"Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue" -- what does this mean?

I heard Christopher Hitchens say this in a debate, and he attributed it to someone I hadn't heard of. But I fixated on this quotation and thought about it for a while.

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.

I think my command of English is reasonably strong, but I cannot make sense of this.

Solution 1:

It was La Rochefoucault. Robert Stern explains this as

In an earlier age, La Rochefoucault could still laugh at hypocrisy as "the compliment vice pays virtue", but he was only dealing with the naive hypocrisy of a Tartuffe. Moliere's hero, after all, just pretends to be more pious than other people in order to cover up his wicked schemes. Tartuffe's hypocrisy was merely one form of unctuous fraud among many others.

It's an odd construction, but based on imitation being the sincerest compliment, vice will imitate [try to look like] virtue. It's hypocritical in the case of vice because it's not sincere at all.

Solution 2:

"Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue." means that when you are being hypocritical you are in essence acknowledging that a virtue is worthy of emulating -- you want to appear virtuous, even though you aren't actually acting virtuously.