y." A meddler and intriguer during the
Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his _Maximes,_ the Duke of La
Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life. Factions and
the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it
and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound,
he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed
itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that
kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. "He gave me
wit," Madame de La Fayette would say, "but I reformed his heart." He
had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill,
suffering cruelly. "I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld's,"
writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680. "I found him uttering loud shrieks;
his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single
scrap remaining. The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he
was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him. He
begged me to send you word, and to assure you that the wheel-broken do
not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life,
and so he wishes for death as a happy release." He died with Bossuet at
his pillow. "Very well prepared as regards his conscience," says Madame
de Sevigne again; "that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might
be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not
flurried about it, he is not troubled about it. Believe me, my daughter,
it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his
life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had
nothing that was novel or strange for him." M. de La Rochefoucauld
thought worse of men than of life. "I have scarcely any fear of
things," he had said; "I am not at all afraid of death." With all his
rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but
frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been
anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit. Actionless
penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and
the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over
men. "There was always a something (_je ne sais quoi_) about M. de La
Rochefoucauld," writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; "he was
for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had
no notion of petty interests, which were ne