Pensées: Grandeur de l’homme

Edition

Excerpt: one fragment of chapter XXIII, “Grandeur de l’homme”, of Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées après sa mort parmy ses papiers, Paris, Guillaume Desprez, 1670, the first Port-Royal edition ([41] f., 365 p.), page 181, in the copy of the BnF on Gallica (view 267), from “L’homme n’est qu’un roseau” to “Voilà le principe de la morale.”, its two paragraphs complete; the fragments before and after it in the chapter are left out, with the fleuron that opens each fragment. The words were taken from the proofread transcription of fr.wikisource of another 1670 edition by Desprez (Index “Pascal - Pensées, 2e édition G. Desprez, 1670.djvu”, pages 258-259, from Gallica bpt6k577160), whose spelling is modernized, and were set back to the spelling of the print word by word against the page image of the first edition (foible, goute, tüer, écraseroit, seroit, tüe, sçait twice, luy, nostre, and “&” twice); the two 1670 prints were compared on this passage and differ only in “goute” (first edition) and “goutte”, “de là” and “de la” (second). The long s is set as a round s, the word divided at a line end (“pen-ser”) is joined, the space that the print leaves before some commas is dropped, and a no-break space is kept before the semicolons. The title of the poster is set from the fragment; the chapter title is in the kicker and the footer.

Rights

Blaise Pascal died on 19 August 1662, and the Pensées were published in 1670: in the public domain in France (author died before 1 January 1956) and in the United States (published before 1931).

Gallica gives the scan the rights statement “domaine public”. Its conditions of use (https://gallica.bnf.fr/edit/und/conditions-dutilisation-des-contenus-de-gallica) make non-commercial reuse free with the credit “Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF”, which the footer gives, and commercial reuse subject to a license; the poster reuses the text, not the images. The Wikisource transcription used as a working copy is not reproduced: every word was read on the page image of the print.