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Updated: May 10, 2025
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.
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.
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."
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.
As for M. de Cambrai's book 'Les Maxinies des Saints', it was as little liked as ever, and underwent rather a strong criticism at this time from M. de La Trappe, which did not do much to improve its reputation. At the commencement of the dispute M. de Meaux had sent a copy of 'Les Maximes des Saints' to M. de La Trappe, asking as a friend for his opinion of the work.
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."
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."
La Bruyère was thirty-five years of age when La Rochefoucauld died, and twenty when the "Maximes" were published.
We brought with us a beautifully bound set of French classics, and we read Voltaire one day, and La Bruyère the next, and Pascal, and Fontenelle, and Molière, and Fénelon, and the sermons of Bossuet, and since I have been seventeen the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. Grandmamma dislikes Jean Jacques; she says he helped the Revolution, and she is all for the ancien régime.
It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and "Pensées," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow. Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the "Comédie Humaine."
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