Tancock Leonard - Maxims

MAXIMS

FRANOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, was born in 1613. In his early years he was active in the intrigues against Richelieu and later in the Fronde, but he was severely wounded in the fighting in Paris in 1652 and his political career ended in discomfiture. Thereafter he lived quietly in a small, highly intellectual society which included Mme de Sabl, Mme de Svign and particularly Mme de La Fayette, to whom in his later years he was united in devoted friendship. His Mmoires Were first published in 1662 in an unauthorized and uncorrected form the authentic version appeared only in recent times. The first Paris edition of the Rflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, generally known as the Maximes, appeared in 1665; modifications and additions were made in later editions. His Rflexions diverses did not appear until long after La Rochefoucaulds death in 1680.

La Rochefoucaulds bitter and pessimistic philosophy had a wide influence in France: the Jansenists approved it as a confirmation of their doctrine of the vileness of fallen man; Voltaires Candide and the writings of Chamfort derive in part from it; Vauvenargues displays the inevitable reaction against it. Voltaire wrote that La Rochefoucauld contributed greatly to forming the taste of the nation; il accoutuma penser et renfermer ses penses dans un tour vif, prcis et dlicat.

LEONARD TANCOCK spent most of his life in or near London, apart from a year as a student in Paris, most of the Second World War in Wales and three periods in American universities as visiting professor. Until his death in 1986, he was a Fellow of University College, London, and was formerly Reader in French at the University. He prepared his first Penguin Classic in 1949 and, from that time, was extremely interested in the problems of translation, about which he wrote, lectured and gave broadcasts. His numerous translations for the Penguin Classics include Zolas Germinal, Thrse Raquin, The Dbcle, LAssommoir and La Bte Humaine; Diderots The Nun, Rameaus Nephew and DAlemberts Dream; Maupassants Pierre and Jean; Marivauxs Up from the Country; Constants Adolphe; La Rochefoucaulds Maxims; Voltaires Letters on England; Prvosts Manon Lescaut; and Madame de Svigns Selected Letters.

L A R O C H E F O U C A U L D

TRANSLATED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Leonard Tancock

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This translation first published 1959

Copyright Leonard Tancock, 1959
All rights reserved

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EISBN: 9780141908144

IN his Age of Louis XIV Voltaire describes the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld as one of the works which contributed the most towards forming the taste of the French nation and giving it a feeling for aptness and precision. This little book of reflections about human nature, perhaps the most penetrating and disconcerting ever written, appeared in its original form, only about half the length of the text given here, in 1665, in the middle of the wonderful decade which saw the flowering of the genius of Molire, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, Bossuet, and a galaxy of masterpieces by artists in other forms, painting, sculpture, architecture, the age that is made alive for us by the incomparable letters of Mme de Svign, one of La Rochefoucaulds closest friends. Not that the Maxims were the product of a new, youthful movement in literature, for at that time the author was in his fifties, and prematurely aged by ill-health at that. They are, rather, the fruit of half a lifetime of activity and observation of others, recollected in the enforced tranquillity of middle-aged invalidism and generalized and condensed so as to be universally applicable.

Franois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, was born in Paris on the 15 September 1613, the eldest child of the first duke, before whom the family title for many generations had been that of Comte. His academic education was perfunctory, the usual training given to the heir of a great noble house who was destined for a military career until the moment of accession to the title, and to be married with all possible speed with a view to ensuring the succession. The Prince de Marcillac (courtesy title of the heir to the La Rochefoucauld dukedom) was married before he was fifteen to the even younger Andre de Vivonne, a wealthy heiress who in the fullness of time bore him eight children, to whom her husband occasionally referred in letters in conventionally affectionate terms, but who seems to have played no significant part in his life. She died in about 1670.

After a baptism of fire in a military campaign in Italy the young Marcillac embarked upon the treacherous waters of court life in the thirties of the seventeenth century, and at once the curiously contradictory elements in his character began to complicate his career. One side of him was shy, contemplative, reflective, and therefore somewhat awkward and constitutionally incapable of swift decisions and ruthless action. But his self-interest, ambition, and love of intrigue drew him into all sorts of schemings usually doomed to failure because he also had strong emotional, chivalrous, and self-sacrificing urges which led him to identify himself for purely sentimental reasons with persons or groups who seemed to him unfortunate or in some way victims, and to set himself against others in influential positions whom a less quixotic and more diplomatic courtier would never have antagonized. In a word he was destined to romantic self-dedication followed by bitter disillusion.

Such was to be the pattern of the first forty years of his life. The court of Louis XIII was a hotbed of intrigue, with a weak, aloof king, the arrogant, all-powerful Richelieu, and the meddlesome queen, Anne of Austria, hated by the cardinal and disliked and avoided by her husband. Marcillac of course devoted himself to the unpopular queen, though he was to admit much later, in his Memoirs, that affection for her maid of honour, Mlle de Hautefort, had something to do with it. But it is true that the queen was humiliated and insulted in all sorts of ways by the cardinal and the king, and the romantic young Marcillac saw himself as a knight-errant sent to help a lady in distress. He even suggests in his Memoirs, though the story is not corroborated anywhere else, that at one moment in 1637 the queens position became so intolerable that she begged him to escort her, accompanied of course by Mlle de Hautefort, to safety in Brussels. For his complicity in plots of this kind Marcillac was lucky enough to escape with only a week or two in the Bastille, followed by banishment to Verteuil, one of the family castles. After two years, however, he returned and resumed his army career.