y
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]

[Footnote 6: It is possible that the conversation of Mme de
Sable concentrated his thoughts on self-love. A contemporary
MS. says of that lady, "Elle flatte fort l'amour propre
quand elle parle aux gens." But egotism was a new discovery
which fascinated everybody in the third quarter of the
century.]

Let us turn to the few, but profoundly beautiful reflections which
form the constructive element in La Rochefoucauld's teaching. His aim
in edification is to train us to dig through the crust of social sham
to the limpid truth which exists in the dark centre of our souls--

"If there is a pure love, he says, exempt from all admixture with
other passions, it is that which lies hidden at the bottom of the
heart, and of which we ourselves are ignorant."

Unlike Mandeville, our own great cynic of the eighteenth century, La
Rochefoucauld, while calling in question the reality of almost all
benevolent impulses, stopped short of denying the existence of virtue
itself. He would not have said, as the author of the "Fable of the
Bees" (1714) did, that the "hunting after this _pulchrum et honestum_
is not much better than a wild-goose chase." But he had a strong
contempt for the humbugs of the world, and among them he placed
unflinching optimists. One of the main forms of humbug in his day was
the legend that everybody acted nobly for the sake of