French in 1659—with the help of Cromwell’s troops practicing a Protestant
version of realpolitik. Nevertheless, Condé made his peace with the king, had
his estates restored, and went on to lead the French army again against both
Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland. The recipients of Condé’s patronage
are an amazing assortment—the pre-Adamite heretic La Peyrère, who served
as his librarian; the Libertins Érudits; Molière, Racine, and the court literary
world—while later in his life Condé switched from scoffing to hosting conser-
vative defenders of devoutness such as Bossuet and La Bruyère.
This side-switching is a structural key to the cosmopolitanism and the
creativity of the time. French alliances with England and Sweden at the height
of the religious wars made France the nexus of religious politics; there was no
domestic tolerance for Protestant true believers, but an extension of traditional
Catholic rationalism was acceptable. Dangerous connections were open to
those who were willing to seek them out. Once again Descartes carried off the
prize. He began as a professional soldier, enlisting in 1617 on the side of Prince
Maurice of Nassau, champion of the Dutch Calvinists; in 1619–20 he was in
Tilly’s army of the Catholic League and was present at the destruction of the
Protestant stronghold at Prague. It was on these travels that Descartes made
his first contacts with Dutch scientists and had his famous dream—while
bivouacking with the Catholic army on the Danube—about mathematics as
the key to knowledge. This would be the pattern of the rest of his career, as
he moved back and forth between Paris and Holland, seeking cosmopolitan
allies and evading dogmatists on all sides of the religious strife.
The mental detachment resulting from this atmosphere permeates the pe-
riod. The priest Gassendi wanted to defend religion but associated with the
group around the aristocrat La Mothe Le Vayer, reputed a secret atheist; others
of these Libertins Érudits include Patin, rector of the medical faculty of the
Sorbonne, bastion of theological orthodoxy; Naudé, librarian to the cynical
Richelieu and Mazarin; and the freethinking satirist Cyrano de Bergerac.
Moliere, a former pupil of Gassendi, was another member of the circle, and
reflected a satirical tone in his plays. The most forthright expression of this
outlook is the Maximes (1665–1678) of La Rochefoucauld. This high-ranking
nobleman had intrigued against Richelieu in the 1630s, joined the Fronde over
a slight from Mazarin, negotiated the release of Condé from prison, rebelled
again, made his peace, and recovered his estates. He retired into amusing his
aristocratic correspondents by exchanging cryptic sentences, distillations of
cynical wisdom on the self-interest and moral self-deception of mankind. Yet
his collaborator, Mme. de Sablé, was a Jansenist sympathizer, a resident at
Port-Royal in the 1650s, and La Rochefoucauld himself became an intimate
of the religious authoritarian Bossuet. The cynical outlook was rationalized as
compatible with religion by showing the sinfulness of the world.^6
The Jansenist movement began as fervent rather than cynical, but its
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