Note 115 — LETTER III.

The allusions in the text afford curious illustrations of the mode of warfare pursued by the Jesuits of the seventeenth century. The first refers to a comic catechism, in which the simple language of childhood was employed as a vehicle for the most calumnious charges against the opponents of the Society. Pascal refers again to this catechism in Letter xvii. The second device was a sort of school-boy masquerade. A handsome youth, disguised as a female, in splendid attire, and bearing the inscription of sufficient grace, dragged behind him another dressed as a bishop (representing Jansenius, bishop of Ypres), who followed with a rueful visage, amidst the hootings of the other boys. The comedy referred to was acted in the Jesuits’ college of Clermont. The almanacs published in France at that period being usually embellished with rude cuts for the amusement of the vulgar, the Jesuits procured the insertion of a caricature of the Jansenists, who were represented as pursued by the pope, and taking refuge among the Calvinists. This, however, called forth a retaliation, in the shape of a poem, entitled “The Prints of the Famous Jesuitical Almanac,” in which the Jesuits were so successfully held up to ridicule, that they could hardly show face for some time in the streets of Paris. (Nicole, i. p. 208.)