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 Conde, 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 by this time
discovered, like the rest of the world, that as a swashbuckler and
in