In 1744, when he was only fifty years of age, his political ambition, seemed, in part, to have died out, and the indifferent state of his health led him to choose a private life. And then the object of his secret ideal and his real ambition we know now. Before his marriage he had, about the year 1732, by a French lady (Madame de Bouchet) whom he met in Holland, a natural son to whom he was tenderly attached. He wrote to this son, in all sincerity: “From the first day of your life, the dearest object of mine has been to make you as perfect as the weakness of human nature will allow.” Toward the education of this son all his wishes, all his affectionate and worldly predilections tended. And whether Viceroy of Ireland or Secretary of State in London, he found time to write long letters full of minute details to him, to instruct him in small matters and to perfect him in mind and manner. The Chesterfield, then, that we love especially to study is the man of wit and experience, who knew all the affairs and passed through all phases of political and public life only to find out its smallest resources, and to tell us the last _mot_; he who from his youth was the friend of Pope and Bolingbroke, the introducer into England of Montesquieu and Voltaire, the correspondent of Fontenelle and Madame de Teucin, he whom the Academy of Inscriptions placed among its members, who united the wit of the two nations, and who, in more than one intellectual essay, but particularly in his letters to his son, shows himself to us as a moralist as amiable as he is consummate, and one of the masters of life. It is the Rochefoucauld of England of whom we speak. Montesquieu, after the publication of _L’Esprit des Lois_, wrote to the Abbé de Guasco, who was then in England: “Tell my Lord Chesterfield that nothing is so flattering to me as his approbation; but that, though he is reading my work for the third time, he will only be in a better position to point out to me what wants correcting and rectifying in it; nothing could be more instructive to me than his observations and his critique.” It was Chesterfield who, speaking to Montesquieu one day of the readiness of the French for revolutions, and their impatience at slow reforms, spoke this sentence, which is a _résumé_ of our whole history: “You French know how to make barricades, but you never raise barriers.” Lord Chesterfield certainly appreciated Voltaire; he remarked, _à propos_ of the _Siècle de Louis XIV._: “Lord Bolingbroke had taught me how to read history; Voltaire teaches me how it should be written.” But, at the same time, with that practical sense which rarely abandons men of wit on the other side of the Straits, he felt the imprudences of Voltaire, and disapproved of them. When he was old, and living in retirement, he wrote to a French lady on the subject thus: