er
terrible friend is that which declares that "In the misfortunes of our
friends there is always something which gives us no displeasure." She
was about to learn that no one had a nobler practice in friendship
than the cynic who wrote this: "There are good marriages, but no
delicious ones"; Mme de La Fayette's own marriage had been not at all
delicious and not even good. "Gratitude in the majority of men is
simply a strong and secret wish to receive still greater benefits."
Terrifying this must have been to a sentimental and exalted bosom, and
exclusive of all hope until the little word "majority" was observed, a
loophole offered for scared humanity to creep out at.

The design of La Rochefoucauld was to make people ashamed of their
egotism, and so to help them to modify it. He saw France deadened by a
universal sycophancy, and tyrannized over by a court life which made a
lie of everything. He insisted upon the value of individual sincerity,
but in a voice so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases--as
when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is
usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence
of others"--that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if
he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of
these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to
all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of
Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," as suited
only to the vices of wicked persons, "improborum hominum vitiis," and
to issue a warning against the too-sweeping cynicism of
Roccapucaldius, as he called the Duke. This was, perhaps, the
beginning of the dead-set against La Rochefoucauld. It encouraged
Rousseau, a century later, to talk of "ce triste livre," and to
declare, in the true romantic spirit, that "Bad maxims are worse than
bad acts." There have always been, and always will be, people who
experience a sort of _malaise_, an ill-defined discomfort, as though
they sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This is
particularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Our
virtues are often only our vices in disguise," and who also, by the
way, are constitutionally impatient of the French genius for making
what is ugly, and even what is detestable, pleasing by the surface of
style.

There is an element of unmercifulness in the candour of La
Rochefoucauld which is