Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 6

the close of the career of Richelieu, nothing would have
distinguished him from the mob of violent noblemen who made the
streets of Paris a pandemonium.
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