Reflections | Page 6

nothing in com- parison.” The combined effect of his wounds and the gout caused the last years of Rochefoucauld's life to be spent in great pain. Madame de Sévigné, who was {with} him continually during his last illness, speaks of the fortitude with which he bore his sufferings as something to be admired. Writing to her daughter, she says, “Believe me, it is not for nothing he has moralised all his life; he has thought so often on his last moments that they are nothing new or unfamiliar to him.”
In his last illness, the great moralist was attended by the great divine, Bossuet. Whether that match- less eloquence or his own philosophic calm had, in spite of his writings, brought him into the state Madame de Sévigné describes, we know not; but one, or both, contributed to his passing away in a manner that did not disgrace a French noble or a French philosopher. On the 11th March, 1680, he ended his stormy life in peace after so much strife, a loyal subject after so much treason.
One of his friends, Madame Deshoulières, shortly before he died sent him an ode on death, which aptly describes his state-- “Oui, soyez alors plus ferme, Que ces vulgaires humains Qui, près de leur dernier terme, De vaines terreurs sont pleins. En sage que rien n'offense, Livrez-vous sans resistance A d'inévitables traits; Et, d'une demarche égale, Passez cette onde fatal Qu'on ne repasse jamais.”
Rochefoucauld left behind him only two works, the one, Memoirs of his own time, the other the Maxims. The first described the scenes in which his youth had been spent, and though written in a lively style, and giving faithful pictures of the intrigues and the scandals of the court during Louis XIV.'s minority, yet, except to the historian, has ceased at the present day to be of much interest. It forms, perhaps, the true key to understand the special as opposed to general application of the maxims.
Notwithstanding the assertion of Bayle, that “there are few people so bigoted to antiquity as not to prefer the Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld to the Commen- taries of Caesar,” or the statement of Voltaire, “that the Memoirs are universally read and the Maxims are learnt by heart,” few persons at the present day ever heard of the Memoirs, and the knowledge of most as to the Maxims is confined to that most celebrated of all, though omitted from his last edition, “There is something in the misfortunes of our best friends which does not wholly displease us.” Yet it is difficult to assign a cause for this; no book is perhaps oftener unwittingly quoted, none certainly oftener unblushingly pillaged; upon none have so many contradictory opinions been given.
“Few books,” says Mr. Hallam, “have been more highly extolled, or more severely blamed, than the maxims of the Duke of Rochefoucauld, and that not only here, but also in France.” Rousseau speaks of it as, “a sad and melancholy book,” though he goes on to say “it is usually so in youth when we do not like seeing man as he is.” Voltaire says of it, in the words above quoted, “One of the works which most contri- buted to form the taste of the (French) nation, and to give it a spirit of justness and precision, was the collection of the maxims of Francois Duc de la Roche- foucauld, though there is scarcely more than one truth running through the book--that ‘self-love is the motive of everything’--yet this thought is presented under so many varied aspects that it is nearly always striking. It is not so much a book as it is materials for ornamenting a book. This little collection was read with avidity, it taught people to think, and to comprise their thoughts in a lively, precise, and delicate turn of expression. This was a merit which, before him, no one in Europe had attained since the revival of letters.”
Dr. Johnson speaks of it as “the only book written by a man of fashion, of which professed authors need be jealous.”
Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, says, “Till you come to know mankind by your experience, I know no thing nor no man that can in the mean- time bring you so well acquainted with them as Le Duc de la Rochefoucauld. His little book of maxims, which I would advise you to look into for some moments at least every day of your life, is, I fear, too like and too exact a picture of human nature. I own it seems to degrade it, but yet my experience does not convince me that it degrades it unjustly.”
Bishop Butler, on the other hand, blames the book in no measured terms. “There is a strange affecta- tion,” says the bishop, “in some people