Some Maxims of Rochefoucauld

A book called Horizon has some very fascinating stories in it, and I selected this one which has a story about Rochefoucauld and at the end of the article, some maxims. I am going to cite a couple of his maxims, and choose a few paragraphs to give the idea of this interesting article.

Where love is, no disguise can hide it for long; where it is not,none can simulate it.

There are few sensible people, we find, except those who share our opinions.

A feeling of confidence does more for conversation than wit.

The glory of great men must always be measured against the means they have used to acquire it.

When you cannot find your peace in yourself it is useless to look for it elsewhere.


This article called The Making of a Cynic is in Horizon books, written by Morris Bishop.

A shy, sensitive boy who was a bridegroom at fourteen, a colonel at fifteen, and for much of his life thereafter a courtier, in the end became France's most acerbic critic of human folly and frailty.

I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the steet were time and he at the end of the street.

So wrote young T.S. Eliot, weary, disillusioned, walking the sad street of time through the Boston waste land in company with his disillusioned elder. One may be fairly sure it was drizzling.

Eliot's companion in gloom was the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, seventh-century French moralist, soldier, intriguer against the government of Cardinal Richelieu, and lover of three of the most remarkable women of the century: the Duchesse de Chevreuse, the Duchesse de Longueville, and Mme de La FAyette. He is commonly tagged as La Rochefoucauld the Cynic.

What is a cynic like? Do great loves end in cynicism, or does cynicism aid one in becoming a great lover? How does one get to be a cynic? Let us exmaine the case of Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac.

He was born to greatness, of an ancient and mighty family. His blood was presumed to be only a slightly lighter blue than that of the Princes of the Blood (in those days blood types were distinguished by inherited rank). The marks of his noble caste were pride, honor, courage, courtesy ---and cruelty, rapacity, and contempt for common men, which can readily become contempt for all humanity. But some few bear hard the burden of aristocracy. They torture themselves in secret; they question their own eminence.

Young Francois was shy and sensitive, introspective, a dreamer. The scenery of his land of dreams was provided by the pastoral novels of his time, wherein beribboned shepherds endlessly flutetheir hopeless love to queenly shepherdesses, inexorably chaste. He knew Honore d'Urfe's Astreealmost by heart, and all his life he read and reread it, even when he became a misantrhopic gouty old man. We can no longer dwell in the dreamland of Astree; no living mortal, I suspect, has finished its 5,216 pages.

Francois was married at fourteen, for financial and dynastic reasons. He went to the wars almost immediately, and within a year was commissioned a colonel, commanding hte Auvergne regiment. The realities both of marriage andof war no doubt jarred his dreams of love and heroism.

(This is all written by Morris Bishop)