It is curious that the man who wrote these words should have been on the threshold of a period when his prime interest and most active concern was centred in a labyrinth of Court intrigue. For about six years he was absorbed and immersed in the designs directed by a party at Court against the influence of Cardinal Fleury. Of all the pages of his Journal, the volume and a half in which this period is embraced is the least admirable and the least attractive; for the man is keenly interested in the issue of the struggle; not an incident or a detour escapes him; and we have an almost daily record of hopes and plans and futile ambitions, sometimes outbreaks of revolting spleen, set down in pages which are as difficult to read in cold blood as they were easy to write in heat. There is no question that the tone of hard hostility which criticism of d'Argenson has so often assumed, is explained, if it is not warranted, by the revelations of this period. Even the appreciation of St. Beuve was almost quenched by their perusal when the volumes of Rathery came into his hands; and in the last of his "Causeries" devoted to d'Argenson, the luminous enthusiasm of his earlier essays is exchanged for a tone of coldness and disillusion.[223] Had the prince of critics held the strife of politics in less abhorrence, he might have seen less reason to abandon the attitude which invested his earlier essays, not only with justice, but with charm. Appreciation of d'Argenson may be sufficiently great to justify an attempt to present these years in a light more attractive and perhaps more true than that in which they have frequently appeared. The inquiry is no unimportant one. D'Argenson has been charged, not with mere personal ambition, but with rancour awakened by personal pique. The issue will decide whether he was indeed the man that he himself imagined, or whether, with all his fine philosophy, he was really no larger than any of the men against whose littleness he inveighed.