680) Mme de Sevigne writes again: "I have never
seen a man so obliging, nor more amiable in his wish to give pleasure
by what he says." [9] Her detailed and pathetic account of his last
hours, which closed on the night of March 16, 1680, testifies to her
deep attachment and to Mme de La Fayette's despair.

[Footnote 9: Two of La Fontaine's fables, "L'Homme et son
Image" and "Les Lapins," were dedicated to La Rochefoucauld
in 1668. In the former we read:--

_On voit bien ou je veux venir.
Je parle a tous, et cette erreur extreme
Est un mal que chacun se plait d'entretenir
Notre ame, c'est cet homme amoureux de lui-meme;
Tant de miroirs, ce sont les sottises d'autrui,
Miroirs, de nos defauts les peintres legitimes;
Et quant au canal, c'est celui,
Que chacun sait: le livre des Maximes._]

When Mme de Sevigne, in 1675, received the third edition of the Duke's
book, which contained more than seventy new maxims, she wrote, "Some of
them are divine; some of them, I am ashamed to say, I don't understand."
Probably she would have partly agreed with some one's criticism of them,
"De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit--trop
d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation
wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he
sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are
disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces.
Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into
which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime
companion. Mme de Sevigne describes such talks with her delicate irony,
and says, "We plunged into subtleties which were beyond our
intelligence." An example is the dispute whether "Grace is to the body
what good sense is to the mind," or "Grace is to the body what delicacy
is to the mind" should be the ultimate form of a maxim. They sometimes
drew the spider's thread so fine that it became invisible.[11]

[Footnote 10: The practice of making "maxims," _axiomata_,
encouraged the enlivenment of conversation by the
introduction of topsy-turvy statements, such as "Constancy
is merely inconstancy arrested," in the manner of Oscar
Wilde and Mr. Chesterton.]

[Footnote 11: La Rochefoucauld was not without affectations. He
spoke airily about his _maniere negligee_ of writing, whe