81.—We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect.
82.—Reconciliation with our enemies is but a desire to better our condition, a weariness of war, the fear of some unlucky accident.
["Thus terminated that famous war of the Fronde. The Duke de la Rochefoucauld desired peace because of his dangerous wounds and ruined castles, which had made him dread even worse events. On the other side the Queen, who had shown herself so ungrateful to her too ambitious friends, did not cease to feel the bitterness of their resentment. ‘I wish,' said she, ‘it were always night, because daylight shows me so many who have betrayed me.'"—Memoires De Madame De Motteville, Tom. IV., p. 60. Another proof that although these maxims are in some cases of universal application, they were based entirely on the experience of the age in which the author lived.]
83.—What men term friendship is merely a partnership with a collection of reciprocal interests, and an exchange of favours—in fact it is but a trade in which self love always expects to gain something.
84.—It is more disgraceful to distrust than to be deceived by our friends.
85.—We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are, yet interest alone produces our friendship; we do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do, but for that we expect to receive.
86.—Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.
87.—Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other.
[A maxim, adds Aimé Martin, "Which may enter into the code of a vulgar rogue, but one is astonished to find it in a moral treatise." Yet we have scriptural authority for it: "Deceiving and being deceived."—2 TIM. iii. 13.]
88.—Self love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them, and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.