Reading Mes Cahiers, one is struck by the large share accorded to Pascal in the meditations of Maurice Barrès, a share which does not always appear reflected in Barrès's finished work. Barres tells us that, at twenty, his favorite writers included Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Goethe, Cervantes, and Pascal. But is was not until some time later that Pascal came to be the lode-star of the middle decades of his life. There were readers who linked his Culte du Moi with Pascal's analysis of the self, but such readers did not come until after this Culte du Moi could be retrospectively interpreted in relation to his nationalism and to his increasing impulsion toward Catholicism. It was inevitable that the skeptic and individualist should have been impressed by Pascal as a hero of independent thought. Added to this was the interest naturally felt by the artist and patriot for one of the unchallenged glories of French literature. And when the Lorrainer began to delve among the roots of the Auvergne side of his family, he would not have been the exponent of “la Terre et les Morts,” if his imagination had not been stirred by the fact that Pascal too, was from Auvergne.