The ladies may hold it to be an excuse for our French moralist that he was a confirmed and impenitent bachelor. He thought that marriage enchained a philosopher, and would have said, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, "He rideth the faster who rideth alone," Boileau, after a visit from La Bruyere, remarked that nature had not consented to make him so agreeable as he wished to be. It seems that he was shy and gauche, and that he strove to conceal these defects by occasional outbursts of a dreadful playfulness. There are stories about his behaviour in the House of Conde, which if they are true seem to carry eccentricity beyond the bounds of what is permitted even to a philosopher. Nevertheless, contemporaries report that, in spite of his plain features and his "look of a common soldier" (a dreadful thing to say in the seventeenth century), the ladies ran after him. I am afraid that when they did so, he repulsed them. He says about love none of the charming things which he says about friendship, such as "To be with those we are fond of, that is enough; to dream, to speak to them, to say nothing to them, to think about them, to think of indifferent things, but in their presence,--all is equally pleasant." Or this: "Pure friendship has a flavour which is beyond the taste of those who are born mediocre." Or again. "There ought to be, deep down in the heart, inexhaustible wells of sorrow in readiness for certain losses." The tenderness of such thoughts as these may surely outweigh the dryness of the portraits of Corinne and Clarice. The career of our moralist, after the publication of his single book, was a short one. His startling success as a writer irresistibly pointed him out as a candidate for election to the French Academy, but here he was met by the barbed wire of jealousy and exasperated vanity. He had laughed at too many pretentious mandarins to hope to escape their resentment. At last, in 1693, but alas! at the expense of a vast deal of intrigue on the part of his illustrious protectors, he stormed that reluctant fortress. In his Reception Discourse, he revenged himself on his enemies by firing volley after volley of irony into their ranks, and the august body was beside itself with rage. No pompous Academician, for instance, likes to hear, in the solemn conclave of his colleagues, that he is so Christian and so charitable that "writing well may be said to be among the least of his qualities." La Bruyere summed up his attacks in a preface to the eighth edition of the "Caracteres" in 1694. He then retired again to his independence as a crafty old bachelor, and Saint Simon gives us a pleasant snapshot of him in these latest years, "a very straightforward man, capital company, simple, with nothing of the pedant about him, and entirely disinterested."