Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/300

280 The egotism of French aristocratic society, vividly reflected in all the literature of this period, the "Moi! et c'est assez" which Corneille's tragedies exalt, but which was to Pascal hateful ("Le Moi est haïssable"), the proof of man's corruption, the source of his miseries, of the contradiction which makes him, in order to gratify self, seek in endless diversion an escape from self,—nowhere is this so nakedly painted as in the Memoirs of the early seventeenth century, especially those which describe the confused, frivolous, and criminal intrigues and wars of the Fronde. "Tous les hommes se haïssent naturellement l'un l'autre," says the sombre Jansenist, like the English materialist Hobbes; and certainly patriotism, loyalty, and fidelity were unknown to the princes, cardinals, generals, and great ladies who struggled with Mazarin, and with one another, for power, money, and privilege. There was no lack of intrigue and self-seeking among the courtiers who gathered round Charles at Oxford. "It cannot be imagined," says Clarendon, "into how many several shapes men's indispositions were put, and the many artifices which were used to get honours, offices, preferments, and the waywardness and perverseness which attended the being disappointed of their own hopes." But when all that a cynical critic can say has been said of cavalier dissoluteness and intrigues, and of the negotiations of the Scotch and of the Army with Charles, there remains a vast moral difference between the war of principles in England—principles on which, in the last resort, neither Charles nor the