[Footnote 1: The poet Leon Guillot, in dying, bid his comrades describe him to his father and mother as "tombe au champ d'honneur et mort _joyeusement_ pour son pays."--"Les Diverses Familles Spirituelles de la France," pp. 178, 179.] There is not much advantage in searching for the germs of all this exalted sentiment earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century. The malady of the Fronde was serious precisely because it revealed the complete absence, in the nobles, in the clergy, in the common people, of patriotic conviction of any kind. Cardinal's men and anti-cardinalists, Mazarin and Monsieur, Conde and Plessis-Praslin,--we follow the bewildering turns of their fortune and the senseless evolution of their mercenaries, without being able to trace any moral line of conduct, any ethical aim on the part of the one or the other. It was anarchy for the sheer fun of anarchy's sake, a struggle which pervaded the nation without ever contriving to be national, a riot of forces directed by no intellectual or ethical purpose whatever. The delirium of it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when the aristocratic bolshevists of Conde's army routed the victorious king and cardinal at the Faubourg St. Antoine. This was the consummation of tragical absurdity; what might pass muster for political reason had turned inside out; and when Mazarin fled to Sedan he left behind him a France which was morally, religiously, intellectually, a sucked orange. Out of the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually escaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is the first of the moral virtues. We see him, the cynic and sensual brawler of 1640, turned within a few years into a model of regularity, the anarchist changed into a serious citizen with a logical scheme of conduct, the atheistical swashbuckler become the companion of saints and pitching his tent under the shadow of Port Royal. More than do the purely religious teachers, he marks the rapid crystallization of society in Paris, and the opening of a new age of reflection, of polish and of philosophical experiment. Moral psychology, a science in which Frenchmen have ever since delighted, seems to begin with the stern analysis of _amour-propre_ in the "Maximes."