over the sorrows of the world. But neither she nor any third person would ever see their social discretion thus betrayed, and she concludes, in her droll way, "C'est une vision!" In another letter to Mme de Grignan (June 6, 1672) she says of the Duke, "Il connaît quasi aussi bien que moi la tendresse maternelle."]

[Footnote 5: There was unquestionably a strong vein of tenderness running through the stoical character of the Duke, and if we were more intimately acquainted with his private life we should probably see many traces of it. Such traces exist as it is. We have Mme de Sévigné's account of his reception of the news of the Passage of the Rhine. It was announced to him, on the 17th of June, 1672, at the house of Mme de La Fayette, in the presence of Mme de Sévigné, that in that terrible disaster his eldest son had been dangerously wounded and his fourth son, the Chevalier, killed. The tears seemed to start out of the depth of his heart, and they brimmed his eyes, although his self-command prevented an outbreak of grief. But there was a further complication. The young Duke of Longueville was also killed at the Rhine, and he, as a select circle of intimate friends were perfectly aware, was really the love-child of La Rochefoucauld. Mme de Sévigné, having given a superficial account of the incident, characteristically goes on to say, "Alas! I am telling a lie; between ourselves, my dear, he does not feel the loss of the Chevalier so much; it is that of the young man whom all the world regrets which leaves him so inconsolable." And again she says: "I saw the secrets of his heart revealed under this cruel blow; and no one that I have ever seen surpasses him in courage, in honour, in tenderness, in balance of mind." This is a tribute not to be overlooked.]

To understand the wholesome influence which La Rochefoucauld has exercised on French character, we must keep constantly in sight his hatred of falsehood. If he is angry and sardonic, it is because he sees, or thinks he sees, falsehood everywhere masquerading as virtue. His foremost duty was to pluck the mask from the false virtues which strutted everywhere through the society and literature of France. Voltaire recognized nothing else in La Rochefoucauld but this sardonic misanthropy, this determination to prove that man is guided solely by self-interest. This Voltaire thought was the seule vérité contained in the "Maximes," and in a measure he was right. The moralist saw amour-propre as an Apollyon straddling right across the pathway of mankind; he saw lies flourish everywhere, and proclaim themselves to be the truth. The conscience of mankind was seduced or browbeaten by the impudency of self-love. Thus—

"We have not the courage to say broadly that we ourselves have no defects, and that our enemies have no good qualities; but as a matter of fact that is not far from being what we think."

He believed not at all, or very faintly, in altruism. He had to sweep away affected and therefore erroneous suppositions with regard to morality, and particularly with regard to social motives. He had come back to Paris, after his long and irksome exile, with a terrible clear-sightedness, and he saw that society had gone to pieces and that truth was essential to its rebuilding. He was convinced—and this must be asserted in the face of his own apparent cynicism—he was convinced of the existence of pure virtue, but he thought that amour-propre in the individual, and conventionality (what was then meant by la coutume) in the social order, had made it almost as rare as the dodo. He wished, by his stringent exposure of the arts of lying, to save virtue before it was absolutely extinct. He had the instinct of race-preservation.[6]