Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Might one not rather say that the perpetual misfortunes of our friends are the chief plague of existence? Goethe came nearer the truth when he wrote: "I am happy enough for myself. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for others, I am not happy." But Rochefoucauld had to play the cynic, and a dash of cynicism adds a fine ingredient to a maxim.
La Rochefoucauld stopped him for a moment on the threshold of war, entreating Condé to allow him to undertake fresh negotiations. The Prince consented willingly thereto. Madame de Longueville was opposed to it.
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."
He divided the whole into two portions at his death, the French books passing to a relation and afterwards to the family of La Rochefoucauld, and the rest forming the foundation of a fine library long possessed by the Archbishops of Rouen. The Archbishop Juvenal des Ursins died in the middle of the fifteenth century.
At last the King, when quite close to the basin, looked at the principal people around, and without addressing anybody, said, with an air of vexation, these few words: "The Duchesse de Bourgogne is hurt." M. de la Rochefoucauld at once uttered an exclamation.
He says countless things which are the very echo of Sir Walter's epistolary manner. He says things like Lamb, and sometimes they are as good as the original could have made them. He says things like Defoe, like Montaigne, like Rochefoucauld. His bouquet is culled in every garden, and set in leaves which have grown in all forests of literature.
May Nuttall, who had never explored the philosophies of La Rochefoucauld, had nevertheless seen that quotation in the birthday book of an acquaintance, and the saying had made a great impression upon her. She was twenty-one years of age, at which age girls are most impressionable and are little influenced by the workings of pure reason.
The Memoirs of M. de la Rochefoucauld appeared. They contained certain atrocious and false statements against my father, who so severely resented the calumny, that he seized a pen, and wrote upon the margin of the book, "The author has told a lie." Not content with this, he went to the bookseller, whom he discovered with some difficulty, for the book was not sold publicly at first.
Instead of defending himself, and Madame de Longueville, he accuses Condé of having "adroitly increased the suspicions of the Frondeurs against his sister and La Rochefoucauld, firmly believing that so long as they held that belief, they would never discover the true cause of the postponement of the marriage." And what was that true cause?
It was during that rapid journey and their very brief sojourn in Berri that certain obscure relations, it would appear, were formed between the Duke de Nemours and Madame de Longueville, the report of which reaching Bordeaux, exaggerated probably by interested and malevolent underlings, wounded La Rochefoucauld and drove him to a violent rupture.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking