“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,” says La Rochefoucauld (M 218). Hypocrisy is a parasite, operating by mimicking the attractiveness of virtue, appropriating its rewards. Most other vices are more particularly associated with specific traits and feed and sustain themselves. Vices such as avarice and fractiousness are not parasitical on their opposing virtues: generosity and amiability. Other vices exist in a kind of symbiosis with their opposing virtue, but parasitism is not at its essence, as it is with hypocrisy. Thus lust and gluttony charge their batteries by occasional regimens of temperance and abstinence. The glutton and the lecher may self-servingly think their abstinence is virtuous; they may sincerely believe themselves to be turning over new leaves, but by the time they are turning over the hundredth new leaf surely they must know that their attempts at virtue are only so much foreplay to their vice, an enhancing of its deliciousness.

Of Hairshirts

Once people suspect hypocrisy, many start to mistrust all appearances of virtue as so much glory seeking and shamming. Montaigne goes so far as to claim that virtuous deeds done openly are ever more compromised the grander they are: “The more glittering the deed the more I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness.” Because virtue looks good, it looks bad. What are the virtuous to do? Pretend to vice?