reas
no one ever took more pains. Segrais gives very interesting
information on this point: he says that the Duke
"sent me from time to time what he had been working
on, and he wished me to keep these note-books of his for
five or six weeks, so as to be able to give them my
closest attention, particularly with regard to the turn of
the thoughts and the arrangement of the words. Some of
his maxims he altered as many as thirty times." But
when he wrote to Esprit, in 1660, La Rochefoucauld
affected to regard his own writings as trifles thrown off
"au coin de mon feu" The great of the earth have these
amiable and amusing weaknesses.]

But his clearness of insight was immense, and he was too profoundly
intelligent to be a merely destructive or sterile force. He builded
better than he knew. For instance, courage, it has been alleged, he
denies, and indeed he is so savage in his exposure of braggadocio that
it might well be believed that he refused to admit that men could be
brave. Yet what does he say?--

"Intrepidity is an extraordinary force of the soul which lifts it
above those troubles, disorders and emotions which the aspect of great
peril would otherwise excite; it is by this force that heroes maintain
themselves in a state of equanimity, preserving the free use of their
reason through the most surprising and the most terrible accidents."

This must include the most moving of all accidents, those which call
forth moral and physical courage in the face of national danger, and
are rewarded by _gloire_, by public and lasting fame. And we are led
on to a consideration of the lengthy reflection on the spirit in which
the approach of death should be faced, with which he closed the latest
edition of the "Maximes," declaring that "the splendour of dying with
a firm spirit, the hope of being regretted, the desire to leave a fair
reputation behind us, the assurance of being released from the
drudgery of life and of depending no more on the caprices of fortune,"
are remedies which would medicine our pain in approaching the dreaded
goal of our existence.

We must read La Rochefoucauld closely to perceive why a book so
searching, and even so cruel as his, has exercised on the genius of
France a salutary and a lasting influence. His savage pessimism is not
useless, it is not a mere scorn of humanity and a sneer at its
weaknesses. It tends, by stripping off all the sha