intriguer during the Fronde, sceptical and bitter in his Maximes, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld was amiable and kindly in his private life.  Factions and the court had taught him a great deal about human nature; he had seen it and judged of it from its bad side.  Witty, shrewd, and often profound, he was too severe to be just.  The bitterness of his spirit breathed itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport.  “He gave me wit,” Madame de La Fayette would say, “but I reformed his heart.”  He had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672.  He was ill, suffering cruelly.  “I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld’s,” writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1680.  “I found him uttering loud shrieks; his pain was such that his endurance was quite overcome without a single scrap remaining.  The excessive pain upset him to such a degree that he was sitting out in the open air with a violent fever upon him.  He begged me to send you word, and to assure you that the wheel-broken do not suffer during a single moment what he suffers one half of his life, and so he wishes for death as a happy release.”  He died with Bossuet at his pillow.  “Very well prepared as regards his conscience,” says Madame de Sevigne again; “that is all settled; but, in other respects, it might be the illness and death of his neighbor which is in question, he is not flurried about it, he is not troubled about it.  Believe me, my daughter, it is not to no purpose that he has been making reflections all his life; he has approached his last moments in such wise that they have had nothing that was novel or strange for him.”  M. de La Rochefoucauld thought worse of men than of life.  “I have scarcely any fear of things,” he had said; “I am not at all afraid of death.”  With all his rare qualities and great opportunities he had done nothing but frequently embroil matters in which he had meddled, and had never been anything but a great lord with a good deal of wit.  Actionless penetration and sceptical severity may sometimes clear the judgment and the thoughts, but they give no force or influence that has power over men.  “There was always a something (je ne sais quoi) about M. de La Rochefoucauld,” writes Cardinal de Retz, who did not like him; “he was for meddling in intrigues from his childhood, and at a time when he had no notion of petty interests, which were never his foible, and when he did not understand great ones, which, on the other hand, were never his strength.  He was never capable of doing anything in public affairs, and I am sure I don’t know why.  His views were not sufficiently broad, and he did not even see comprehensively all that was within his range, but his good sense,—­very good, speculatively,—­added to his suavity, his insinuating style, and his easy manners, which are admirable, ought to have compensated more than it did for his lack of penetration.  He always showed habitual irresolution, but I really