Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 9

Edmund Gosse

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
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