Note 122 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal (continued 2)

This is especially the case with Montaigne who, as everyone knows, extols honour insofar as it is man’s sensitiveness to the judgment of his conscience, but very little insofar as it is a desire for glory—‘put off with other pleasures that which comes from the approbation of others.’ Barrès believes he sees in that ‘a foreigner who does not share our prejudices’. Barrès confuses the moralists and the poets. Before him I do not know one French author with dogmatic claims who has attributed a high moral value to the love of glory; the French moralists before 1890 are very unmilitary, even the soldiers like Vauvenargues and Vigny. (See the excellent study of G. Le Bidois, L’Honneur au miroir de nos lettres, especially on Montesquieu.)