This heart might well need reform and cure from all of evil it had communicated with during long years of intrigue and adventure. The easiness of his temper, his turn for gallantry, the mobile nature of his mind, rendered him susceptible to the contamination of the bad passions then so active around him. Ardent, ambitious, subtle,--we find him, in the time of the Fronde, busiest among the intriguers; eager in pursuit of his objects, yet readily turned aside; violent in his hatred, passionate in his attachments, yet easily detached from both, after the first fire had burnt out. His vacillation of conduct and feeling at that time caused it to be said, that he always made a quarrel in the morning, and the employment of his day was to make it up by evening. Cardinal de Retz, his great enemy, accuses him or thinking too ill of human nature.[28] Thrown among the fools, knaves, and demoralised women of the Fronde, we cannot wonder that he, seeing the extent of the evil of which human nature is capable, was unaware that these very passions, regulated by moral principle and religion, would animate men to virtue as well as to vice. He read this lesson subsequently in his own heart, when, turning from the libertine society with which he spent his youth, he became the friend of madame de la Fayette, madame de Sévigné, and the most distinguished persons of the reign of Louis XIV. Yet the taint could not quite be effaced. It left his heart, but it blotted his understanding. He could feel generous, noble, and pious sentiments; but having once experienced emotions the reverse of these, and having found them deep-rooted in others, he fancied that both virtue and vice, good and evil, sprang from the same causes, and were based on the same foundations. Added to this, we may observe that his best friends belonged to a court. True and just as was madame de la Fayette,--amiable and disinterested as madame de Sévigné,--brave as Turenne,--noble as Condé,--pious as Racine,--honest as Boileau,--devout and moral as madame de Maintenon might be, and were, the taint of a court was spread over all; the desire of being well with the sovereign, and making a monarch's favour the cynosure of hearts and the measure of merit. Rochefoucauld fancied that he could discern selfishness in all; yet, had he turned his eye inward with a clearer view, he had surely found that the impulses that caused his own heart to warm with friendship and virtue, were based on a power of forgetting self in extraneous objects; for he was a faithful, affectionate, and disinterested friend, a fond father, and an honourable man. He was brave also; though madame de Maintenon tells us that he was accustomed to say that he looked on personal bravery as folly. This speech lets us into much of the secret recesses of his mind. His philosophy was epicurean; and, wanting the stoic exaltation of sentiment, and worship of good for good's sake, he mistook the principles of the human mind, and saw no excellence in a