12.--Whatever care we take to conceal our passions under the appearances of piety and honour, they are always to be seen through these veils. [The 1st edition, 1665, preserves the image perhaps better--"however we may conceal our passions under the veil, etc., there is always some place where they peep out."] 13.--Our self love endures more impatiently the condemnation of our tastes than of our opinions. 14.--Men are not only prone to forget benefits and injuries; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit. 15.--The clemency of Princes is often but policy to win the affections of the people. ["So many are the advantages which monarchs gain by clemency, so greatly does it raise their fame and endear them to their subjects, that it is generally happy for them to have an opportunity of displaying it."--Montesquieu, Esprit Des Lois, Lib. VI., C. 21.] 16.--This clemency of which they make a merit, arises oftentimes from vanity, sometimes from idleness, oftentimes from fear, and almost always from all three combined. [La Rochefoucauld is content to paint the age in which he lived. Here the clemency spoken of is nothing more than an expression of the policy of Anne of Austria. Rochefoucauld had sacrificed all to her; even the favour of Cardinal Richelieu, but when she became regent she bestowed her favours upon those she hated; her friends were forgotten.--Aime Martin. The reader will hereby see that the age in which the writer lived best interprets his maxims.] 17.--The moderation of those who are happy arises from the calm which good fortune bestows upon their temper. 18.--Moderation is caused by the fear of exciting the envy and contempt which those merit who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it is a vain display of our strength of mind, and in short the moderation of men at their greatest height is only a desire to appear greater than their fortune. 19.--We have all sufficient strength to support the misfortunes of others. [The strongest example of this is the passage in Lucretius, lib. ii., line I:-- "Suave mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem."] 20.--The constancy of the wise is only the talent of concealing the agitation of their hearts. [Thus wisdom is only hypocrisy, says a commentator. This definition of constancy is a result of maxim 18.] 21.--Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it; so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes. [See this thought elaborated in maxim 504.] 22.--Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.