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.