Buddhism ideals in the West before the 20th century
Apparently Pascal is aware of the same thing that the Buddha was aware of before he became enlightened: i.e. a view of reality which was the actual incentive for Gautama to look for enlightenment, asking something like,
&quot;How can I be happy, even as a king, when illness and death are inevitable?&quot;
This description of the &quot;human condition&quot; is presumably well-known to many other people too.
What's remarkable about Buddhism isn't its description of the problem: what's remarkable is the Buddha's description of the solution to that problem.
Pascal describes the problem but not the solution. He says (I paraphrase),

&quot;We can't be happy. But there's a reason for that, i.e. our feeble and mortal condition. Even a king couldn't be happy without distractions.&quot;

Later,

&quot;Thus goes life. We look for rest by overcoming a few obstacles. And when they're overcome, rest becomes insufferable.&quot;

And a few pages beyond that,

&quot;Man, who hasn't been able to heal death, misery, and ignorance, has advised himself not to think about it.

The conclusion to that chapter is that such distraction is actually harmful because it stops us from looking for the real remedy:

puisque l’homme ne s’ennuie de tout, et ne cherche cette multitude d’occupations que parce qu’il a l’idée du bonheur qu’il a perdu ; lequel ne trouvant pas en soi, il le cherche inutilement dans les choses extérieures, sans se pouvoir jamais contenter, parce qu’il n’est ni dans nous, ni dans les créatures, mais en Dieu seul.
because man gets bored with everything, and searches for this multitude of activities only because he has the idea of the unhappiness which he has lost; which having not found (happiness) in himself, he (man) looks for it uselessly (in vain) in external things, never able to content himself, because it (happiness) is not in us, not in the creatures, but only in God.

In summary I think that Pascal is aware of the First Noble Truth but the rest of it is not especially Buddhist. The remedy which Pascal proposes (elsewhere in the book) is the Christian faith.