One of the most gifted of the young officers who gave their lives for
France at the beginning of the war, Quartermaster Paul Lintier, in the
admirable notes which he wrote on his knee at intervals during the
battle of the Meuse in August 1914, said—
"The imperative instinct for making the best you can of life, the
sentiment of duty, and anxiety for the good opinion of others, in a
word honour—these are the main educators of the soldier under fire.
This is not a discovery, it is simply a personal statement."
Taken almost at random from the records of the war, this utterance may
serve us as well as any other to distinguish the attitude of the
Frenchman in the face of violent and critical action from the equally
brave and effective attitude of other races. He has the habit, not
common elsewhere, of analyzing conduct and of stripping off from the
contemplation of it those voluntary illusions which drop a curtain
between it and truth.
The result of this habit of ruthless criticism is to concentrate the
Frenchman's attention, even to excess, on the motives of conduct, and
to bring him more and more inevitably to regard self-love,
self-preservation, personal vanity in its various forms, as the source
of all our apparent virtues. Even when we appear to be most
disinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfish
devotion, by honour, we are really the prey, as Lintier saw it, of
the wish to save our lives and to preserve the good opinion of others.
Underneath the transports of patriotism, underneath the sincerity of
religious fervour, the Frenchman digs down and finds amour-propre at
the root of everything.
This attitude or habit of mind is particularly shocking to all those
who live in a state of illusion, and there is probably no aspect of
French character which is more difficult for the average Englishman to
appreciate than this tendency towards sceptical dissection of the
motives of conduct. Yet it is quite certain that it is widely
disseminated among those of our neighbours who are most prompt and
effective in action, and whose vigour is in no degree paralysed by the
clairvoyance with which they seek for exact truth even in the most
romantic and illusive spiritual circumstances. To throw light on this
aspect of French character, I propose to call attention to a little
book, which is probably well-known to my readers already, but which
may be regarded from a point of view, as I venture to think, more
instructive than that which is usually chosen.
In the year 1665 there appeared anonymously in Paris, in all the
circumstances of well-advertised secrecy, a thin volume of "Maximes,"
which were understood to have exercised for years past the best
thoughts of a certain illustrious nobleman. Mme de Sablé, who was not
foreign to the facts, immediately wrote a review, intended for the
Journal des Scavants, in the course of which she said that the new
book was "a treatise on movements of the human heart which may be said
to have remained until now unrecognized." The book, as every one
knows, was the work of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, and the subject
of it was an unmasking of "the veritable condition of man."
It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost
exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great
writers of Europe. He has become—he became during his own lifetime—
the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that
egotism is the primum mobile of all human action, and that man is
wholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will.
He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we
do. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says,
"All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in
the blood." It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate one
another," and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise." Yet
again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which
seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested
instincts of the human soul, for he says "Amour-propre is the love
of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into
their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes
them the tyrants of others…. It exists in all states of life and in
all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it
lives on nothing." He does not admit that Christianity itself is
immune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts all
disguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. "The
refinements of self-love surpass those of chemistry," and the purpose
of La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and to
show that nothing remains but a poisonous deposit of egotism.
No wonder that La Rochefoucauld has been generally regarded as a
scourge of the human race, a sterile critic of mankind without
sympathy or pity. It is true that his obstinate insistence on the
universality of egotism produces a depressing and sometimes a
fatiguing impression on the reader, who is apt to think of him as
Shakespeare's Apemantus, "that few things loves better than to abhor
himself." But when the First Lord goes on to add "He's opposite to
humanity," we feel that no phrase could less apply to La
Rochefoucauld. We have, therefore, immediately to revise our opinion
of this severe dissector of the human heart, and to endeavour to find
out what lay underneath the bitterness of his "Maximes." It is a
complete mistake to look upon La Rochefoucauld as a monster, or even
as a Timon. Without insisting, at all events for the moment, on the
plain effect of his career on his intellect, but yet accepting the
evidence that much of his bitterness was the result of bad health,
sense of failure, shyness, foiled ambition, we have to ask ourselves
what he gave to French thought in exchange for the illusions which he
so rudely tore away. In dealing with any savage moralist, we are
obliged to turn from the abstract question: Why did he say these
things? to the realistic one. What did he hope to effect by what he
said? Perhaps we can start no better on this inquiry than to quote the
Duchess of Schomberg's exclamation when she turned over the pages of
the first edition—namely that "this book contains a vast number of
truths which I should have remained ignorant of all my life if it had
not taught me to perceive them." This may be applied to French energy,
and we may begin to see what has been the active value of La
Rochefoucauld's apparently negative and repugnant aphorisms.
The La Rochefoucauld whom we know belongs to a polite and modern age.
He is instinct with the spirit of society, "la bonne compagnie," as it
was called in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a crowd of
refined and well-trained pens competed to make of the delicate
language of France a vehicle which could transfer from brain to brain
the subtlest ingenuities of psychology. He is a typical specimen of the
Frenchman of letters at the moment when literature had become the ally
of political power and the instrument of social influence. Into this
new world, before it had completely developed, the future author of
the "Maximes" was introduced at a very early age. He was presented to
the wits and précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet at the age of
eighteen. It is amusing to think that he may have seen Voiture, in the
Blue Room, seize his lute and sing a Spanish song, or have volunteered
as a paladin in the train of Hector, King of Georgia. But the
pedantries and affectations of this wonderful society seem to have
made no immediate impression upon La Rochefoucauld, whose early years
were those of the young nobleman devoid of all apparent intellectual
curiosity. It is true that he says of himself that directly he came
back from Italy (this was in 1629, when he was only sixteen), "I began
to notice with some attention whatever I saw," but this was, no doubt,
external; he does not exhibit in his writings, and in all probability
did not feel, the slightest interest in the pedantic literature of the
end of Louis XIII.'s reign. He represented, through his youth, the
purely military and aristocratic element in the society of that age.
If he had died when he was thirty, or at the close of the career of
Richelieu, nothing would have distinguished him from the mob of
violent noblemen who made the streets of Paris a pandemonium.
To understand the influence of La Rochefoucauld it is even more
needful than in most similar cases to form a clear idea of his
character, and this can only be obtained by an outline of his
remarkable career. François VI. Duke of La Rochefoucauld, as a typical
Parisian, was born in the ducal palace in the rue des Petits-Champs,
on September 15, 1613. The family was one of the most noble not merely
in France but in Europe, and we do not begin to understand the author
until we realize his excessive pride of birth. In a letter he wrote to
Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 he says, "I am in a position to prove that
for three hundred years the monarchs [of France] have not disdained to
treat us as members of their family." This arrogance of race inspired
the early part of his life to the exclusion, so far as we can
perceive, of any other stimulus to action. He was content to be the
violent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of
Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim,
"Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul."
Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon
counter-scuffle—such was the life of the young French nobleman of whom
La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type
and specimen.
La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the "Maximes," but of a
second book which is much less often read. This is his "Mémoires," a
very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary
history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary
to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must
be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book is
like a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to a
different scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but they
make up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times.
No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with these
authentic fragments of the social and political history of France
under Richelieu and Mazarin. These Memoirs had a very remarkable
influence on the general literature of France. They turned out of
favour the chronicles of "illustrious lives," the pompous and false
travesties of history, which the sixteenth century had delighted in,
and in this way they served to prepare for the purification of French
taste. The note of the best of them was a happy sincerity even in
egotism, a simplicity even in describing the most monstrous and
grotesque events. Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seems
to me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is not
to be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personal
recollections.
We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers the
sort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day. La
Rochefoucauld, although he begins in the first person, has nothing
which he chooses to tell us about his own childhood and education. He
was married, at the age of fifteen, to a high-born lady, Andrée de
Vivonne, but her he scarcely mentions. By the side of those glittering
amatory escapades of his on the grand scale, with which Europe rang,
he seems to have pursued a sober married existence, without
upbraidings from his own conscience, or curtain-lectures from his meek
duchess, who bore him eight children. La Rochefoucauld's "Mémoires"
open abruptly with these words:—"I spent the last years of the
Cardinal's administration in indolence," and then he begins to
discourse on the audacities of the Duke of Buckingham (pleasingly
spelled Bouquinquant) and his attacks on the heart of the Queen of
France. We gather that although the English envoy can have had no
personal influence on the future moralist—since Buckingham was
murdered at Portsmouth in 1628, while La Rochefoucauld did not come to
court till 1630—yet the young Frenchman so immensely admired what he
heard of the Englishman, and so deliberately set himself to take him
as a model, that our own knowledge of Buckingham may be of help to us
in reproducing an impression of La Rochefoucauld, or rather of the
Prince de Marcillac, as he was styled until his father died.
After describing the court as the youth of seventeen had found it, he
skips five years to tell us how the Queen asked him to run away with
her to Brussels in 1637. History has not known quite what to make of
this amazing story, of which La Rochefoucauld had the complacency to
write more than twenty years afterwards—
"However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I may
say that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I was
at an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startling
things, and I felt that nothing could be more startling or more
extravagant than to snatch at the same time the Queen from the King
her husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, and
Mlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her."
He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as an
episode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, as
though he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own life
had not been of much consequence.
Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillac
was known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youth
who carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past the
confines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who was
twenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describing
him—surely by repute—as the type of—
"These gentlemen who chatter so much about the empire and about the
sovereignty of ladies, and have their heads so stuffed with tales and
strange adventures, that they grow to believe that they can do all
that was done under the reign of Amadis, and that the least of their
duties is to reply to a supplicating lady, I, who am only a man, how
should I resist the prayer of her to whom the Gods themselves can
refuse nothing?"
We seem far from the sombre and mordant author of the "Maximes," but
a complete apprehension of the character of La Rochefoucauld requires
the story of his adventures to be at least briefly indicated. A chasm
divides his early from his late history, and this chasm is bridged
over in a very shadowy way by such records as we possess of his
retirement after the Fronde.
Between the death of Richelieu and this retirement there lies a period
of ten years, during which the future author of the "Maximes" is
swallowed up in the hurly-burly of the worst moment in the whole
history of France. It is difficult from any point of view to form what
it would be mere waste of time for us to attempt in this connection, a
clear conception of the chaos into which that country was plunged by
the weakness of Anne of Austria and the criminality of Mazarin. The
senseless intrigues of the Fronde affect the bewildered student of
those times as though
this frame
Of Heav'n were falling and these elements
In mutiny had from her axle torn
The steadfast earth.
At first La Rochefoucauld seems to have meant to support the cause of
the court, expecting to be rewarded for what he had done, or been
prepared to do for the Queen. He says in his "Mémoires" that after the
death of Louis XIII. the Queen-Mother "gave me many marks of
friendship and confidence; she assured me several times that her
honour was involved in my being pleased with her, and that nothing in
the kingdom was large enough to reward me for what I had done in her
service." That sounds very well, but what it really illustrates is the
extraordinary violence of aristocratic frivolity, the fierce levity
and insatiable frenzied vanity of the noble families. The aims of La
Rochefoucauld, in support of which he was ready to sacrifice his
country, were of a class that must seem to us now petty in the
extreme. He wanted the tabouret, the footstool, for his duchess, in
other words the right to be seated in presence of the members of the
royal family. He wanted the privilege of driving into the courtyard of
the Louvre without having to descend from his coach outside and walk
in. He demanded these honours because they were already possessed by
the families of Rohan and of Bouillon. It is extraordinary to consider
what powerful effects such trumpery causes could have, but it is a
fact that the desolating and cruel wars of the Fronde largely depended
upon jealousies of the carrosse and the tabouret. La
Rochefoucauld's support of the rebellion frankly and openly was based
upon it.
La Rochefoucauld brings the first part of his "Mémoires" down to 1649.
In the second part he begins again with 1642, being very anxious to
show, to his own advantage of course, what the conditions were at
court after the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and in particular
to define the position of Mme de Chevreuse, the great intriguer and
seductress of the French politics of the age. The charm of this lady,
who was no longer young, faded before that of the Duchess of
Longueville, one of the most ambitious and most unscrupulous women who
ever lived. She was the sister of the Prince de Conti, and from the
time when her celebrated relations with La Rochefoucauld began, her
influence engaged him in all the unplumbed chaos which led to civil
war. When this finally broke out, however, in 1648, the Duke is found
once more on the side of the young king and his government, that is to
say, of Cardinal Mazarin.
Through the "universal hubbub wide of stunning sounds and noises all
confused," we can catch with difficulty the accents of literature, at
first indeed vocal in the midst of the riot, and even stimulated by
it, as birds are by a heavy shower of rain, but soon stunned and
silenced by horrors incompatible with the labour of the Muses. The
wars of the Fronde made a sharp cut between the heroic age of
imaginative literature and the classical age which presently succeeded
it, and offer in this respect a tolerable parallel to the civil wars
raging in England about the same time. It is specious, but convenient,
to discover a date at which a change of this kind may be said to
occur. In England we have such a date marked large for us in 1660;
French letters less obviously but more certainly can be said to start
afresh in 1652. It is tolerably certain that in that year Pascal, Retz
and the subject of our inquiry simultaneously and independently began
to write. Up to that time there is no reason to believe that La
Rochefoucauld had given himself at all to study, and we possess no
evidence that up to the age of forty he was more interested in the
existence of the literature of his country than was the idlest of the
cut-throat nobility who swaggered in and out of the courtyard of the
Louvre.
His "Mémoires" end with an account of the war in Guienne in 1651 which
is more solemn and more detached than all the rest. No one would
suspect that the historian, who affects the gravity of a Tacitus, was
acting all through the events he describes with the levity of a
full-blooded and unscrupulous schoolboy. The most amazing instance of
this is his grotesque attempt to have Cardinal de Retz murdered at the
Palais de Justice. In the course of a sort of romping fray he caught
Retz's head between the flaps of a folding door, and shouted to
Coligny to come and stab him from behind. But he himself was shoved
away, and the Cardinal released. La Rochefoucauld admits the escapade,
without any sign of embarrassment, merely observing that Retz would
have done as much by him if he had only had the chance. But now comes
the incident which, better than anything else could, illustrates the
feverish and incongruous atmosphere of the Fronde, and the difficulty
of following the caprices of its leading figures. The very next day
after this attempt to assassinate Retz in a peculiarly disgraceful
way, La Rochefoucauld met the Cardinal driving through the streets of
Paris in his coach. Kneeling in the street, he demanded and received
the episcopal benediction of the man whom he had tried to murder in an
undignified scuffle a few hours before. No animosity seems to have
persisted between these two princes of the realm of France, and this
may be the moment to introduce the picture which Cardinal de Retz,
whose head was held in the folding door, painted very soon after of
the volatile duke who had held him there to be stabbed from behind.
Both writers began their memoirs in 1652, and no one has ever decided
which is the more elegant of the two unique conpositions. The
conjunction between two of the greatest prose-writers of France is
piquant, and we cannot trace in Retz's sketch of his antagonist the
smallest sign of resentment. It was not published until 1717, but it
has all the appearance of having been written sixty years earlier, at
least, when Mademoiselle was seized with the fortunate inspiration of
having "portraits" written of, and often by, the celebrated personages
of the day. This, then, is how Retz saw La Rochefoucauld—
"There has always been a certain je ne sais quoi in M. de La
Rochefoucauld. He has always ever since his childhood wanted to be
taking part in some plot, and that at a time when he was indifferent
to small interests, which have never been his weakness, and when he
had no experience of great ones, which, in another sense, have never
been his strong point. He has never had any skill in conducting
business, and I don't know why; for he possessed qualities which in
any other man would have made up for those which he lacked. He was not
longsighted enough, and he did not see as a whole even what was within
his range of vision. But his good sense—which in the field of
speculation was very good—joined to his gentleness, his insinuating
charm, and his admirable ease of manner, ought to have compensated,
more than they have done, for his defect of penetration. He has always
suffered from an habitual irresoluteness; but I do not know to what
this irresoluteness should be attributed. He has never been a warrior,
though very much a soldier. He has never, through his own effort,
succeeded in being a good courtier, though he has always intended to
be one. That air of bashfulness and of shyness which you observe in
him in social life has given him in matters of business an apologetic
air. He has always fancied that he needed to apologize; and this—in
conjunction with his 'Maximes,' which do not err on the side of too
much faith in virtue, and with his practice, which has always been to
wind up business as impatiently as he started it—makes me conclude
that he would have done much better to know himself, and to be content
to pass, as he might well have passed, for the most polished courtier
and the finest gentleman, in private life, which this age has
produced."
We are now beginning to see the real author of the "Maximes," when, at
the age of forty, he begins to peep forth from the travesty of his
aristocratic violence and idleness. Whether the transformation would
have been gradual instead of sudden is what can never be decided, but
we date it from July 2, 1652, when he was dangerously wounded in a
riot in the Faubourg St. Antoine, at the Picpus barricade, where he
was shot in the forehead and, as it at first appeared, blinded for
life. According to the faithful Gourville, when La Rochefoucauld
thought he would lose his eyesight, he had a picture of Madame de
Longueville engraved with two lines under it from a fashionable
tragedy, the "Alcyonée" of Duryer—
That I might hold her heart and please her lovely eyes
I made my war on kings and would have fought the skies.
With this piece of rodomontade the old Rochefoucauld ceases and makes
place for the author of the "Maximes." When he recovered from his
wound, his spirit of adventure was broken. He submitted to the
cardinal, he withdrew from Condé, and in 1653, still his head bound
with bandages and wearing black spectacles to hide those clear and
seductive eyes which Petitot had painted, he crept, a broken man, to
his country house at Verteuil, in the neighbourhood of Ruffec, now in
the Charente. This chateau, built just two hundred years before that
date, still exists, a noble relic of feudal France, and a place of
pilgrimage for lovers of the author of the "Maximes."
No one was ever more suddenly and more completely cured of a whole
system of existence than was La Rochefoucauld by the wound which was
so nearly fatal. He said, "It is impossible for any man who has
escaped from civil war to plunge into it again." For him, at all
events, it was impossible. His only wish in 1653 was to bury himself
and his slow convalescence among his woods at Verteuil. In this
enforced seclusion, at the age of forty, he turned for solace to
literature, which he would seem to have neglected hitherto. We know
nothing of his education, which had probably been as primitive as that
of any pleasure-seeking and imperious young nobleman of the time. He
went to the wars when he was thirteen. In an undated letter he says
that he sends some Latin verses composed by a friend for the judgment
of his unnamed correspondent, but he adds, "I do not know enough Latin
to dare to give an opinion." M. Henri Regnier, in his invaluable
"Lexique de la langue de La Rochefoucauld" (1883) points out that the
Duke's evident lack of classical knowledge is a positive advantage to
him, as it throws him entirely on the resources of pure French. In
like manner we may rejoice that Shakespeare had "little Latin and less
Greek."
It is tantalizing for us that we know almost nothing of the years,
from 1653 to 1656, which La Rochefoucauld spent in severe retirement
at Verteuil. What was happening to France was happening, no doubt, in
its degree to him; he was chewing the cud of remorse for the follies
and crimes of the Fronde. "Only great men should have great failings,"
the exile wrote, and we may be sure that he had by this time
discovered, like the rest of the world, that as a swashbuckler and
intriguer he was noisy and petulant, but on the whole anything but
great. The Fronde left behind it a sense of littleness, of
poverty-stricken humanity, and this particular frondeur had seen the
mask drop from the features of his fellow-men. Now, in the quiet of the
country, in disgrace with fortune and his own conscience, he grasped a
new and this time a dignified and suitable ambition. He began to study
reality and learned to distinguish truth from pretence. This study was
to make him one of the most eminent of French authors and a great power
in the purification of French intelligence. He began, doubtless, his
career as an author by composing the "Mémoires," in which he embodied
his exasperations and his recriminations in language of studied
dignity. There is little here which betrays the future moralist, except
the simplicity and almost colourless transparency of the style.
As containing nearly the sole certain evidence of La Rochefoucauld's
state of mind at the time of transition, it is well, perhaps, to speak
at this moment of his letters, which were first brought together in
1881. They extend from 1637 to 1677, and the biographer pores over
them in the hope of extracting from them some crumbs of information.
But to the general reader they cannot be recommended. They are seldom
confidential, the writer never lets himself go. Even to his later
friends, such as Mme de Sablé, La Rochefoucauld is rarely familiar,
and the impression of himself in these graceful and sometimes vigorous
epistles is illusive; the writer seems for ever on his guard. The
great mass of this correspondence, in which politics takes no part
after 1653, is singularly literary; it is mainly occupied with the
interests, and almost with the jargon, of the professional author. We
are told that his affectation in society was to appear cold and
unmoved, and this he certainly contrived to do in those of his letters
which have been preserved.
La Rochefoucauld told Mme de Sablé that he depended on her for his
knowledge of the inmost windings of the human heart. When he returned
to Paris, this lady was approaching the age of sixty. Her salon
competed with that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and that of Mlle de
Montpensier at the Luxembourg. The Marquise de Sablé had been gay in
her youth, but when her young lover, Armentières, was killed in a
duel, she turned devout. She also turned hypochondriacal and literary.
According to Tallemont des Réaux, who has left a portrait of her which
is equally ill-natured and entertaining, she built herself a house
adjoining the choir of the church of Port Royal, in the Faubourg St.
Jacques. Her friend, the Abbé d'Ailly, who edited her works after her
death in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries in
the world on the chapter of death." She herself expressed her
hypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do,
because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness as
I have." Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness,
and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations of
Antoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience.[2] She
became intimate with Arnauld d'Andilly, and with the rest of those
Jansenist authors of whom Racine said that their works were "the
admiration of scholars and the consolation of all pious persons." But
she seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respect
the literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "Les
Provinciales," had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. de
Sablé deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for her
fervent cultivation of precise language.
[Footnote 2: It was of Singlin that Pascal wrote in 1654,
"Soumission total à J.C. et à mon directeur."]
As La Rochefoucauld's correspondence throws little light on the
character and person of its author at the time of his intellectual and
moral conversion, we turn with satisfaction to a document which owes
its existence to a social amusement, almost to a "parlour game." We
have seen that La Grande Mademoiselle, anxious to amuse the friends
whom she gathered round her in her salon at the Luxembourg, hit upon
the notion of inducing her guests to produce written portraits of
themselves. You might say all the good of yourself you liked, on the
understanding that you put in the shades as well. The collection of
these self-portraits was actually printed in 1659, and is a work of
great value and interest to biographer and historian. It marks a new
movement of French intelligence, a critical excursion into psychology
not hitherto attempted in France, and some of the portraits are
marvellously delicate in their conscientious precision. Here, however,
we are not concerned with more than one of them, that which is signed
with the initials of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. It is his only
important composition produced between the "Mémoires" and the
"Maximes," and it is charmingly written, a portrait drawn in tones of
rose-colour and dove-grey, like the pastel-portraits of a century
later.
He begins by describing his physical appearance, but passes soon to
the moral and social qualities. It would be interesting to quote the
whole of this portrait, but we must confine ourselves to some brief
quotations. How far we seem from the beasts of prey which ranged the
forests of the Fronde, or tore one another to pieces in the streets of
Paris, when we follow this refined attempt to present the character of
a modern and a complicated man:—
"There is something," says La Rochefoucauld, "at once peevish and
proud in my appearance. This makes most people think that I am
contemptuous, but I am not so at all. So far as my humour goes, I am
melancholy, and I am so to such an extent that, in the last three or
four years, I have scarcely been seen to laugh three or four times. It
seems to me nevertheless that my melancholy would be supportable and
mild enough if it depended solely on my temperament, but it comes so
much from outside causes, and what so comes fills my imagination to
such a degree, and occupies my thoughts so exclusively, that most of
the time I move as in a dream, and scarce listen to what I myself am
saying."
Here we have the disappointed courtier still brooding over his
disgrace, but we pass to an account of the relief which the new-born
man of letters find in the cultivation of the intellect alone—
"I am fond of general reading, but that in which I find something to
fashion the mind and to fortify the soul is what I like best. Above
all it gives me an extreme satisfaction to read in company with an
intelligent person, for in this way one is kept constantly reflecting
on what one reads, and the reflections thus exchanged form a species
of conversation than which no other in the world is so agreeable or so
useful. I give a sound opinion about works in verse and prose which
are submitted to me, but perhaps I allow myself too much freedom in
expressing that opinion. Another fault of mine is that I am sometimes
too scrupulously delicate and too severely critical. I do not dislike
to listen to argument, and sometimes I am glad to take my share in the
discussion, but I usually support my opinion with too much heat, and
when any one pleads an unjust cause in my presence, sometimes, in my
zeal for logic, I myself become exceedingly illogical. My sentiments
are virtuous, my inclinations are honest, and I am so intensely
anxious to act in all things as a gentleman should, that my friends
cannot do me a greater favour than to warn me sincerely of my faults.
Those who know me rather intimately, and who have been so kind as to
give me their counsels in this direction, are aware that I have ever
received them with all imaginable joy and with all the submission of
mind which they could possibly desire."
All this, and what remains, show that in the character of La
Rochefoucauld action had abruptly receded in favour of analysis, and
the brutality of civil war in the woods had given place to the
refinement of endless conversation by the fireside corner. The old
swashbuckler turned from the illusions of the camp to the most
exquisite of peaceful associations, and he regarded women from a
totally new point of view. It was the age of the salons, and La
Rochefoucauld tells us why it was that he became their sedulous
associate. He says, "When women are intelligent, I like their
conversation better than that of men. There is a certain suavity in
their talk which is lacking in that of our sex, and it seems, in
addition, that they explain themselves with more precision, and give a
more agreeable turn to what they say." In other words, La
Rochefoucauld had, by 1658, become a complete, and indeed the most
competent and highly finished example of the new social intelligence
which was to be found in France. We must dwell for one rapid moment on
what that new spirit was.
The seventeenth century in France, liberated from the weight of
internecine wars and political tyrannies, had now thrown itself with
ardour into the civilized arts, and had, in particular, developed a
love of moral disquisition. All the talk which presently became
fashionable about virtue and the higher life was a reaction against
the horrors of the Fronde. The advance of social refinement was very
rapid, and, especially in Paris, there was a determined and
intelligent movement in the direction of the amelioration of manners
and a studied elegance of life. M. Rébelliau has pointed out that it
was precisely at this moment that a great number of new words, and
among them délicate, distinguer, moraliste, ménagements, finesse and
many others, were accepted as part of the French language. These
served immediately to enrich the vocabulary of the men and women who
were anxious to push further and deeper their investigations into
psychological analysis. With this social tendency to dissect the human
heart and to seize its most secret movements, was combined the
religious and, as we may put it, protestant fashion of the hour, in
the spirit of Port Royal. To be a moralist was almost in itself to be
a Jansenist, and we see the author of the "Maximes" presently claiming
to be, after a fashion, evangelical.
There is so little said about theology, in the direct sense, in the
writings of La Rochefoucauld, that his various French critics have
given perhaps too little thought to his religious tendencies. They
have treated him as though he were the enemy of a pious life. But if
we examine that contention from the standpoint provided for us by our
own Puritan habit of thought, we must recognize that there was
something positively pious about the bitter philosopher of the
"Maximes." He was trying, let us never forget, to discover a
scientific form of morals, and hardly enough attention has been given
to the prominence which he gave to a searching analysis of conscience.
He found little to help him in the court religion of the age, but he
was immensely impressed with the Jansenist conception of the frailty
and worthlessness of the natural man. Hence, his persistency in
cultivating almost exclusively the society of those men and women of
Port Royal with whom we might suppose that he had very little in
common. But, quite recently, a discovery has been made, which is not
only of special interest to us as Englishmen, but which throws a
further light on the evangelical or puritan tendency of the author of
the "Maximes."
A careful scholar, M. Ernest Jouy, was led by a passage in a
seventeenth-century MS. to make investigations which seem to have
proved that La Rochefoucauld was acquainted with an English book of
edification and even that he deigned to make use of it in the
fashioning of his famous "Maximes." This was "The Mystery of
Self-Deceiving," published in 1615 by a semi-nonconformist Puritan
divine, Daniel Dyke, minister of Coggeshall in Essex, and translated
obscurely into French by a certain Vernulius. Of the original work
Fuller wrote, "It is a book which will be owned for a truth while men
have any badness in them, and will be owned as a treasure whilst they
have any goodness in them." It is, certainly, an amazing thing to find
that this clumsy old treatise of English divinity was apparently
possessed as a treasure by the most elegant and the most sceptical of
Frenchmen.
La Rochefoucauld may be conceived as saying to the practical divines
of Port Royal, "Your work is confused and thwarted by the vast
prevalence of rubbish under which morals are concealed. I will help
you to force the people who talk so glibly of humanity and pity, of
rectitude and amiability, to dissect the real bodies of egotism to
which they give those names. I put Man in the pillory of
self-judgment; it is for you to deal evangelically with what remains
of his temperament when he comes down out of the ordeal."
To do this, La Rochefoucauld prepared, with infinite patience and with
the conscientiousness of a great literary artist, his sheaf of
Maxim-arrows, ready to shoot them, one by one, into the gross heart of
amour-propre. What, then, were the reflexions which, now settled in
Paris, and secure from the rough world in the recesses of Mme de
Sablé's salon, the Duke began to fashion and to polish? A maxim is a
formula, which comprehends the whole truth on a particular subject.
Coleridge says, in his "Table Talk," that a maxim is a conclusion upon
observation of matters of fact; we may add that it is final, it goes
as far as it can possibly go, and contains the maximum of truth in the
minimum of verbiage. If we take some of the most cynical and savage
maxims of La Rochefoucauld we may see that conciseness could proceed
no further: for instance, "Virtue is a rouge that women add to their
beauty"; or "Pride knows no law and self-love no debt"; or "The
pleasure of love is loving." The ingenuity of man has not devised a
mode of saying those particular things as exactly in fewer words. They
reach the maximum of conciseness, and are therefore called maxims.
It is very unusual in the history of literature to be able to point to
a man of genius as the positive founder of a class of work. When we
look closely into the matter, we are sure to find that there was an
obscure predecessor, a torch-bearer who lighted up the path. Even
Shakespeare has Marlowe in front of him, and in front of Marlowe are
Greene and Peele. Several poets were inspired by the story of the fall
of the rebel angels before Milton took up "Paradise Lost" and seized
that province as his own by conquest. In like manner, La Rochefoucauld
seems to us in a general view, and seemed indeed to his own Parisian
contemporaries, to have invented a new art in the production of his
"Maximes." But, in truth, he was not the pioneer, and he seems to have
spent months, and even years, in a sort of apprenticeship to two
authors who have not survived in French literature as he has. So far
as we can make out, the real creator of the maxim in French was
Jacques Esprit (1611-1678), the Abbé Esprit as he was called, although
he was never a priest, and had a legitimate wife and family. He was a
young man from Béziers in Provence, who came to Paris under the
protection of Chancellor Séguier, soon became a member of the French
Academy, and enjoyed a steady social and literary success.
There seems little doubt that Esprit was known early to La
Rochefoucauld, for he was familiar in the family of the Duke and
Duchess of Longueville, and later the governor of their children. He
enjoyed the confidence of the salons from an early date. There is
some reason to suppose that Esprit had begun to write maxims before La
Rochefoucauld's return from exile, and certainly before Mme de Sablé's
retreat to Port Royal in 1659. It is very noticeable in La
Rochefoucauld's letters to Esprit—most of which belong to the year
1660—that he treats the academician—who was of plebeian birth and
not many months older than himself—with extreme deference. The Duke
adopts the style of a pupil to a master, and he submits his sketches
or experiments in maxim-making to Esprit for a severe criticism, which
he accepts, and for advice, which he adopts. The probability seems to
be that Esprit introduced the fashion for writing maxims to Mme de
Sablé, who was fascinated by it, recommended it to La Rochefoucauld,
and then pointed Esprit out as the acknowledged master of the art, who
could give invaluable technical advice.
There was a sort of collaboration. We find La Rochefoucauld writing to
Esprit, "I shall be much obliged if you will show our last sentences
to Mme de Sablé; it may perhaps induce her to write some of her own."
And to the lady he writes, "Here are all my maxims which you have not
yet seen, but as nothing is done for nothing, I beg you to send me in
return the receipt for the carrot soup which we had when Commander de
Souvré dined at your house," The three maximists consulted one
another, polished up one another's sentences, and suggested subjects
which were first discussed round the dinner-table or in the summer
parlour and then worked up, sometimes by all three conjointly, to the
highest pitch of perfection. It was probably Esprit by whom many of
the original suggestions were started, indeed it is he who seems to
have first laid down the formula that "the mind is the servant and
even the dupe of the instincts," which both Pascal and La
Rochefoucauld were presently to expand in such brilliant forms. But it
is quite an error to presume, as some writers have done, that there
was a kind of factory for maxims, out of which sentences were turned
which really belonged to no one in particular. The "Maximes" of Mme de
Sablé and those of the Abbé Esprit—the latter contained in a
Jansenist volume called "The Falsity of Human Virtues"—were published
independently, but in the same year, 1678. Any one who has the
patience to refer to these works may satisfy himself that Mme de
Sablé, as an artist, is superior to Esprit, but immeasurably inferior
to La Rochefoucauld, who is the one unapproachable master of the
maxim.[3]
[Footnote 3: A good deal of the prejudice which successive
critics, and (very mischievously) Brunetière in particular,
have shown with regard to the character of La Rochefoucauld,
is due, in my opinion, to the influence of Victor Cousin,
who published, in 1854, a disjointed and diffuse, but in
many ways brilliantly executed volume on Mme de Sablé.
Cousin, who examined, for the first time, a vast array of
MS. sources, deliberately lowered the value of La
Rochefoucauld in order to enhance the merit of the lady, of
whom the learned academician wrote like a lover. Even Esprit
was thrown into the scale to lighten the weight of the
Duke's originality. Cousin was borne gaily on the stream of
his heroine-worship, and others less profoundly acquainted
with the facts have let themselves be carried with him. But
it is time that we should cease to imitate them in this.]
For six or seven years the Duke worked away at the polishing of his
incomparable epigrams, and it was not until October 27, 1665, that the
little famous book made its anonymous appearance. The importance of
the work was perceived immediately in the close circle of the salons
which regulated literary opinion in Paris. For half a century past
Frenchmen had been regarding with jealous attention the causes and
effects of human passion, culminating, for the moment, in the treatise
written by Descartes for the daughter of the Queen of Bohemia. The
Jansenists and the Jesuits, the playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes and
Spinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusive
secrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earlier
generations. But La Rochefoucauld reduced the desultory psychology of
his predecessors to a system, so that for us the moralizing tendencies
of the seventeenth century in France seem to have found their final
expression less in the sob of Pascal's conscience than in the resigned
ironic nonchalance of La Rochefoucauld, who, as Voltaire so admirably
says, "dissolves every virtue in the passions which surround it."
Perhaps what the "Maximes" most resembled was the then
recently-published analysis of egotism in "Leviathan." But the cool
and atrocious periods of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls "the unblushing
egotism" of Hobbes have really little in common with the sparkling
rapier-strokes of La Rochefoucauld, except that both these moralists—
who may conceivably have met and compared impressions in Paris—
combined a resolute pessimism about the corruption of mankind with an
epicurean pursuit of happiness.
The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld were atoms of gold sifted through the
mesh of discussions at the dinner-table, around the fire in winter,
under the hawthorns and lilacs which Mme de Sévigné describes, in
endless talk between two or more trained and intelligent persons,
along the course of which thought oscillated from extreme to extreme,
until at last the company dispersed, leaving La Rochefoucauld to
capture and to fix the essential result of all that desultory
conversation. It is not impossible for us to conjecture the general
character of this brilliant and illusive talk. It had one central aim,
more or less clearly perceived, namely the desire to reach a Latin
standard of perfection. It sought to exchange for the romantic
barbarism which had underlain so much that was picturesque in the
sixteenth century—a barbarism which had come down from the late
Middle Ages, and which was really a dissolution of strong things
outworn—to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as against
mere rude bulk. It desired to introduce depth of purpose in the place
of chaotic moral disorder, originality in place of a frenzied and
incoherent eccentricity, and to found a solid structure upon a basis
of intellectual discipline.
But in order to carry out this fine scheme, and especially in order
successfully to check that decadence which had alarmed the best minds
in France, there was a pioneer work to be done. It was necessary to
intensify and purify the light of criticism. For this purpose the
conversations of the salons culminated in the lapidary art of La
Rochefoucauld, who was not a creator like Racine and Molière, like
Bossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly later
builders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams.
Segrais, whose recollections of him are among the most precious which
have come down to us, says that La Rochefoucauld never argued. He had
the Socratic manner, and led others on to expose and expound their
views. His custom was, in the course of the endless talks about morals
and the soul, "to conceal half of his own opinion, and to show tact
with an obstinate opponent, so as to spare him the annoyance of having
to yield." There is something very like this in the "Pensées" of
Pascal. La Rochefoucauld blames himself, in his self-portrait, for
arguing too fiercely, and for being testy with an opponent, but these
faults were not perceived by other people. Doubtless he was aware of
an inward impatience, and succeeded in concealing it by means of that
extreme politeness on which he prided himself.
The "Maximes" are shocking to persons who live in a state of illusion
about themselves, and they were so from the hour of their publication.
They roll up a bitter pill for human vanity. When Mme de La Fayette,
destined to look deeper than any other mortal into the soul of La
Rochefoucauld, read them first in 1663, in company with Mme du Plessis
at the Château de Fresnes, she was terrified and shocked at what she
called the "corruption" which they revealed. She wrote to Mme de
Sablé, who had lent her the manuscript—
"Ah, Madame, how corrupt he must be in mind and heart to be capable of
imagining such things! I am so frightened by it that I should say, if
this were not a matter too serious for jest, that such maxims are
likely to do more to upset him than all the plates of soup he
swallowed at your house the other day."
As the "Maximes" pass from hand to hand, we see the spiritual Mænads
of Port Royal clustering "with a lovely frightened mien" about the
sinister author, while he turns "his beauteous face haughtily another
way," like young Apollo in the Phrygian highlands. The word
"pessimism" was, I believe, unknown until the year 1835, but this is
what Mme de La Fayette and the rest of the Jansenist ladies meant by
"corruption." Perhaps the most celebrated of all the sayings of her
terrible friend is that which declares that "In the misfortunes of our
friends there is always something which gives us no displeasure." She
was about to learn that no one had a nobler practice in friendship
than the cynic who wrote this: "There are good marriages, but no
delicious ones"; Mme de La Fayette's own marriage had been not at all
delicious and not even good. "Gratitude in the majority of men is
simply a strong and secret wish to receive still greater benefits."
Terrifying this must have been to a sentimental and exalted bosom, and
exclusive of all hope until the little word "majority" was observed, a
loophole offered for scared humanity to creep out at.
The design of La Rochefoucauld was to make people ashamed of their
egotism, and so to help them to modify it. He saw France deadened by a
universal sycophancy, and tyrannized over by a court life which made a
lie of everything. He insisted upon the value of individual sincerity,
but in a voice so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases—as
when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is
usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence
of others"—that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if
he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of
these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to
all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of
Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," as suited
only to the vices of wicked persons, "improborum hominum vitiis," and
to issue a warning against the too-sweeping cynicism of
Roccapucaldius, as he called the Duke. This was, perhaps, the
beginning of the dead-set against La Rochefoucauld. It encouraged
Rousseau, a century later, to talk of "ce triste livre," and to
declare, in the true romantic spirit, that "Bad maxims are worse than
bad acts." There have always been, and always will be, people who
experience a sort of malaise, an ill-defined discomfort, as though
they sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This is
particularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Our
virtues are often only our vices in disguise," and who also, by the
way, are constitutionally impatient of the French genius for making
what is ugly, and even what is detestable, pleasing by the surface of
style.
There is an element of unmercifulness in the candour of La
Rochefoucauld which is distressing to sentimentalists. But this was
characteristic of the age, which looked upon compassion as a frailty,
as a break-down of noble personal reserve. He shall speak on this
matter for himself—
"I am little sensible of pity, and if I had my way, I would avoid it
altogether. At the same time, there is nothing I would not do to
relieve an afflicted person: and I believe as a matter of fact that
one ought to go so far as to express compassion for the misfortunes of
such a man, since the unhappy are so stupid that compassion does them
more good than anything else in the world. But I also hold that one
should confine one's self to professions of pity and be very careful
not to feel any. Pity is a passion which is wholly useless to a
well-constituted mind; it can but weaken the heart, and it ought to be
left to people who, carrying nothing out in a logical manner, require
passion to constrain them to do things."
He seems to paint himself in tones of Prussian blue, but we must
really think of him as of a man timid, and at the same time
preternaturally wide-awake, who was determined at all risks not to be
taken at a disadvantage. When he was an old man, when much communing
with Mme de La Fayette had allayed his suspicion of mankind, La
Rochefoucauld said to Mlle de Scudery, "I hope that clemency will come
into fashion, and that we shall see no more men unhappy." [4] He
professed to found politeness on extreme amour-propre, but perhaps
in a still closer analysis he would have discovered its basis in
kindness of heart. He resists the temptation to weaken his own
pessimism, just as in his biting sarcasms about love we may trace a
tender soul still bleeding from the wounds which Mme de Longueville's
levity had inflicted on it.[5]
[Footnote 4: Mme de Sévigné told her daughter that she was
sure that if one could peep at the Duke and Mme de La
Fayette "when they were alone with the cat," one would find
all the restraints of society flung aside, and see them
without the mask, their cynicism forgotten, mingling cries
and tears over the sorrows of the world. But neither she nor
any third person would ever see their social discretion thus
betrayed, and she concludes, in her droll way, "C'est une
vision!" In another letter to Mme de Grignan (June 6, 1672)
she says of the Duke, "Il connaît quasi aussi bien que moi
la tendresse maternelle."]
[Footnote 5: There was unquestionably a strong vein of
tenderness running through the stoical character of the
Duke, and if we were more intimately acquainted with his
private life we should probably see many traces of it. Such
traces exist as it is. We have Mme de Sévigné's account of
his reception of the news of the Passage of the Rhine. It
was announced to him, on the 17th of June, 1672, at the
house of Mme de La Fayette, in the presence of Mme de
Sévigné, that in that terrible disaster his eldest son had
been dangerously wounded and his fourth son, the Chevalier,
killed. The tears seemed to start out of the depth of his
heart, and they brimmed his eyes, although his self-command
prevented an outbreak of grief. But there was a further
complication. The young Duke of Longueville was also killed
at the Rhine, and he, as a select circle of intimate friends
were perfectly aware, was really the love-child of La
Rochefoucauld. Mme de Sévigné, having given a superficial
account of the incident, characteristically goes on to say,
"Alas! I am telling a lie; between ourselves, my dear, he
does not feel the loss of the Chevalier so much; it is that
of the young man whom all the world regrets which leaves him
so inconsolable." And again she says: "I saw the secrets of
his heart revealed under this cruel blow; and no one that I
have ever seen surpasses him in courage, in honour, in
tenderness, in balance of mind." This is a tribute not to be
overlooked.]
To understand the wholesome influence which La Rochefoucauld has
exercised on French character, we must keep constantly in sight his
hatred of falsehood. If he is angry and sardonic, it is because he
sees, or thinks he sees, falsehood everywhere masquerading as virtue.
His foremost duty was to pluck the mask from the false virtues which
strutted everywhere through the society and literature of France.
Voltaire recognized nothing else in La Rochefoucauld but this sardonic
misanthropy, this determination to prove that man is guided solely by
self-interest. This Voltaire thought was the seule vérité contained
in the "Maximes," and in a measure he was right. The moralist saw
amour-propre as an Apollyon straddling right across the pathway of
mankind; he saw lies flourish everywhere, and proclaim themselves to
be the truth. The conscience of mankind was seduced or browbeaten by
the impudency of self-love. Thus—
"We have not the courage to say broadly that we ourselves have no
defects, and that our enemies have no good qualities; but as a matter
of fact that is not far from being what we think."
He believed not at all, or very faintly, in altruism. He had to sweep
away affected and therefore erroneous suppositions with regard to
morality, and particularly with regard to social motives. He had come
back to Paris, after his long and irksome exile, with a terrible
clear-sightedness, and he saw that society had gone to pieces and that
truth was essential to its rebuilding. He was convinced—and this must
be asserted in the face of his own apparent cynicism—he was convinced
of the existence of pure virtue, but he thought that amour-propre in
the individual, and conventionality (what was then meant by la
coutume) in the social order, had made it almost as rare as the dodo.
He wished, by his stringent exposure of the arts of lying, to save
virtue before it was absolutely extinct. He had the instinct of
race-preservation.[6]
[Footnote 6: It is possible that the conversation of Mme de
Sablé concentrated his thoughts on self-love. A contemporary
MS. says of that lady, "Elle flatte fort l'amour propre
quand elle parle aux gens." But egotism was a new discovery
which fascinated everybody in the third quarter of the
century.]
Let us turn to the few, but profoundly beautiful reflections which
form the constructive element in La Rochefoucauld's teaching. His aim
in edification is to train us to dig through the crust of social sham
to the limpid truth which exists in the dark centre of our souls—
"If there is a pure love, he says, exempt from all admixture with
other passions, it is that which lies hidden at the bottom of the
heart, and of which we ourselves are ignorant."
Unlike Mandeville, our own great cynic of the eighteenth century, La
Rochefoucauld, while calling in question the reality of almost all
benevolent impulses, stopped short of denying the existence of virtue
itself. He would not have said, as the author of the "Fable of the
Bees" (1714) did, that the "hunting after this pulchrum et honestum
is not much better than a wild-goose chase." But he had a strong
contempt for the humbugs of the world, and among them he placed
unflinching optimists. One of the main forms of humbug in his day was
the legend that everybody acted nobly for the sake of other people.
This La Rochefoucauld stoutly denied, but he was not so excessive as
his commentators in his condemnation of that self-love which he
declares to be the source of all our moral actions. He insinuates the
possibility of an innocent and even a beneficial egotism. He says,
"The praise which is given us serves to fix us in the practice of
virtue," and if that is true, amour-propre must be practically
useful. Helvétius, who made some very valuable comments on the
"Maximes" a hundred years later, pointed out that amour-propre is
not in itself an evil thing, but is a sentiment implanted in us all by
nature, and that this sentiment is transformed in every human being
into either vice or virtue, so that although we are all egoists, some
are good and some are bad.
La Rochefoucauld, therefore, while he takes a very dark view of the
selfishness of the human race, softens the shades of his picture by
admitting that egotism may be, and often must be, advantageous not
merely to the individual but to the race. And here we find the key to
one of the oddest passages in his works, that in which he attributes
his inspiration to two saints, St. Augustine and St. Epicurus! He
says—
Everybody wishes to be happy; that is the aim of all the acts of
life. Spurious men of the world and spurious men of piety only seek
for the appearance of virtue, and I believe that in matters of
morality, Seneca was a hypocrite and Epicurus was a saint. I know of
nothing in the world so beautiful as nobility of heart and loftiness
of mind: from these proceeds that perfect integrity which I set above
all other qualities, and which seems to me, at my present stage of
life, to be of more price than a royal crown. But I am not sure
whether, in order to live happily and as a man of the highest sense of
honour, it is not better to be Alcibiades and Phaedo than to be
Aristides and Socrates.
It would take us too far out of our path to comment on the relation of
this epicureanism to the religion of La Rochefoucauld's day, but a few
words seem necessary on this subject. He says extremely little about
religion, although he makes the necessary and perhaps not wholly
perfunctory, statement that he was orthodox. But the position of a
votary of St. Epicurus had grown difficult. Since the Duke's exile,
the enmity between the church and the world had become violent, so
violent that a man of prominent social and intellectual position was
bound to take one side or another. We may note that the years during
which the "Maximes" were being composed were precisely those during
which Bossuet was thundering from the pulpit his anathemas against
worldly luxury and the pride of life. The period marked at one
extremity by "L'Amour des Passions" (1660) and at the other by the
"Grandeurs Humains" (1663) is precisely that in which the lapidary art
of La Rochefoucauld was most assiduous. The church was advocating
asceticism and humility with all its authority, and was leading up
towards the later phase of the fanatical despotism of Louis XIV.'s old
age, with all its attendant hypocrisy. For the moment, in the
struggle, La Rochefoucauld, though no dévot, would seem a friend of
the church rather than a foe, and in fact he retained the intimacy of
Bossuet, in whose arms he died. We may be sure that he guarded himself
with delicate care from the charge of being what was then called a
"libertine," that is a man openly at war with the theory and practice
of the theologians.
It is said that La Rochefoucauld invented[7] the word "vraie," "true,"
to describe the character of Mme de La Fayette. His intimacy with this
illustrious lady is one of the most beautiful episodes in the history
of literature, and perhaps its purest example of true friendship
between the sexes. The phrase we have already quoted shows that in
1663 the two great writers were acquainted but not yet intimate. Marie
de la Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette, was in her thirtieth year, La
Rochefoucauld had completed his fiftieth when some cause which remains
obscure drew them together with a tie which death alone, after
seventeen wonderful years of almost unbroken association, was to
sever. There was no scandal about it, even in that scandal-mongering
age. The astute Mile de Scudery, writing to her gossip Bussy Rabutin
(December 6, 1675), says, "Nothing could be happier for her, or more
dignified for him; the fear of God on either side, and perhaps
prudence as well, have clipped the wings of love." Twelve years
before, when Ménage had repeated to her some critical remarks about
her novel, "La Princesse de Montpensier," Mme de La Fayette had
replied, "I am greatly obliged to M. de la Rochefoucauld for his
expressions. They are the result of our similarity of experience, 'de
la belle sympathie qui est entre nous.'"
[Footnote 7: Mme de Sévigné seems not to have known this
when, in writing to her daughter (July 19, 1671), she claims
to have been the first to say vraie when she meant
sincere, loyal. "Il y a longtemps que je dis que vous êtes
vraie"]
The famous friends were excluded by their physical conditions from the
activities of life. Mme de La Fayette, who was perhaps something of a
hypochondriac, tossed all day among the pillows of that golden bed
with the extravagance of which the austerity of Mme de Maintenon
upbraided her. La Rochefoucauld, tormented by the gout, lay stretched
at her side in his long chair, and the days went by in endless
discussion, endless balancing of right and wrong, much gossip, much
reading of books new and old, and not a little consultation of artist
with artist. They kept their secrets well, and no curiosity of
successive critics has been able to discover how much of La
Rochefoucauld is hidden in the pages of "La Princesse de Clèves", the
earliest of the modern novels of the world, nor how much of Mme de La
Fayette in the revised and re-revised text of the "Maximes." [8] But we
know that she was no less sagacious and no less an enemy to illusion
than he was, and those are probably not far wrong who have detected a
softening influence from her conversation on the late genius of La
Rochefoucauld.
In 1675 Mme de Thiange presented to the Duke du Maine a toy which has
long ago disappeared, and for the recovery of which I would gladly
exchange many a grand composition of painting and sculpture. It was a
sort of gilded doll's house, representing the interior of a salon.
Over the door was written, "Chambre des Sublimes." Inside were wax
portrait-figures of living celebrities, the Duke du Maine in one
arm-chair; in another La Rochefoucauld, who was handing him some
manuscript. By the arm-chairs were standing Bossuet, then Bishop of
Condom, and La Rochefoucauld's eldest son, M. de Marcillac. At the
other end of the alcove Mme de La Fayette and Mme de Thiange were
reading verses together. Outside the balustrade, Boileau with a
pitchfork was preventing seven or eight bad poets from entering, to
the amusement and approval of Racine, who was already inside, and of
La Fontaine, who was invited to come forward. The likeness of these
little waxen images is said to have been perfect, and there can hardly
be fancied a relic of that fine society which would be more valuable
to us in re-establishing its social character. We know not what became
of it in the next generation. No doubt, the wax grew dusty, and the
figures lost their heads and hands, and some petulant châtelaine
doomed the ruined treasure to the dustbin.
[Footnote 8: Bussy Rabutin writes to Mme de Sévigné that he
hears that La Rochefoucauld and Mme de La Fayette are
preparing "quelque chose de fort joli." This shows that
before "La Princess de Clèves" was finished the Duke's name
was identified with its composition.]
No mention of Mme de Sévigné is made in the inventory of the "Chambre
des Sublimes," and yet there is no one to whom we owe an exacter
portraiture of its inmates, nor one who was more worthy to animate its
golden recesses. For the last ten years of La Rochefoucauld's life she
was one of the closest observers of the famous sedentary friendship.
Unfortunately she tells us nothing about the original publication of
the "Maximes," for his name does not occur in her correspondence
before 1668, and does not abound there until 1670. Then we find her
for ever at the Duke's house, or meeting him at Mme de La Fayette's
bedside. He gratified her by warm and constant praise of Mme de
Grignan, whose letters were regularly read to the friends by her
infatuated mother. It is vexing that Mme de Sévigné, who might have
spared us two or three of her immortal pages, although she incessantly
mentions and even quotes La Rochefoucauld, generally refrains from
describing him. She and Mme de La Fayette were his guests in the
country on May 15, and the three wonderful companions walked in the
harmony of "nightingales, hawthorns, lilacs, fountains and fine
weather," or played with his pet white mouse. Such touches are rare,
and Paris seems best to suit what Mme de Sévigné admirably calls "the
grey-brown" thought of La Rochefoucauld.
In 1671 he had a terrible attack of the gout, accompanied by agonies
moral and physical which filled the ladies with alarm and pity. Better
in 1672, he was able to entertain company to hear Corneille read his
new tragedy of "Pulchérie" in January, and Molière his new comedy,
"Les Femmes Savantes," in March. He was now, in premature old age, the
venerable figure in the group, the benevolent Nestor of the salons.
Let his detractors remember that Mme de Sévigné, who knew what she was
talking about, wrote that "he is the most lovable man I have ever
known," His sufferings, his disenchantments and disappointments, only
seemed to accentuate his beautiful patience. Just before his fatal
illness (January 31, 1680) Mme de Sévigné writes again: "I have never
seen a man so obliging, nor more amiable in his wish to give pleasure
by what he says." [9] Her detailed and pathetic account of his last
hours, which closed on the night of March 16, 1680, testifies to her
deep attachment and to Mme de La Fayette's despair.
[Footnote 9: Two of La Fontaine's fables, "L'Homme et son
Image" and "Les Lapins," were dedicated to La Rochefoucauld
in 1668. In the former we read:—
On voit bien où je veux venir.
Je parle a tous, et cette erreur extrême
Est un mal que chacun se plaît d'entretenir
Notre âme, c'est cet homme amoureux de lui-même;
Tant de miroirs, ce sont les sottises d'autrui,
Miroirs, de nos défauts les peintres légitimes;
Et quant au canal, c'est celui,
Que chacun sait: le livre des Maximes.]
When Mme de Sévigné, in 1675, received the third edition of the Duke's
book, which contained more than seventy new maxims, she wrote, "Some of
them are divine; some of them, I am ashamed to say, I don't understand."
Probably she would have partly agreed with some one's criticism of them,
"De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit—trop
d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation
wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he
sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are
disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces.
Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into
which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime
companion. Mme de Sévigné describes such talks with her delicate irony,
and says, "We plunged into subtleties which were beyond our
intelligence." An example is the dispute whether "Grace is to the body
what good sense is to the mind," or "Grace is to the body what delicacy
is to the mind" should be the ultimate form of a maxim. They sometimes
drew the spider's thread so fine that it became invisible.[11]
[Footnote 10: The practice of making "maxims," axiomata,
encouraged the enlivenment of conversation by the
introduction of topsy-turvy statements, such as "Constancy
is merely inconstancy arrested," in the manner of Oscar
Wilde and Mr. Chesterton.]
[Footnote 11: La Rochefoucauld was not without affectations. He
spoke airily about his manière négligée of writing, whereas
no one ever took more pains. Segrais gives very interesting
information on this point: he says that the Duke
"sent me from time to time what he had been working
on, and he wished me to keep these note-books of his for
five or six weeks, so as to be able to give them my
closest attention, particularly with regard to the turn of
the thoughts and the arrangement of the words. Some of
his maxims he altered as many as thirty times." But
when he wrote to Esprit, in 1660, La Rochefoucauld
affected to regard his own writings as trifles thrown off
"au coin de mon feu" The great of the earth have these
amiable and amusing weaknesses.]
But his clearness of insight was immense, and he was too profoundly
intelligent to be a merely destructive or sterile force. He builded
better than he knew. For instance, courage, it has been alleged, he
denies, and indeed he is so savage in his exposure of braggadocio that
it might well be believed that he refused to admit that men could be
brave. Yet what does he say?—
"Intrepidity is an extraordinary force of the soul which lifts it
above those troubles, disorders and emotions which the aspect of great
peril would otherwise excite; it is by this force that heroes maintain
themselves in a state of equanimity, preserving the free use of their
reason through the most surprising and the most terrible accidents."
This must include the most moving of all accidents, those which call
forth moral and physical courage in the face of national danger, and
are rewarded by gloire, by public and lasting fame. And we are led
on to a consideration of the lengthy reflection on the spirit in which
the approach of death should be faced, with which he closed the latest
edition of the "Maximes," declaring that "the splendour of dying with
a firm spirit, the hope of being regretted, the desire to leave a fair
reputation behind us, the assurance of being released from the
drudgery of life and of depending no more on the caprices of fortune,"
are remedies which would medicine our pain in approaching the dreaded
goal of our existence.
We must read La Rochefoucauld closely to perceive why a book so
searching, and even so cruel as his, has exercised on the genius of
France a salutary and a lasting influence. His savage pessimism is not
useless, it is not a mere scorn of humanity and a sneer at its
weaknesses. It tends, by stripping off all the shams of conduct and
digging to the root of action, to make people upright, candid and
magnanimous on a new basis of truth. So we come at last to see the
significance of Voltaire's dark saying of the "Maximes": "This book is
one of those which have contributed most to form the taste of the
French nation, and to give it the spirit of accuracy and precision."