they are averse to render us a service which they know to be
disagreeable. They treat us as we wish to be treated. We hate the truth,
and they hide it from us. We desire flattery, and they flatter us. We
like to be deceived, and they deceive us.

So each degree of good fortune which raises us in the world removes us
farther from truth, because we are most afraid of wounding those whose
affection is most useful and whose dislike is most dangerous. A prince
may be the byword of all Europe, and he alone will know nothing of it. I
am not astonished. To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is
spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them
disliked. Now those who live with princes love their own interests more
than that of the prince whom they serve; and so they take care not to
confer on him a benefit so as to injure themselves.

This evil is no doubt greater and more common among the higher classes;
but the lower are not exempt from it, since there is always some
advantage in making men love us. Human life is thus only a perpetual
illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our
presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on
mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend
said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and
without passion.

Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and
in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he
avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from
justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.