I have taken the trouble of extracting and collecting, for your
use, the foregoing Political Maxims of the Cardinal de Retz, in his
Memoirs. They are not aphorisms of his invention, but the true and just
observations of his own experience, in the course of great business.
My own experience attests the truth of them all. Read them over with
attention as here above, and then read with the same attention,
and _tout de suite_, the Memoirs, where you will find the facts and
characters from whence those observations are drawn, or to which they
are applied; and they will reciprocally help to fix each other in your
mind. I hardly know any book so necessary for a young man to read and
remember. You will there find how great business is really carried on;
very differently from what people, who have never been concerned in it,
imagine. You will there see what courts and courtiers really are, and
observe that they are neither so good as they should be, nor so bad
as they are thought by most people. The court poet, and the sullen,
cloistered pedant, are equally mistaken in their notions, or at least
in the accounts they give us of them. You will observe the coolness
in general, the perfidy in some cases, and the truth in a very few,
of court friendships. This will teach you the prudence of a general
distrust, and the imprudence of making no exception to that rule, upon
good and tried grounds. You will see the utility of good breeding
toward one’s greatest enemies, and the high imprudence and folly of
either insulting or injurious expressions.