Part 17

FONTANGES: It pleases me vastly. I admire rubies. I will ask the king for one exactly like it. This is the time he usually comes from the chase. I am sorry you cannot be present to hear how prettily I shall ask him. I am sure he will order the ring for me, and I will confess to you with it upon my finger. But, first, I must be cautious and particular to know of him how much it is his royal will that I should say.

_IV.--The Empress Catharine and Princess Dashkof_

CATHARINE: Into his heart! Into his heart! If he escapes, we perish! Do you think, Dashkof, they can hear me through the double door? Yes, hark! they heard me. They have done it! What bubbling and gurgling! He groaned but once. Listen! His blood is busier now than it ever was before. I should not have thought it could have splashed so loud upon the floor. Put you ear against the lock.

DASHKOF: I hear nothing.

CATHARINE: My ears are quicker than yours, and know these notes better. Let me come. There! There again! The drops are now like lead. How now? Which of these fools has brought his dog with him? What trampling and lapping! The creature will carry the marks all about the palace with his feet! You turn pale, and tremble. You should have supported me, in case I had required it.

DASHKOF: I thought only of the tyrant. Neither in life nor in death could any one of these miscreants make me tremble. But the husband slain by his wife! What will Russia--what will Europe say?

CATHARINE: Russia has no more voice than a whale. She may toss about in her turbulence, but my artillery (for now, indeed, I can safely call it mine) shall stun and quiet her.

DASHKOF: I fear for your renown.

CATHARINE: Europe shall be informed of my reasons, if she should ever find out that I countenanced the conspiracy. She shall be persuaded that her repose made the step necessary; that my own life was in danger; that I fell upon my knees to soften the conspirators; that only when I had fainted, the horrible deed was done.

DASHKOF: Europe may be more easily subjugated than duped.

CATHARINE: She shall be both, God willing! Is the rouge off my face?

DASHKOF: It is rather in streaks and mottles, excepting just under the eyes, where it sits as it should do.

CATHARINE: I am heated and thirsty. I cannot imagine how. I think we have not yet taken our coffee. I could eat only a slice of melon at breakfast--my duty urged me _then_--and dinner is yet to come. Remember, I am to faint at the midst of it, when the intelligence comes in, or, rather, when, in despite of every effort to conceal it from me, the awful truth has flashed upon my mind. Remember, too, you are to catch me, and to cry for help, and to tear those fine flaxen hairs which we laid up together on the toilet; and we are both to be as inconsolable as we can be for the life of us.

Come, sing. I know not how to fill up the interval. Two long hours yet! How stupid and tiresome! I wish all things of the sort could be done and be over in a day. They are mightily disagreeable when by nature one is not cruel. People little know my character. I have the tenderest heart upon earth. Ivan must follow next; he is heir to the throne. But not now. Another time. Two such scenes together, and without some interlude, would perplex people.

I thought we spoke of singing. Do not make me wait. Cannot you sing as usual, without smoothing your dove's throat with your handkerchief, and taking off your necklace? Sing, sing! I am quite impatient!

_V.--Bacon and Richard Hooker_

BACON: Hearing much of your worthiness and wisdom, Master Richard Hooker, I have besought your comfort and consolation in this my too heavy affliction, for we often do stand in need of hearing what we know full well, and our own balsams must be poured into our breasts by another's hand. Withdrawn, as you live, from court and courtly men, and having ears occupied by better reports than such as are flying about me, yet haply so hard a case as mine, befalling a man heretofore not averse from the studies in which you take delight, may have touched you with some concern.

HOOKER: I do think, my lord of Verulam, that the day which in his wisdom he appointed for your trial was the very day on which the king's majesty gave unto your ward and custody the great seal of his English realm. And--let me utter it without offence--your features and stature were from that day forward no longer what they were before. Such an effect do rank and power and office produce even on prudent and religious men. You, my lord, as befits you, are smitten and contrite; but I know that there is always a balm which lies uppermost in these afflictions.

BACON: Master Richard, it is surely no small matter to lose the respect of those who looked up to us for countenance; and the favour of a right learned king, and, O Master Hooker, such a power of money! But money is mere dross. I should always hold it so, if it possessed not two qualities--that of making men treat us reverently, and that of enabling us to help the needy.

HOOKER: The respect, I think, of those who respect us for what a fool can give and a rogue can take away, may easily be dispensed with; but it is indeed a high prerogative to help the needy, and when it pleases the Almighty to deprive us of it, he hath removed a most fearful responsibility.

BACON: Methinks it beginneth to rain, Master Richard. What if we comfort our bodies with a small cup of wine, against the ill-temper of the air. Pledge me; hither comes our wine.(_To the servant_) Dolt! Is not this the beverage I reserve for myself?

Bear with me, good Master Hooker, but verily I have little of this wine, and I keep it as a medicine for my many and growing infirmities. You are healthy at present: God, in His infinite mercy, long maintain you so! Weaker drink is more wholesome for you. But this Malmsey, this Malmsey, flies from centre to circumference, and makes youthful blood boil.

HOOKER: Of a truth, my knowledge in such matters is but sparse. My lord of Canterbury once ordered part of a goblet, containing some strong Spanish wine, to be taken to me from his table when I dined by sufferance with his chaplains, and, although a most discreet, prudent man, as befitteth his high station, was not so chary of my health as your lordship. Wine is little to be trifled with; physic less. The Cretans, the brewers of this Malmsey, have many aromatic and powerful herbs among them. On their mountains, and notably on Ida, grows that dittany which works such marvels, and which perhaps may give activity to this hot medicinal drink of theirs. I would not touch it knowingly; an unregarded leaf dropped into it above the ordinary might add such puissance to the concoction as almost to break the buckles in my shoes.

BACON: When I read of such things I doubt them: but if I could procure a plant of dittany I would persuade my apothecary and my gamekeeper to make experiments.

HOOKER: I dare not distrust what grave writers have declared in matters beyond my knowledge.

BACON: Good Master Hooker, I have read many of your reasonings, and they are admirably well sustained. Yet forgive me, in God's name my worthy master, if you descried in me some expression of wonder at your simplicity. You would define to a hair's breadth the qualities, states, and dependencies of principalities, dominations, and powers; you would be unerring about the apostles and the churches, and 'tis marvellous how you wander about a pot-herb!

HOOKER: I know my poor, weak intellects, most noble lord, and how scantily they have profited by my hard painstaking. Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly, but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory.

BACON: I have observed among the well-informed and the ill-informed nearly the same quantity of infirmities and follies; those who are rather the wiser keep them separate, and those who are wisest of all keep them better out of sight. I have persuaded men, and shall persuade them for ages, that I possess a wide range of thought unexplored by others, and first thrown open by me, with many fair enclosures of choice and abstruse knowledge. One subject, however, hath almost escaped me, and surely one worth the trouble.

HOOKER: Pray, my lord, if I am guilty of no indiscretion, what may it be?

BACON: Francis Bacon.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Reflections and Moral Maxims

Rochefoucauld's "Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims," were published in 1665. In them his philosophy of life is expressed with a perfection of form which still remains unrivalled and unequalled. The original work contains only 314 short sentences; the last edition he published contains 541; but when one examines the exquisite workmanship of his style, one does not wonder that it represents the labour of twenty years. La Rochefoucauld (see Vol. X, p. 203) is one of the greatest masters of French prose, as well as one of the great masters of cynicism. He has exerted a deep influence both on English and French literature, and Swift and Byron were among his disciples.

_I.--Of Love and of Women_

To judge love by most of its effects, it seems more like hatred than kindness.

In love we often doubt of what we most believe.

As long as we love, we forgive.

Love is like fire, it cannot be without continual motion; as soon as it ceases to hope or fear it ceases to exist.

Many persons would never have been in love had they never heard talk of it.

Agreeable and pleasant as love is, it pleases more by the manners in which it shows itself than by itself alone.

We pass on from love to ambition; we seldom return from ambition to love.

Those who have had a great love affair find themselves all their life happy and unhappy at being cured of it.

In love the one who is first cured is best cured.

The reason why lovers are never weary of talking of each other is that they are always talking of themselves.

Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy which makes our heart attach itself in succession to all the qualities of our beloved, and prefer, now this trait and now that; so that this constancy is only a kind of inconstancy fixed and enclosed in a single object.

If there is a love pure and exempt from all mixture with our other passions, it is that which is hidden in the depth of our heart and unknown to ourselves.

The pleasure of love consists in loving, and our own passion gives us more happiness than the feelings which our beloved has for us.

The grace of novelty is to love like the fine bloom on fruit; it gives it a lustre which is easily effaced and never recovered.

We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we desire.

Women often fancy themselves to be in love when they are not. Their natural passion for being beloved, their unwillingness to give a denial, the excitement of mind produced by an affair of gallantry, all these make them imagine they are in love when they are in fact only coquetting.

All women are flirts. Some are restrained by timidity and some by reason.

The greatest miracle of love is the reformation of a coquette.

A coquette pretends to be jealous of her lover, in order to conceal her envy of other women.

Most women yield more from weakness than from passion, hence an enterprising man usually succeeds with them better than an amiable man.

It is harder for women to overcome their coquetry than their love. No woman knows how much of a coquette she is.

Women who are in love more readily forgive great indiscretions than small infidelities.

Some people are so full of themselves that even when they become lovers they find a way of being occupied with their passion without being interested in the person whom they love.

It is useless to be young without being beautiful, or beautiful without being young.

In their first love affairs women love their lover; in all others they love love.

In the old age of love, as in the old age of life, we continue to live to pain long after we have ceased to live to pleasure.

There is no passion in which self-love reigns so powerfully as in love; we are always more ready to sacrifice the repose of a person we love than to lose our own.

There is a certain kind of love which, as it grows excessive, leaves no room for jealousy.

Jealousy is born with love, but it does not always die with it.

Jealousy is the greatest of all afflictions, and that which least excites pity in the persons that cause it.

In love and in friendship we are often happier by reason of the things that we do not know than by those that we do.

There are few women whose merit lasts longer than their beauty.

The reason why most women are little touched by friendship is that friendship is insipid to those who have felt what love is.

_II.--Friendship_

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something that does not displease us.

Rare as true love is, it is less rare than true friendship.

What makes us so changing in our friendships is that it is difficult to discern the qualities of the soul, and easy to recognize the qualities of the mind.

It is equally difficult to have a friendship for those whom we do not esteem as for those we esteem more than ourselves.

We love those who admire us, not those whom we admire.

Most of the friendships of the world ill deserve the name of friendship; still, a man may make occasional use of them, as in a business where the profits are uncertain and it is usual to be cheated.

It is more dishonourable to mistrust a friend than to be deceived by him.

We are fond of exaggerating the love our friends bear us, but it is less from a feeling of gratitude than from a desire to advertise our own merits.

What usually hinders us from revealing the depths of our hearts to our friends is not so much the distrust which we have of them as the distrust that we have of ourselves.

We confess our little defects merely to persuade our friends that we have no great failings.

The greatest effort of friendship is not to show our defects to a friend, but to make him see his own.

Sincerity is an opening of the heart. It is found in exceedingly few people, and what passes for it is only a subtle dissimulation used to attract confidence.

We can love nothing except in relation to ourselves, and we merely follow our own bent and pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; yet it is only by this preference that friendship can be made true and perfect.

It seems as if self-love is the dupe of kindness and that it is forgotten while we are working for the benefit of other men. In this case, however, our self-love is merely taking the safest road to arrive at its ends; it is lending at usury under the pretext of giving, it is aiming at winning all the world by subtle and delicate means.

The first impulses of joy excited in us by the good fortune of our friends proceed neither from our good nature nor from the friendship we have for them; it is an effect of self-love that flatters us with the hope either of being fortunate in our turn or of drawing some advantage from their prosperity.

What makes us so eager to form new acquaintances is not the mere pleasure of change or a weariness of old friendships, so much as a disgust at not being enough admired by those who know us too well, and a hope of winning more admiration from persons who do not know much about us.

_III.--Things of the Mind_

The mind is always the dupe of the heart. Those who are acquainted with their own mind are not acquainted with their own heart.

The mind is more indolent than the body.

It is the mark of fine intellects to explain many things in a few words; little minds have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

We speak but little when vanity does not make us speak.

A spirit of confidence helps on conversation more than brilliance of mind does.

True eloquence consists of saying all that is necessary, and nothing more.

A man may be witty and still be a fool; judgment is the source of wisdom.

A man does not please for very long when he has but one kind of wit.

It is a mistake to imagine that wit and judgment are two distinct things; judgment is only the perfection of wit, which pierces into the recesses of things and there perceives what from the outside seems to be imperceptible.

A man of intelligence would often be at a loss were it not for the company of fools.

It is not so much fertility of mind that leads us to discover many expedients in regard to a single matter, as a defect of intelligence, that makes us stop at everything presented to our imagination, and hinders us from discerning at once which is the best course.

Some old men like to give good advice to console themselves for being no longer in a state to give a bad example.

No man of sound good sense strikes us as such unless he is of our way of thinking.

Stiffness of opinion comes from pettiness of mind; we do not easily believe in anything that is beyond our range of vision.

Good taste is based on judgment rather than on intelligence.

It is more often through pride than through any want of enlightenment that men set themselves stubbornly to oppose the most current opinions; finding all the best places taken on the popular side, they do not want those in the rear.

In order to understand things well one must know the detail of them; and as this is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.

It is never so difficult to talk well as when we are ashamed of our silence.

The excessive pleasure we feel in talking about ourselves ought to make us apprehensive that we afford little to our listeners.

Truth has not done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done harm.

Man's chief wisdom consists in being sensible of his follies.

_IV.--Human Life and Human Nature_

Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.

The passions of youth are scarcely more opposed to salvation than the lukewarmness of old persons.

There is not enough material in a fool to make a good man out of him.

We have more strength than will, and it is often to excuse ourselves to ourselves that we imagine things are impossible.

There are few things impossible in themselves; it is the application to achieve them that we lack more than the means.

It is a mistake to imagine that only the more violent passions, such as ambition and love, can triumph over the rest. Idleness often masters them all. It indeed influences all our designs and actions, and insensibly destroys both our vices and our virtues.

Idleness is of all our passions that which is most unknown to ourselves. It is the most ardent and the most malign of all, though we do not feel its working, and the harm which it does is hidden. If we consider its power attentively, we shall see that in every struggle it triumphs over our feelings, our interests, and our pleasures. To give a true idea of this passion it is necessary to add that idleness is like a beatitude of the soul which consoles it for all its losses and serves in place of all its wealth.

The gratitude of most men is only a secret desire to receive greater favours.

We like better to see those on whom we confer benefits than those from whom we receive them.

It is less dangerous to do harm to most men than to do them too much good.

If we had no defects ourselves we should not take so much pleasure in observing the failings of others.

One man may be more cunning than another man, but he cannot be more cunning than all the world.

Mankind has made a virtue of moderation in order to limit the ambition of great men and to console mediocre people for their scanty fortune and their scanty merit.

We should often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world saw all the motives that produced them.

Our desire to speak of ourselves, and to reveal our defects in the best light in which we can show them, constitutes a great part of our sincerity.

The shame that arises from undeserved praise often leads us to do things which we should not otherwise have attempted.

The labours of the body free us from the pains of the mind. It is this that constitutes the happiness of the poor.

It is more necessary to study men than to study books.

The truly honest man is he who sets no value on himself.

Censorious as the world is, it is oftener favourable to false merit than unjust to true.

It is not enough to possess great qualities; we must know how to use them.

He who lives without folly is not so wise as he fancies.

Good manners are the least of all laws and the most strictly observed.

Everybody complains of a lack of memory, nobody of a lack of judgment.

The love of justice is nothing more than a fear of injustice.

Passion often makes a fool of a man of sense, and sometimes it makes a fool a man of sense.

Nature seems to have hidden in the depth of our minds a skill and a talent of which we are ignorant; only our passions are able to bring them out and to give us sometimes surer and more complete views than we could arrive at by thought and study.

Our passions are the only orators with an unfailing power of persuasion. They are an art of nature with infallible rules, and the simplest man who is possessed by passion is far more persuasive than the most eloquent speaker who is not moved by feeling.

As we grow old we grow foolish as well as wise.

Few people know how to grow old.

Death and the sun are things one cannot look at steadily.

_V.--Virtues and Vices_

Hypocrisy is a homage that vice pays to virtue.

Our vices are commonly disguised virtues.

Virtue would not go far if vanity did not go with her.

Prosperity is a stronger test of virtue than misfortune is.

Men blame vice and praise virtue only through self-interest.

Great souls are not those which have less passions and more virtues than common souls, but those which have larger ambitions.

Of all our virtues one might say what an Italian poet has said of the honesty of women, "that it is often nothing but an art of pretending to be honest."

Virtues are lost in self-interest, as rivers are in the sea.

To the honour of virtue it must be acknowledged that the greatest misfortunes befall men from their vices.

When our vices leave us, we flatter ourselves that we have left them.

Feebleness is more opposed to vice than virtue is.

What makes the pangs of shame and jealousy so sharp is that our vanity cannot help us to support them.

What makes the vanity of other persons so intolerable is that it hurts our own.

We have not the courage to say in general that we have no defects, and that our enemies have no good qualities; but in matters of detail we are not very far from believing it.

If we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others Would not injure us.

We sometimes think we dislike flattery; we only dislike the way in which we are flattered.

Flattery is a kind of bad money to which our vanity gives currency.

Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill-conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

We are so prepossessed in our own favour that we often mistake for virtues those vices that bear some resemblance to them, and are artfully disguised by self-love.

Nothing is so capable of lessening our self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.