In the French language, to call someone a Stoic is to recognize the virtue of standing firm in adversity, of enduring misfortune with courage and tenacity, without being driven from the path one has chosen. The characteristic Stoic attitude thus appears to be constancy. The image of the sage as a rock, immovable in a storm, was a standard trope in French moral literature during the seventeenth century. On the mark of the publisher Plantin we read the motto, labore et constantia (by labor and constancy). This illustrates the extent to which this virtue seems characteristic of the rebirth of the Stoic movement at the end of the Renaissance. The restoration began with the philological work of the humanists, but it is also tied to a definite political context, marked by the renewed outbreak of religious troubles and civil war. Treatises on the subject of constancy flourished at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries and had impressive publishing histories. But treating constancy as a cardinal virtue was not merely a compromise choice: Charron had preferred prudence, Descartes generosity, Pascal charity. Constancy is the virtue of someone who relies first and foremost on his own strengths and not on God or others. As Lipsius says, a man writes a treatise on constancy primarily for himself and his own benefit, and not because he seeks fame.