was necessary to
intensify and purify the light of criticism. For this purpose the
conversations of the _salons_ culminated in the lapidary art of La
Rochefoucauld, who was not a creator like Racine and Moliere, like
Bossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly later
builders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams.
Segrais, whose recollections of him are among the most precious which
have come down to us, says that La Rochefoucauld never argued. He had
the Socratic manner, and led others on to expose and expound their
views. His custom was, in the course of the endless talks about morals
and the soul, "to conceal half of his own opinion, and to show tact
with an obstinate opponent, so as to spare him the annoyance of having
to yield." There is something very like this in the "Pensees" of
Pascal. La Rochefoucauld blames himself, in his self-portrait, for
arguing too fiercely, and for being testy with an opponent, but these
faults were not perceived by other people. Doubtless he was aware of
an inward impatience, and succeeded in concealing it by means of that
extreme politeness on which he prided himself.

The "Maximes" are shocking to persons who live in a state of illusion
about themselves, and they were so from the hour of their publication.
They roll up a bitter pill for human vanity. When Mme de La Fayette,
destined to look deeper than any other mortal into the soul of La
Rochefoucauld, read them first in 1663, in company with Mme du Plessis
at the Chateau de Fresnes, she was terrified and shocked at what she
called the "corruption" which they revealed. She wrote to Mme de
Sable, who had lent her the manuscript--

"Ah, Madame, how corrupt he must be in mind and heart to be capable of
imagining such things! I am so frightened by it that I should say, if
this were not a matter too serious for jest, that such maxims are
likely to do more to upset him than all the plates of soup he
swallowed at your house the other day."

As the "Maximes" pass from hand to hand, we see the spiritual Maenads
of Port Royal clustering "with a lovely frightened mien" about the
sinister author, while he turns "his beauteous face haughtily another
way," like young Apollo in the Phrygian highlands. The word
"pessimism" was, I believe, unknown until the year 1835, but this is
what Mme de La Fayette and the rest of the Jansenist ladies meant by
"corruption." Perhaps the most celebrated of all the sayings of h