As the "Maximes" pass from hand to hand, we see the spiritual Maenads of Port Royal clustering "with a lovely frightened mien" about the sinister author, while he turns "his beauteous face haughtily another way," like young Apollo in the Phrygian highlands. The word "pessimism" was, I believe, unknown until the year 1835, but this is what Mme de La Fayette and the rest of the Jansenist ladies meant by "corruption." Perhaps the most celebrated of all the sayings of her terrible friend is that which declares that "In the misfortunes of our friends there is always something which gives us no displeasure." She was about to learn that no one had a nobler practice in friendship than the cynic who wrote this: "There are good marriages, but no delicious ones"; Mme de La Fayette's own marriage had been not at all delicious and not even good. "Gratitude in the majority of men is simply a strong and secret wish to receive still greater benefits." Terrifying this must have been to a sentimental and exalted bosom, and exclusive of all hope until the little word "majority" was observed, a loophole offered for scared humanity to creep out at. The design of La Rochefoucauld was to make people ashamed of their egotism, and so to help them to modify it. He saw France deadened by a universal sycophancy, and tyrannized over by a court life which made a lie of everything. He insisted upon the value of individual sincerity, but in a voice so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases--as when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence of others"--that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," as suited only to the vices of wicked persons, "improborum hominum vitiis," and to issue a warning against the too-sweeping cynicism of Roccapucaldius, as he called the Duke. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the dead-set against La Rochefoucauld. It encouraged Rousseau, a century later, to talk of "ce triste livre," and to declare, in the true romantic spirit, that "Bad maxims are worse than bad acts." There have always been, and always will be, people who experience a sort of _malaise_, an ill-defined discomfort, as though they sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This is particularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Our virtues are often only our vices in disguise," and who also, by the way, are constitutionally impatient of the French genius for making what is ugly, and even what is detestable, pleasing by the surface of style.