of anarchy's sake, a struggle which
pervaded the nation without ever contriving to be national, a riot of
forces directed by no intellectual or ethical purpose whatever. The
delirium of it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when the
aristocratic bolshevists of Conde's army routed the victorious king
and cardinal at the Faubourg St. Antoine. This was the consummation of
tragical absurdity; what might pass muster for political reason had
turned inside out; and when Mazarin fled to Sedan he left behind him a
France which was morally, religiously, intellectually, a sucked
orange.

Out of the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising
rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which
has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous
revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La
Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually
escaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the
stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory
that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is
the first of the moral virtues. We see him, the cynic and sensual
brawler of 1640, turned within a few years into a model of regularity,
the anarchist changed into a serious citizen with a logical scheme of
conduct, the atheistical swashbuckler become the companion of saints
and pitching his tent under the shadow of Port Royal. More than do the
purely religious teachers, he marks the rapid crystallization of
society in Paris, and the opening of a new age of reflection, of
polish and of philosophical experiment. Moral psychology, a science in
which Frenchmen have ever since delighted, seems to begin with the
stern analysis of _amour-propre_ in the "Maximes."

It is obvious that my choice of three moral maxim-writers to exemplify
the sources of modern French sentiment must be in some measure an
arbitrary one. The moralists of the end of the seventeenth century in
France are legion, and I would not have it supposed that I am not
aware of the relative importance of some of them. But although La
Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere were not the inventors of their
respective methods of writing, nor positively isolated in their
treatment of social themes, I do not think it is claiming too much for
them to say that in the crowd of smaller figures they stand out large,
and with each generation larger, in any survey of their century. In