La Rochefoucauld’s standpoint is stated in his second maxim: “Self-love [amour de soi] is the love of a man’s own self, and of anything else for his own sake . . . A man’s whole life is but one continued exercise and strong agitation of it.” Vanity (amour-propre) is only one of the many forms that self-love takes, but even that form enters into almost every action and thought. Our passions may sometimes sleep, but our vanity never rests. “He that refuses praise the first time that it is offered does so because he would hear it a second time.” 74 The hunger for applause is the source of all conscious literature and heroism. “All men are proud alike; the only difference is that all do not take the same methods of showing it.” 75 “Virtues are lost in self-interest, as rivers are in the sea.” 76 “If we reflect upon our ‘secret’ thoughts, we shall find within our own breast the seed of all those vices which we condemn in others,” and we shall be able to judge, from our private corruption, the basic depravity of mankind. 77 We are the slaves of our passions; if one passion is overcome it is not by reason but by another passion; 78 “intellect is always the dupe of feeling”; “men never desire anything very eagerly which they desire only by the dictates of reason”; 79 and “the plainest man, with the help of passion, will prevail more than the most eloquent man without it.” 80
The art of life lies in concealing our self-love sufficiently to avoid antagonizing the self-love of others. We must pretend to some degree of altruism. “Hypocrisy is a sort of homage which vice pays to virtue.” 81 The philosopher’s supposed contempt of riches or noble birth is just his way of exalting his own wares. Friendship is “only a kind of traffic in which selflove ever proposes to be the gainer”; 82 we may measure its sincerity by noting that we find something not altogether displeasing in the misfortunes of our friends. 83 We more readily forgive those who have injured us than those whom we have injured, or who have obliged—therefore obligated—us with favors. 84 Society is a war of each against all. “True love is like ghosts—something that everyone talks of but scarcely anyone has seen”; 85 and “if we had never heard discourse of love, most of us would never have fallen in love.” 86 Yet love, when real, is so profound an experience that women who have once known it can have little capacity for friendship, finding the latter by comparison so cold and flat. 87 Hence women hardly exist except when in love. “Some ladies may be met with who never had any intrigue at all; but it will be exceeding hard to find any who have had one and no more.” 88 “The generality of honest women are like hidden treasures, which are safe only because nobody has sought them.” 89
The ailing cynic knew quite well that these epigrams were not a just description of humanity. He hedged many of them with “almost,” “nearly,” or the like philosophical cautions; he confessed that “it is easier to know mankind in general than any one man in particular”; 90 and his preface allowed that his maxims did not apply to those “few favorites whom Heaven is pleased to preserve . . . by an especial grace.” 91 He must have ranked himself among those few, for he wrote: “I am devoted to my friends so far that I would not hesitate for a moment to sacrifice my interests to theirs” 92—though doubtless he would have explained that this would be because he found more pleasure in making such a sacrifice than in withholding it. He talked now and then of “gratitude, the virtue of wise and generous minds”; 93 and of “love, pure and untainted with any other passion (if such a thing there be), which lies hidden in the bottom of our hearts.” 94 And “though it may be said, with great truth . . . , that men never act without a regard for their own interest, yet it does not follow that all that they do is corrupt, and that no such thing as justice or honesty is left in the world. Men may govern themselves by noble means, and propose [to themselves] interests full of commendation and honor.” 95
Old age softened La Rochefoucauld, even while it darkened his gloom. In 1670 his wife died, after forty-three years of patient fidelity, having given him eight children, and having nursed him for the last eighteen years. In 1672 his mother died, and he confessed that her life had been a long miracle of love. In that year two of his sons were wounded in the invasion of Holland; one succumbed to his injuries. The bastard son whom Mme. de Longueville had borne, whom he had not been allowed to claim as his own, but had deeply loved, fell in the same unholy war. “I have seen La Rochefoucauld weep,” reported Mme. de Sévigné, “with a tenderness that made me adore him.” 96 Was his love for his mother and his sons self-love? Yes, if we may view these as part and extensions of his self. This is the reconciliation of altruism and egoism—that altruism is the expansion of the self, and of self-love, to one’s family, or friends, or community. Society can be satisfied with such embracing magn-anim-ous selfishness.
One of La Rochefoucauld’s most superficial remarks was that “few women’s worth lasts longer than their beauty.” 97 His mother and his wife were exceptions, and it was ungenerous to ignore the thousands of women who had lost their physical beauty in the service of men and other children. In 1665 a third woman offered him most of her life. Doubtless Mme. de La Fayette pleased her own heart in seeking to comfort him. He was fifty-two, gouty, and half-blind; she was thirty-three, still beautiful, but herself an invalid, suffering from tertian fever. She had been appalled by the cynicism of the Maximes, and perhaps some pleasant notion of reforming and comforting this unhappy man entered into her view. She invited him to her home in Paris; he came, carried in a sedan chair; she swathed and cushioned his aching foot; she brought her friends, including the effervescent Mme. de Sévigné, to help her entertain him. He came again, and even more frequently, until his visits aroused the gossip of Paris. We do not know if sexual intimacy was involved; in any case it was a minor part in what proved to be an exchange of souls. “He gave me understanding,” she said, “but I reformed his heart.” 98 He may have helped her with La Princess de Clèves, though the tenderness and delicacy of that romance are all the world apart from the harshness of the Maximes.
After the death of Mme. de La Rochefoucauld this historic friendship became a kind of spiritual marriage, and French literature contains many a picture of the frail little woman sitting quietly beside the old philosopher immobilized with pain. “Nothing,” said Mme. de Sévigné, “could be compared to the charm and confidence of their friendship.” 99 Someone said that where La Rochefoucauld ends, Christianity begins; 100 it proved true in this case. Perhaps Mme. de La Fayette, sincerely pious, persuaded him that only religion could answer the problems of philosophy. When he felt himself dying he asked Bishop Bossuet to give him the last sacraments (1680). His friend survived him for thirteen ailing years.
IX. LA BRUYÈRE: 1645–96
Eight years after La Rochefoucauld’s death Jean de La Bruyère confirmed his sardonic analysis of Parisian humanity. Jean was the son of a minor civil servant. He studied law, bought a minor governmental office, became tutoi to the grandson of the Great Condé, served the Condé family as écuyer gentilhomme—gentleman in waiting—and followed it to Chantilly and Versailles. He remained a bachelor to the end of his life.
Sensitive and shy, he suffered from the sharp edge of class distinctions in France, and he could not evoke the amiable pretenses that might have smoothed his way, despite his middle-class origin, among the aristocracy and at the court. He observed the royal menagerie with a hostile and penetrating eye, and took his revenge by describing it in a book into which he poured nearly all his intellectual substance. He entitled it Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle—The Characters of Theophrastus Translated from the Greek, with the Characters or Manners of This Age. The book became the talk of Paris, for under recognizable disguises it portrayed persons well known in the city or at the court; and each of them reveled in the exposure of the rest. “Keys” were published, purporting to identify the portraits with their originals; La Bruyère protested that the resemblances were accidental, but no one believed it, and his fame was made. Eight editions were used up before the author’s dea
th in 1696; to each he added new “characters,” in which Paris saw the mirror of the time.
To us today, who have lost the key to this gallery, the material seems a bit thin, the ideas traditional and hackneyed, the spirit a bit envious, the satire too facile, as of Menalcas, the absent-minded man. 101 La Bruyère asked for no change in the religion or government of France. He thought it good that there should be poor people; otherwise it would be difficult to get servants, and there would be no one to mine or till the earth; the fear of poverty is indispensable to the production of wealth. 102 He proudly numbered Bossuet among his friends; he repeated in the final section of his book (“Of Freethinkers”) the arguments that the great preacher had expressed with better judgment and in nobler prose; he echoed the proofs that Descartes had given of God and immortality; and with some skill he invoked against the agnostics of his time the order and majesty of the heavens, the signs of design in living things, and the sense of self-determination in the will, and of immateriality in the mind. He struck at the arrogance of aristocrats, the greed of financiers, and the servility of courtiers, whom he pictured as facing Louis, rather than the altar, in the chapel at Versailles; but he took care to hand protective bouquets to the King. 103 In at least one passage he put caution aside, and rose bravely to describe the bestial condition to which the peasants of France had been reduced by the wars and taxes of the reign:
Certains animaux farouches, des mâles et des femelles, répandus par la campagne, noirs, livides, et tout brulés du soleil, attachés à la terre qu’ils fouillent et qu’ils remuent avec une opiniâtreté invincible; ils ont comme une voix articulée, et quand ils se lèvent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine; et en effet ils sont des hommes.*
That page has remained a locus classicus in France’s classic age.
X. FOR GOOD MEASURE
Shall we now, exhausted, jumble together in a cowardly appendix some Immortals who are beginning to die?
There is Jean Chapelain, who helped to organize the French Academy, and was considered in his day (1595–1674) the greatest poet in France. There is Jean Baptiste Rousseau, who wrote forgettable poetry, but such biting epigrams that he was banished from France (1712) for defamations of character. Almost every noble active in politics wrote memoirs; we have seen those of de Retz and La Rochefoucauld, and will come later to those of Saint-Simon; only next to these are the three volumes in which Mme. de Motteville recorded, with charming modesty, her twenty-two years at the court of Anne of Austria. We note that she agreed with La Rochefoucauld: “The hard experience I have had of the fictitious friendship of human beings has forced me to believe that there is nothing so rare in this world as probity, or a good heart capable of gratitude.” 105 She was such a rarity.
Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, made a succès de scandale with his Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1665), which described the liaisons of his contemporaries under the guise of ancient Gauls. The King, angry at a quip on Madame Henrietta, sent him to the Bastille. He was released after a year on condition of retiring to his estate; there, fretting to the end of his days, he composed his lively Mémoires. Even more untrustworthy are the Historiettes in which Tallemant des Réaux drew malicious vignettes of celebrities in literature or affairs. Claude Fleury, with his conscientious Histoire ecclésiastique (1691), and Sébastien de Tillemont, with his Histoire des empereurs (1690f), and his sixteen-volume Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles (1693), labored painstakingly, unwittingly, to clear the wilderness for Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776f.).
And there is, last of all, Charles de Marquetel, Seigneur de Saint-Évremond. He was the most genial of those esprits forts who shocked Catholics and Huguenots, Jesuits and Jansenists alike by questioning the basic doctrines of their common faith. His adventurous military career was leading him toward a marshal’s baton when he fell into disfavor as a friend of Fouquet and a critic of Mazarin. Learning that he was scheduled for arrest, he fled to Holland, and then (1662) to England. His fine manners and skeptical wit made him a favorite in the London salon of Hortense Mancini, and at the court of Charles II. Like the Maréchal d’Hocquincourt in one of his merriest dialogues, 106 he loved war best, women next, philosophy third. Having sipped all the delights in Montaigne and studied Epicurus with Gassendi, he concluded with the maligned Greek that sense pleasure is good but intellectual pleasure better, and that we need as little concern ourselves with the gods as they seem to do with us. To eat well and write well appeared to him a reasonable combination. In 1666 he visited Holland again, met Spinoza, and was deeply impressed by the Christian life of the pantheist Jew. 107 A pension from the English government, added to the salvaged remnants of his fortune, enabled him to write a long series of minor works, all in a style of airy grace that shared in forming Voltaire. His Réflexions sur les divers génies du peuple romain helped Montesquieu, and his correspondence with Ninon de Lenclos made part of the fragrance that permeates French letters. On reaching the age of fifty-eight, and unaware that he had thirty-two years of life still before him, he described himself as irremediably infirm. “Without M. Descartes’ philosophy, which says, ’I think, therefore I am,’ I should scarcely believe myself to be; that is all the benefit I have received from studying that famous man.” 108 He almost rivaled Fontenelle in longevity, dying in 1703 at the age of ninety; and he achieved for a Frenchman the rare distinction of being buried in Westminster Abbey.
“Some centuries hence,” wrote Frederick the Great to Voltaire, “they will translate the good authors of the time of Louis XIV as we translate those of the age of Pericles and of Augustus.” 109 Long before the King was dead many Frenchmen had already compared the art and literature of the reign to that of the ancient best. In 1687 Charles Perrault (brother of the Claude Perrault who had designed the eastern façade of the Louvre) read to the French Academy a poem, Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, in which he ranked his own time above any period in the history of Greece or Rome. Though Perrault included Boileau among the contemporaries whom he considered superior to their classic analogues, the old critic leaped to the defense of antiquity, and told the Academy it was a shame to listen to such nonsense. Racine tried to smother the fire by pretending that Perrault was jesting, 110 but Perrault felt that he had a remunerative point. He returned to the battle in 1688 with Parallèles des Anciens et des Modernes, a long but lively dialogue upholding the superiority of the moderns in architecture, painting, oratory, and poetry—except for the Aeneid, which he thought finer than the Iliad, the Odyssey, or any other epic. Fontenelle supported him brilliantly, but La Bruyère, La Fontaine, and Fénelon sided with Boileau.
It was a healthy quarrel; it marked the end of the Christian and medieval theory of degeneration, and of Renaissance and humanist humility before ancient poetry, philosophy, and art. It was generally agreed that science had now advanced beyond any stage reached in Greece or Rome; even Boileau admitted this; and the court of Louis XIV readily conceded that the art of life had never been so beautifully developed as at Marly and Versailles. We shall not pretend to decide the issue; let us put it aside until all phases of this age, in all Europe, have been passed in review. We need not believe that Corneille was superior to Sophocles, or Racine to Euripides, or Bossuet to Demosthenes, or Boileau to Horace; we should hardly equate the Louvre with the Parthenon, or Girardon and Coysevox with Pheidias and Praxiteles. But it is pleasant to know that these preferences are debatable, and that those ancient models are not beyond rivalry.
Voltaire called the reign of Louis XIV “the most enlightened age the world has ever seen,” 111 not anticipating that his own epoch would be named “the Enlightenment.” We should have to moderate his eulogy. Officially it was an age of obscurantism and intolerance, capped by the Revocation of the humane Edict of Nantes; “enlightenment” was the possession of a small minority discountenanced by the court and sometimes disgraced by epicurean excess. Education was controlled by a clergy dedicated to the mediev
al creed. Freedom of the press was hardly dreamed of; freedom of speech was a clandestine audacity amid enveloping censorship. There had been more initiative and spirit, more birth of genius, under Richelieu than under the Great King. The age was unrivaled in the royal patronage and eloquent servility of literature and art. Both the art and the literature touched grandeur, as in the Louvre Colonnade and Andromaque; sometimes they fell into the grandiose, as in the Palace of Versailles or the rhetoric of the later Corneille. There was something artificial in the tragic drama and major arts of the period; they leaned too heavily upon Greek, Roman, or Renaissance models; they took their subjects from an alien antiquity rather than from the history, faith, and character of France; they expressed the classical education of an exclusive caste rather than the life and soul of the people. Hence, amid all that gilded galaxy, the plebeian Molière and La Fontaine are most alive today, because they forgot Greece and Rome and remembered France. The classic age cleansed the language, chiseled the literature, gave grace to speech, and taught passion to reason; but also it chilled French (and English) poetry for almost a century after the great reign.
Nevertheless it was a great reign. Never in history had a ruler been so generous to science, letters, and the arts. Louis XIV persecuted Jansenists and Huguenots, but it was under him that Pascal wrote, Bossuet preached, and Fénelon taught. He conscripted árt to his purpose and glory, but with his nourishment it gave France magnificent architecture, sculpture, and painting. He protected Molière against a swarm of enemies, and supported Racine from tragedy to tragedy. Never did France write better drama, better letters, or better prose. The King’s good manners, his self-control, his patience, his respect for women, helped to spread a charming courtesy through the court, into Paris and France and Europe. He misused some women, but it was under his rule that women reached a status, in literature and life, that gave France a bisexual culture lovelier than any other in the world. After making every discount, and regretting that so much beauty was tarnished with so much cruelty, we may join the French in acclaiming the age of Louis XIV as standing with Periclean Greece, Augustan Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan-Jacobean England among the peaks in the faltering trajectory of mankind.