Chapter 2

To understand the influence of La Rochefoucauld it is even more needful than in most similar cases to form a clear idea of his character, and this can only be obtained by an outline of his remarkable career. François VI. Duke of La Rochefoucauld, as a typical Parisian, was born in the ducal palace in the rue des Petits-Champs, on September 15, 1613. The family was one of the most noble not merely in France but in Europe, and we do not begin to understand the author until we realize his excessive pride of birth. In a letter he wrote to Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 he says, "I am in a position to prove that for three hundred years the monarchs [of France] have not disdained to treat us as members of their family." This arrogance of race inspired the early part of his life to the exclusion, so far as we can perceive, of any other stimulus to action. He was content to be the violent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim, "Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul." Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon counter-scuffle--such was the life of the young French nobleman of whom La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type and specimen.

La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the "Maximes," but of a second book which is much less often read. This is his "Mémoires," a very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book is like a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to a different scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but they make up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times. No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with these authentic fragments of the social and political history of France under Richelieu and Mazarin. These Memoirs had a very remarkable influence on the general literature of France. They turned out of favour the chronicles of "illustrious lives," the pompous and false travesties of history, which the sixteenth century had delighted in, and in this way they served to prepare for the purification of French taste. The note of the best of them was a happy sincerity even in egotism, a simplicity even in describing the most monstrous and grotesque events. Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seems to me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is not to be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personal recollections.

We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers the sort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day. La Rochefoucauld, although he begins in the first person, has nothing which he chooses to tell us about his own childhood and education. He was married, at the age of fifteen, to a high-born lady, Andrée de Vivonne, but her he scarcely mentions. By the side of those glittering amatory escapades of his on the grand scale, with which Europe rang, he seems to have pursued a sober married existence, without upbraidings from his own conscience, or curtain-lectures from his meek duchess, who bore him eight children. La Rochefoucauld's "Mémoires" open abruptly with these words:--"I spent the last years of the Cardinal's administration in indolence," and then he begins to discourse on the audacities of the Duke of Buckingham (pleasingly spelled Bouquinquant) and his attacks on the heart of the Queen of France. We gather that although the English envoy can have had no personal influence on the future moralist--since Buckingham was murdered at Portsmouth in 1628, while La Rochefoucauld did not come to court till 1630--yet the young Frenchman so immensely admired what he heard of the Englishman, and so deliberately set himself to take him as a model, that our own knowledge of Buckingham may be of help to us in reproducing an impression of La Rochefoucauld, or rather of the Prince de Marcillac, as he was styled until his father died.

After describing the court as the youth of seventeen had found it, he skips five years to tell us how the Queen asked him to run away with her to Brussels in 1637. History has not known quite what to make of this amazing story, of which La Rochefoucauld had the complacency to write more than twenty years afterwards--

"However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I may say that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I was at an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startling things, and I felt that nothing could be more startling or more extravagant than to snatch at the same time the Queen from the King her husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, and Mlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her."

He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as an episode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, as though he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own life had not been of much consequence.

Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillac was known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youth who carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past the confines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who was twenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describing him--surely by repute--as the type of--

"These gentlemen who chatter so much about the empire and about the sovereignty of ladies, and have their heads so stuffed with tales and strange adventures, that they grow to believe that they can do all that was done under the reign of Amadis, and that the least of their duties is to reply to a supplicating lady, I, who am only a man, how should I resist the prayer of her to whom the Gods themselves can refuse nothing?"

We seem far from the sombre and mordant author of the "Maximes," but a complete apprehension of the character of La Rochefoucauld requires the story of his adventures to be at least briefly indicated. A chasm divides his early from his late history, and this chasm is bridged over in a very shadowy way by such records as we possess of his retirement after the Fronde.

Between the death of Richelieu and this retirement there lies a period of ten years, during which the future author of the "Maximes" is swallowed up in the hurly-burly of the worst moment in the whole history of France. It is difficult from any point of view to form what it would be mere waste of time for us to attempt in this connection, a clear conception of the chaos into which that country was plunged by the weakness of Anne of Austria and the criminality of Mazarin. The senseless intrigues of the Fronde affect the bewildered student of those times as though

_this frame Of Heav'n were falling and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast earth._

At first La Rochefoucauld seems to have meant to support the cause of the court, expecting to be rewarded for what he had done, or been prepared to do for the Queen. He says in his "Mémoires" that after the death of Louis XIII. the Queen-Mother "gave me many marks of friendship and confidence; she assured me several times that her honour was involved in my being pleased with her, and that nothing in the kingdom was large enough to reward me for what I had done in her service." That sounds very well, but what it really illustrates is the extraordinary violence of aristocratic frivolity, the fierce levity and insatiable frenzied vanity of the noble families. The aims of La Rochefoucauld, in support of which he was ready to sacrifice his country, were of a class that must seem to us now petty in the extreme. He wanted the _tabouret_, the footstool, for his duchess, in other words the right to be seated in presence of the members of the royal family. He wanted the privilege of driving into the courtyard of the Louvre without having to descend from his coach outside and walk in. He demanded these honours because they were already possessed by the families of Rohan and of Bouillon. It is extraordinary to consider what powerful effects such trumpery causes could have, but it is a fact that the desolating and cruel wars of the Fronde largely depended upon jealousies of the _carrosse_ and the _tabouret_. La Rochefoucauld's support of the rebellion frankly and openly was based upon it.

La Rochefoucauld brings the first part of his "Mémoires" down to 1649. In the second part he begins again with 1642, being very anxious to show, to his own advantage of course, what the conditions were at court after the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and in particular to define the position of Mme de Chevreuse, the great intriguer and seductress of the French politics of the age. The charm of this lady, who was no longer young, faded before that of the Duchess of Longueville, one of the most ambitious and most unscrupulous women who ever lived. She was the sister of the Prince de Conti, and from the time when her celebrated relations with La Rochefoucauld began, her influence engaged him in all the unplumbed chaos which led to civil war. When this finally broke out, however, in 1648, the Duke is found once more on the side of the young king and his government, that is to say, of Cardinal Mazarin.

Through the "universal hubbub wide of stunning sounds and noises all confused," we can catch with difficulty the accents of literature, at first indeed vocal in the midst of the riot, and even stimulated by it, as birds are by a heavy shower of rain, but soon stunned and silenced by horrors incompatible with the labour of the Muses. The wars of the Fronde made a sharp cut between the heroic age of imaginative literature and the classical age which presently succeeded it, and offer in this respect a tolerable parallel to the civil wars raging in England about the same time. It is specious, but convenient, to discover a date at which a change of this kind may be said to occur. In England we have such a date marked large for us in 1660; French letters less obviously but more certainly can be said to start afresh in 1652. It is tolerably certain that in that year Pascal, Retz and the subject of our inquiry simultaneously and independently began to write. Up to that time there is no reason to believe that La Rochefoucauld had given himself at all to study, and we possess no evidence that up to the age of forty he was more interested in the existence of the literature of his country than was the idlest of the cut-throat nobility who swaggered in and out of the courtyard of the Louvre.

His "Mémoires" end with an account of the war in Guienne in 1651 which is more solemn and more detached than all the rest. No one would suspect that the historian, who affects the gravity of a Tacitus, was acting all through the events he describes with the levity of a full-blooded and unscrupulous schoolboy. The most amazing instance of this is his grotesque attempt to have Cardinal de Retz murdered at the Palais de Justice. In the course of a sort of romping fray he caught Retz's head between the flaps of a folding door, and shouted to Coligny to come and stab him from behind. But he himself was shoved away, and the Cardinal released. La Rochefoucauld admits the escapade, without any sign of embarrassment, merely observing that Retz would have done as much by him if he had only had the chance. But now comes the incident which, better than anything else could, illustrates the feverish and incongruous atmosphere of the Fronde, and the difficulty of following the caprices of its leading figures. The very next day after this attempt to assassinate Retz in a peculiarly disgraceful way, La Rochefoucauld met the Cardinal driving through the streets of Paris in his coach. Kneeling in the street, he demanded and received the episcopal benediction of the man whom he had tried to murder in an undignified scuffle a few hours before. No animosity seems to have persisted between these two princes of the realm of France, and this may be the moment to introduce the picture which Cardinal de Retz, whose head was held in the folding door, painted very soon after of the volatile duke who had held him there to be stabbed from behind. Both writers began their memoirs in 1652, and no one has ever decided which is the more elegant of the two unique conpositions. The conjunction between two of the greatest prose-writers of France is piquant, and we cannot trace in Retz's sketch of his antagonist the smallest sign of resentment. It was not published until 1717, but it has all the appearance of having been written sixty years earlier, at least, when Mademoiselle was seized with the fortunate inspiration of having "portraits" written of, and often by, the celebrated personages of the day. This, then, is how Retz saw La Rochefoucauld--

"There has always been a certain _je ne sais quoi_ in M. de La Rochefoucauld. He has always ever since his childhood wanted to be taking part in some plot, and that at a time when he was indifferent to small interests, which have never been his weakness, and when he had no experience of great ones, which, in another sense, have never been his strong point. He has never had any skill in conducting business, and I don't know why; for he possessed qualities which in any other man would have made up for those which he lacked. He was not longsighted enough, and he did not see as a whole even what was within his range of vision. But his good sense--which in the field of speculation was very good--joined to his gentleness, his insinuating charm, and his admirable ease of manner, ought to have compensated, more than they have done, for his defect of penetration. He has always suffered from an habitual irresoluteness; but I do not know to what this irresoluteness should be attributed. He has never been a warrior, though very much a soldier. He has never, through his own effort, succeeded in being a good courtier, though he has always intended to be one. That air of bashfulness and of shyness which you observe in him in social life has given him in matters of business an apologetic air. He has always fancied that he needed to apologize; and this--in conjunction with his 'Maximes,' which do not err on the side of too much faith in virtue, and with his practice, which has always been to wind up business as impatiently as he started it--makes me conclude that he would have done much better to know himself, and to be content to pass, as he might well have passed, for the most polished courtier and the finest gentleman, in private life, which this age has produced."

We are now beginning to see the real author of the "Maximes," when, at the age of forty, he begins to peep forth from the travesty of his aristocratic violence and idleness. Whether the transformation would have been gradual instead of sudden is what can never be decided, but we date it from July 2, 1652, when he was dangerously wounded in a riot in the Faubourg St. Antoine, at the Picpus barricade, where he was shot in the forehead and, as it at first appeared, blinded for life. According to the faithful Gourville, when La Rochefoucauld thought he would lose his eyesight, he had a picture of Madame de Longueville engraved with two lines under it from a fashionable tragedy, the "Alcyonée" of Duryer--

_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. He submitted to the cardinal, he withdrew from Condé, and in 1653, still his head bound with bandages and wearing black spectacles to hide those clear and seductive eyes which Petitot had painted, he crept, a broken man, to his country house at Verteuil, in the neighbourhood of Ruffec, now in the Charente. This chateau, built just two hundred years before that date, still exists, a noble relic of feudal France, and a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the author of the "Maximes."

No one was ever more suddenly and more completely cured of a whole system of existence than was La Rochefoucauld by the wound which was so nearly fatal. He said, "It is impossible for any man who has escaped from civil war to plunge into it again." For him, at all events, it was impossible. His only wish in 1653 was to bury himself and his slow convalescence among his woods at Verteuil. In this enforced seclusion, at the age of forty, he turned for solace to literature, which he would seem to have neglected hitherto. We know nothing of his education, which had probably been as primitive as that of any pleasure-seeking and imperious young nobleman of the time. He went to the wars when he was thirteen. In an undated letter he says that he sends some Latin verses composed by a friend for the judgment of his unnamed correspondent, but he adds, "I do not know enough Latin to dare to give an opinion." M. Henri Regnier, in his invaluable "Lexique de la langue de La Rochefoucauld" (1883) points out that the Duke's evident lack of classical knowledge is a positive advantage to him, as it throws him entirely on the resources of pure French. In like manner we may rejoice that Shakespeare had "little Latin and less Greek."

It is tantalizing for us that we know almost nothing of the years, from 1653 to 1656, which La Rochefoucauld spent in severe retirement at Verteuil. What was happening to France was happening, no doubt, in its degree to him; he was chewing the cud of remorse for the follies and crimes of the Fronde. "Only great men should have great failings," the exile wrote, and we may be sure that he had by this time discovered, like the rest of the world, that as a swashbuckler and intriguer he was noisy and petulant, but on the whole anything but great. The Fronde left behind it a sense of littleness, of poverty-stricken humanity, and this particular frondeur had seen the mask drop from the features of his fellow-men. Now, in the quiet of the country, in disgrace with fortune and his own conscience, he grasped a new and this time a dignified and suitable ambition. He began to study reality and learned to distinguish truth from pretence. This study was to make him one of the most eminent of French authors and a great power in the purification of French intelligence. He began, doubtless, his career as an author by composing the "Mémoires," in which he embodied his exasperations and his recriminations in language of studied dignity. There is little here which betrays the future moralist, except the simplicity and almost colourless transparency of the style.

As containing nearly the sole certain evidence of La Rochefoucauld's state of mind at the time of transition, it is well, perhaps, to speak at this moment of his letters, which were first brought together in 1881. They extend from 1637 to 1677, and the biographer pores over them in the hope of extracting from them some crumbs of information. But to the general reader they cannot be recommended. They are seldom confidential, the writer never lets himself go. Even to his later friends, such as Mme de Sablé, La Rochefoucauld is rarely familiar, and the impression of himself in these graceful and sometimes vigorous epistles is illusive; the writer seems for ever on his guard. The great mass of this correspondence, in which politics takes no part after 1653, is singularly literary; it is mainly occupied with the interests, and almost with the jargon, of the professional author. We are told that his affectation in society was to appear cold and unmoved, and this he certainly contrived to do in those of his letters which have been preserved.

La Rochefoucauld told Mme de Sablé that he depended on her for his knowledge of the inmost windings of the human heart. When he returned to Paris, this lady was approaching the age of sixty. Her _salon_ competed with that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and that of Mlle de Montpensier at the Luxembourg. The Marquise de Sablé had been gay in her youth, but when her young lover, Armentières, was killed in a duel, she turned devout. She also turned hypochondriacal and literary. According to Tallemont des Réaux, who has left a portrait of her which is equally ill-natured and entertaining, she built herself a house adjoining the choir of the church of Port Royal, in the Faubourg St. Jacques. Her friend, the Abbé d'Ailly, who edited her works after her death in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries in the world on the chapter of death." She herself expressed her hypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do, because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness as I have." Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness, and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations of Antoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience.[2] She became intimate with Arnauld d'Andilly, and with the rest of those Jansenist authors of whom Racine said that their works were "the admiration of scholars and the consolation of all pious persons." But she seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respect the literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "Les Provinciales," had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. de Sablé deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for her fervent cultivation of precise language.

[Footnote 2: It was of Singlin that Pascal wrote in 1654, "Soumission total à J.C. et à mon directeur."]

As La Rochefoucauld's correspondence throws little light on the character and person of its author at the time of his intellectual and moral conversion, we turn with satisfaction to a document which owes its existence to a social amusement, almost to a "parlour game." We have seen that La Grande Mademoiselle, anxious to amuse the friends whom she gathered round her in her _salon_ at the Luxembourg, hit upon the notion of inducing her guests to produce written portraits of themselves. You might say all the good of yourself you liked, on the understanding that you put in the shades as well. The collection of these self-portraits was actually printed in 1659, and is a work of great value and interest to biographer and historian. It marks a new movement of French intelligence, a critical excursion into psychology not hitherto attempted in France, and some of the portraits are marvellously delicate in their conscientious precision. 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.

He begins by describing his physical appearance, but passes soon to the moral and social qualities. It would be interesting to quote the whole of this portrait, but we must confine ourselves to some brief quotations. How far we seem from the beasts of prey which ranged the forests of the Fronde, or tore one another to pieces in the streets of Paris, when we follow this refined attempt to present the character of a modern and a complicated man:--