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Updated: June 9, 2025
La Bruyère was thirty-five years of age when La Rochefoucauld died, and twenty when the "Maximes" were published.
I became a cynic. At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly dissipated.
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.
She had the satisfaction of at last seeing the Bishop of Lucon promoted to the cardinalship she had so often solicited for him in vain; but, at the same time, the king called to the council Cardinal Rochefoucauld, "not through personal esteem for the old cardinal," says Richelieu, "but to cut off from the new one all hope of a place for which he might be supposed to feel some ambition."
Hunter had known one or two such black sheep in his time; he fancied himself none too shrewd in thus penetrating Flint's rather obvious secret. My mother watched the secretary's comings and goings at the Parish House speculatively. Not even the fact that he quoted her adored La Rochefoucauld, in flawless French, softened her estimate.
Her true character and the unity of her life should be sought where they were really shown in her devotion to him whom she loved. It is there in that devotion wholly and always the same, at once consistent, yet absurd, and very touching even in its downright follies. All her eccentric movements were attributable to the restless and fickle spirit of La Rochefoucauld.
Two treatises, in the form of maxims, on the education of children and on friendship, respectively, are supposed to have come from her pen; from them La Rochefoucauld conceived the ideas he utilized in his famous Maxims. La Rochefoucauld's maxims were composed according to the chance of conversation, which gave rise to various subjects and led to his serious reflection upon them.
Florentin the deputation was introduced to Count Nesselrode, to whom M. Sosthenes de la Rochefoucauld briefly explained its object; he spoke of the wishes of the meeting and of the manifest desire of Paris and of France.
The practical side of Mme. de La Fayette's character was remarkable in a woman of so fine a sensibility and so rare a genius. Her friends often sought her counsel; and it was through her familiarity with legal technicalities that La Rochefoucauld was enabled to save his fortune, which he was at one time in danger of losing.
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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