Amongst the circle whom La Rochefoucault loved to assemble were Boileau—­Despreaux, and Madame de Sevigne—­the one whose wit and the other whose grace completed the delights of that salon.  A life so prosperous as La Rochefoucault’s had but one cloud—­the death of his son who was killed during the passage of the French troops over the Rhine.  We attach to the character of this accomplished man the charms of wit; we may also add the higher attractions of sensibility.  Notwithstanding the worldly and selfish character which is breathed forth in his ’Maxims and Reflections,’ there lay at the bottom of his heart true piety.  Struck by the death of a neighbour, this sentiment seems even on the point of being expressed; but, adds Madame de Sevigne, and her phrase is untranslatable, ‘il n’est pas effleure.’

All has passed away! the Fronde has become a memory, not a realized idea.  Old people shake their heads, and talk of Richelieu; of his gorgeous palace at Rueil, with its lake and its prison thereon, and its mysterious dungeons, and its avenues of chestnuts, and its fine statues; and of its cardinal, smiling, whilst the worm that never dieth is eating into his very heart; a seared conscience, and playing the fine gentleman to fine ladies in a rich stole, and with much garniture of costly lace:  whilst beneath all is the hair shirt, that type of penitence and sanctity which he ever wore as a salvo against all that passion and ambition that almost burst the beating heart beneath that hair shirt.  Richelieu has gone to his fathers.  Mazarin comes on the scene; the wily, grasping Italian.  He too vanishes; and forth, radiant in youth, and strong in power, comes Louis, and the reign of politeness and periwigs begins.

The Duc de Saint-Simon, perhaps the greatest portrait-painter of any time, has familiarized us with the greatness, the littleness, the graces, the defects of that royal actor on the stage of Europe, whom his own age entitled Louis the Great.  A wit, in his writings, of the first order—­if we comprise under the head of wit the deepest discernment, the most penetrating satire—­Saint-Simon was also a soldier, philosopher, a reformer, a Trappist, and, eventually, a devotee.  Like all young men who wished for court favour, he began by fighting:  Louis cared little for carpet knights.  He entered, however, into a scene which he has chronicled with as much fidelity as our journalists do a police report, and sat quietly down to gather observations—­not for his own fame, not even for the amusement of his children or grandchildren—­but for the edification of posterity yet a century afar off his own time.  The treasures were buried until 1829.