Politics and History Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx

I simply hope that I have given a more living portrait of a figure familiar to us in marble or bronze. I am not thinking so much of the inner life of the Seigneur de la Brède, which was so secret that it is still debated whether he was ever a believer, whether he loved his wife as she loved him, whether past the age of thirty-five he experienced the passions of a twenty-year-old. Nor so much the everyday life of the Président de Parlement tired of parliament, of the lord absorbed by his lands, of the vineyardist attentive to his wines and his sales. Others have written of this, and they should be read. I am thinking of a different life, one which time has cloaked in its shadow, and commentaries with their lustre.