ows for death is
but the love of fame which hides death from his sight; in the peasant it
is but the result of his limited vision that hides from him the extent
of the evil, end leaves him free to reflect on other things.

THE FIRST SUPPLEMENT

[The following reflections are extracted from the first two editions
of La Rochefoucauld, having been suppressed by the author in succeeding
issues.]

I.--Self-love is the love of self, and of all things for self. It
makes men self-worshippers, and if fortune permits them, causes them to
tyrannize over others; it is never quiet when out of itself, and only
rests upon other subjects as a bee upon flowers, to extract from them
its proper food. Nothing is so headstrong as its desires, nothing so
well concealed as its designs, nothing so skilful as its management;
its suppleness is beyond description; its changes surpass those of the
metamorphoses, its refinements those of chemistry. We can neither plumb
the depths nor pierce the shades of its recesses. Therein it is hidden
from the most far-seeing eyes, therein it takes a thousand imperceptible
folds. There it is often to itself invisible; it there conceives, there
nourishes and rears, without being aware of it, numberless loves and
hatreds, some so monstrous that when they are brought to light it
disowns them, and cannot resolve to avow them. In the night which covers
it are born the ridiculous persuasions it has of itself, thence come its
errors, its ignorance, its silly mistakes; thence it is led to believe
that its passions which sleep are dead, and to think that it has lost
all appetite for that of which it is sated. But this thick darkness
which conceals it from itself does not hinder it from seeing that
perfectly which is out of itself; and in this it resembles our eyes
which behold all, and yet cannot set their own forms. In fact, in great
concerns and important matters when the violence of its desires
summons all its attention, it sees, feels, hears, imagines, suspects,
penetrates, divines all: so that we might think that each of its
passions had a magic power proper to it. Nothing is so close and strong
as its attachments, which, in sight of the extreme misfortunes which
threaten it, it vainly attempts to break. Yet sometimes it effects that
without trouble and quickly, which it failed to do with its whole power
and in the course of years, whence we may fairly conclude that it is
by itself that its desires are inf