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We have no evidence that he ever met the former, but he certainly read the latter, and in spite of his eager denial that Pascal or La Rochefoucauld suggested his method to him "I have followed neither of these paths," he says it is impossible to doubt that the example of the "Maximes" had a great deal to do with the form of the "Caractères."
His Fables and Dialogues of the Dead were written for his royal pupil. It is well known that the Archbishop sympathised strongly with Madame Guyon and the French mystics, that he did not approve of some of the extravagant expressions of that ardent enthusiast, but vindicated the pure mysticism in his famous work Maximes des Saints.
We have seen that Vauvenargues to whose memory the mind incessantly reverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war says in one of his "Maximes" written nearly two centuries ago "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man."
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.
Fenelon was in exile at his diocese; public rumor before long attributed the work to him; the Maximes des Saints had just been condemned, Telemaque was seized, the printers were punished; some copies had escaped the police; the book was reprinted in Holland; all Europe read it, finding therein the allusions and undermeanings against which Fenelon defended himself.
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."
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.
The truth is that a strong new book is not read by a young man whose genius is prepared for its teaching, without its image being stamped upon his mind. La Bruyère's own experience had already offered to him a banquet of the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil when he met with the "Maximes" of 1665.
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.
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.
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