily bound with further 36 polemical texts of the Jansenist-Jesuit feud.

Order-nr.: 62960