The most damaging thing about fame seems to be that it clouds the judgment so sneakily, so imperceptibly that, viewed from a distance, the famous seem to have lost track of himself. In the face of this, vanity is a detail. Paul Johnson’s book comes to mind once again—a book that seems to have been written so as never to stray from memory. We think of those, and others, to whom fame has given its treacherous embrace, and we see how destructive it has been to their conscience, how ugly it seems to us the manifestation of the very high concept they had of themselves in front of others. Sometimes the most common criticism of the Stoics is nothing more than temperamental implication: a Marcus Aurelius, when compared to a Rousseau, is much more than a great sage.