As La Rochefoucauld's correspondence throws little light on the character and person of its author at the time of his intellectual and moral conversion, we turn with satisfaction to a document which owes its existence to a social amusement, almost to a "parlour game." We have seen that La Grande Mademoiselle, anxious to amuse the friends whom she gathered round her in her _salon_ at the Luxembourg, hit upon the notion of inducing her guests to produce written portraits of themselves. You might say all the good of yourself you liked, on the understanding that you put in the shades as well. The collection of these self-portraits was actually printed in 1659, and is a work of great value and interest to biographer and historian. It marks a new movement of French intelligence, a critical excursion into psychology not hitherto attempted in France, and some of the portraits are marvellously delicate in their conscientious precision. Here, however, we are not concerned with more than one of them, that which is signed with the initials of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. It is his only important composition produced between the "Memoires" and the "Maximes," and it is charmingly written, a portrait drawn in tones of rose-colour and dove-grey, like the pastel-portraits of a century later. He begins by describing his physical appearance, but passes soon to the moral and social qualities. It would be interesting to quote the whole of this portrait, but we must confine ourselves to some brief quotations. How far we seem from the beasts of prey which ranged the forests of the Fronde, or tore one another to pieces in the streets of Paris, when we follow this refined attempt to present the character of a modern and a complicated man:-- "There is something," says La Rochefoucauld, "at once peevish and proud in my appearance. This makes most people think that I am contemptuous, but I am not so at all. So far as my humour goes, I am melancholy, and I am so to such an extent that, in the last three or four years, I have scarcely been seen to laugh three or four times. It seems to me nevertheless that my melancholy would be supportable and mild enough if it depended solely on my temperament, but it comes so much from outside causes, and what so comes fills my imagination to such a degree, and occupies my thoughts so exclusively, that most of the time I move as in a dream, and scarce listen to what I myself am saying." Here we have the disappointed courtier still brooding over his disgrace, but we pass to an account of the relief which the new-born man of letters find in the cultivation of the intellect alone--