One of the first things we learn about Dorothea, at the beginning of the very first chapter, is that she ‘knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensées’ by heart, passages which illuminated for her ‘the destinies of mankind by the light of Christianity’. Pascal provides the epigraph to both Middlemarch’s 33rd and 75th chapters: ‘Qui veut délasser hors de propos, lasse’ and ‘Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et l’ignorance de la vanité des plaisirs absents causent l’inconstance’, respectively. 4 This is strange, since we know that Eliot read Pascal’s Pensées avidly from a young age. Wettlaufer, ‘George Sand, George Eliot, and the Politics of Difference (.)ĤBut while there have been journal articles and even whole PhDs, written on Eliot and Sand, there has been, to my knowledge, very little on Eliot and Pascal.
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