SOURCE: Hope, Quentin M. “Humor in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld.” Dalhousie French Studies 58 (spring 2002): 3-9.

[In this essay, Hope discusses La Rochefoucauld's love of teasing, making fun, and laughter, and claims that many of his maxims should be understood as jokes.]

I have undertaken to write about humor in La Rochefoucauld fully convinced that any reader will know what I mean by humor, but also aware that the word, like other words close to it, eludes definition. In L'écriture comique Jean Sareil speaks of the “impossibilité d'arriver à une définition objective du sujet” and adds: “Qu'est-ce que l'esprit, l'humour, la satire, l'ironie? Bien malin qui pourrait répondre à cette question” (14). Robert Escarpit agrees. He entitles the introduction to his L'humour, “L'impossible définition.”

In his excellent introduction to what has become the standard twentieth-century edition of the Maximes, Jacques Truchet mentions the humorous element in La Rochefoucauld: “Tel certains auteurs comiques, il semble se griser de mots, se livrer à des sortes de gasconnades” (lv). Later, he says of La Rochefoucauld: “[I]l n'aime pas les gens qui se prennent trop au sérieux,” and points out that unlike Pascal, “il n'est pas doué pour le tragique” (lxv).¹ The comment may be taken as an illustration of another point Sareil makes about the difficulty of defining the comic: “On ne peut le définir que par opposition avec le sérieux et avec le tragique” (14).

Robert Favre as well has observed the humor in La Rochefoucauld. The sel and the fiel of the maxims have won him a place in Favre's Le rire dans tous ses éclats (73), one of the rare truly funny books about laughter. Andrew Calder sees La Rochefoucauld as a “Momus figure” (126). He cites Erasmus who reports that Vulcan did a bad job when he created man because he failed to provide windows into man's soul and its winding sinuosities. Momus, like La Rochefoucauld, set out to remedy this oversight. Momus is the born fault-finder and satirist.

Satire is another form of the comic that is not easy to define. As The Columbia World Encyclopedia says, “[i]t is more easily recognized than defined.” Then it goes on to explain that the aim of satire is “to expose foolishness in all its guises—vanity, hypocrisy, pedantry, idolatry, bigotry, sentimentality.” Readers of La Rochefoucauld will recognize some of these forms of “foolishness” as what La Rochefoucauld called “vices.” Contemporary readers were certainly alert to what they saw as a satiric vein in his maxims. One of the anonymous letters Truchet includes in his edition mentions his “esprit satirique” (568), another praises him “d'avoir parfaitement bien rencontré où il s'est agi de mériter le titre de satirique” (575). There is much mockery in him. There is even a certain measure of self-mockery too, yet it would be fair to say that he took the maxims very seriously. He never satirizes the sententiousness that inevitably enters into any sentence, as W. S. Gilbert does in H. M. S. Pinafore when he makes fun of Little Buttercup's “oracular revealing.” She solemnly declares: “Things are seldom what they seem,” which is one of the underlying principles of the maxims. In fact, one of the commonplaces of which Gilbert makes fun—“all that glitters is not gold”—appears as the last sentence of maxim 165 in the Manuscrit de Liancourt (428): “[…] quoique tout ce qui luit ne soit pas d'or.”² The other instances Little Buttercup cites as showing how we are often taken in by sense experience—“[J]ackdaws strut in peacocks' feathers […] storks turn out to be but logs, bulls are but inflated frogs”—are more likely to remind a reader of La Fontaine than of La Rochefoucauld.³ But the Captain's conventional response—“[V]ery true, so they do”—sounds like a satiric reprise upon the usual “How true!” responses of readers, from Queen Christina's “Cela est bien vrai” to Roland Barthes' definition of the maxims as “un cauchemar de vérité” (86). In fact, readers of the maxims are far more likely than readers of the pensées of Pascal or the caractères of La Bruyère to look for hidden truths (bitter and nightmarish perhaps, but true nonetheless) in what they are reading. Consider the title and subtitle of Richard G. Hodgson's Falsehood Disguised: Unmasking the Truth in La Rochefoucauld. That may be characteristic of the genre he has chosen. A maxime, more than a pensée or a caractère, presents itself as a “truth.” It aims to provoke the “How true!” response, just as the joke aims to provoke laughter.

In fact, some of the maxims can only be understood as jokes. “Il est quelquefois agréable à un mari d'avoir une femme jalouse; il entend toujours parler de ce qu'il aime” (MP [maxime posthume] 48). “Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes, pour se consoler de n'être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples” (M [maxime] 93). It is hardly worth pointing out that no old man who has lost the energy and capacity to give bad examples will be consoled for the loss of the pleasures of leading a non-exemplary life by the pleasure of giving good advice, and that no husband afflicted with a jealous wife will take any pleasure in hearing her talk about “ce qu'il aime.” But La Rochefoucauld here is joking and is not deeply concerned with conveying a truth. In these two maxims he throws darts at two of humor's favorite targets: the weak, infirm and garrulous old man, and the husband beset with the woes of matrimony. Another aspect of his comic view of things appears in RD [réflexion diverse] XI, “Du Rapport des Hommes avec les Animaux,” in which appear parrots, birds of prey, thieving magpies, industrious ants, crocodiles shedding crocodile tears, and pigs “qui vivent dans la crapule et dans l'ordure” (205). Thirty-four kinds of animal appear and eight kinds (not breeds) of dog, “et il y a même des chiens de jardinier.” In RD XII, “De l'Origine des Maladies,” he gives even freer rein to his sense of humor and to his enumerative imagination. In the age of iron, man was conquered by the passions and the “peines de l'esprit,” which brought with them the illnesses which have afflicted him ever since. “La vanité a fait les folies, l'avarice, la teigne et la gale, la tristesse a fait le scorbut; la cruauté, la pierre,” and so on. Sixteen passions and sorrows lie at the root of twenty-eight maladies. Truchet mentions these réflexions diverses as exemplifying what he calls “des sortes de gasconnades.”

In his private life, La Rochefoucauld liked to make fun of people and even of himself. He begins a letter to a niece, who has become engaged to be married without telling him about it, as follows: “Il me semble que vous vous mariez bravement sans me rien dire; j'avais cependant d'assez bons conseils à vous donner” (1964:629). Advice-givers are often the targets of humor in the maxims, as in M 93 quoted above, or more tersely in M 110 and M 378, or more analytically in the concluding, four-line sentence of M 116. Here he counts himself as one of them. The series of disasters he wishes upon his niece's marriage if she does not render a better account of herself to him in the future, is the kind of comic enumeration in which he engages in the above-mentioned réflexions diverses. Some of the afflictions with which he threatens her will sound familiar to a reader of our day: “[L]es jalousies réciproques […] une bellemère acariâtre.” Others will serve as reminders that seventeenth-century château life had distresses of its own and that La Rochefoucauld had a sophisticated, sharp and critical sense of humor. “Des belles-sœurs ennuyeuses, polies de campagne, et aimant lire de mauvais romans, […] un méchant cuisinier, un confesseur moliniste […] un curé qui prêche mal et longtemps, un vicaire mauvais poète”. (1964:629). Another letter to the same niece, Mademoiselle de Sillery,⁴ is also in the comic vein and shows his taste for a juicy bit of gossip. He begins: “Paix! Chut! Lisez ma lettre tout bas; prenez garde que personne ne vous la voie lire; les murailles parlent.” The point is that the scandal he is going to report took place not in the Marais, where rakes and ladies of easy virtue live, but in the pious and proper Faubourg Saint-Jacques. “Quel faubourg, grand Dieu! À qui se fiera-t-on? Mais par qui le crime a-t-il été commis? Un disciple de Baron un ami de la vérité, un demi-père de l'Eglise, P … D. H. P. a été trouvé couché entre deux draps, non seulement avec une femme, mais avec deux, dont I'une était sa cousine germaine, et l'autre sa pénitente. Toutes les bonnes âmes ont quitté le quartier, et l'on croit qu'on va raser le faubourg” (1964:650)

It is clear from a few passages in the letters of Madame de Sévigné that when his friends made fun of the sexual activities and misfortunes of others, La Rochefoucauld joined in the laughter and made jokes at their expense. In the letter she wrote her daughter on February 20, 1671, the scene takes place at the dining table of the bishop of Le Mans, and one of the guests is Courcelles, a man who was famous for his cuckoldery. “Courcelles a dit qu'il avait eu deux bosses à la tête qui I'empêchaient de mettre une perruque. Cette sottise nous a tous fait sortir de table, avant qu'on eût achevé de manger du fruit, de peur d'éclater à son nez” (I:166). At this point, d'Olonne, another gentleman known to wear horns (the indiscretions of his wife were the subject of a well-known portrait by Bussy) enters the room, and La Rochefoucauld makes a clever wisecrack at the expense of both cuckolds. He doubts that two heads wearing such prominent horns can fit into the same room. Here is how Madame de Sévigné puts it: “Un peu après, d'Olonne est arrivé. M. de La Rochefoucauld m'a dit: «Madame, ils ne peuvent pas tenir tous deux dans cette chambre» et en effet, Courcelles est sorti” (I:166)

In a passage from which we can infer that Madame de Grignan demonstrated or pretended to demonstrate great courage during what her mother refers to as a “prétendu naufrage,” she again quotes a joking remark of La Rochefoucauld's; she mentions it in a letter to her daughter: “On a parlé de votre hardiesse; M. de La Rochefoucauld a dit que vous avez voulu paraître brave, dans l'espérance que quelque charitable personne vous en empêcherait” (I:184). Unlike many of the impressions we get of him from other sources, this remark does sound as if it came straight from the author of the maxims. The maxims often point out how people want others to believe that they possess qualities they do not really have and that a person will go to great lengths “pour paraître ce qu'il veut qu'on le croie” (M 256). The remark is unusual in another way as well. La Rochefoucauld is usually careful not to say anything critical about Madame de Grignan. He clearly wanted to stay on her mother's good side, and everyone knew that the way to please Madame de Sévigné was to admire her daughter. She is forever forwarding his greetings and compliments to Madame de Grignan. On one occasion he tells Madame de Sévigné that one of his little white mice is as pretty as her daughter, on another that if he were thirty years younger he would be her daughter's suitor.

Madame de Sévigné could not forgive a certain Madame Marans for having made offensive remarks about her beloved daughter. La Rochefoucauld was always willing to join her in making fun of the woman. She happened to be a relative of his, and we can infer that, like all members of that distinguished family, she was proud to be part of it. He would often refer to her jokingly as “ma mère,” which reflects the nickname both of them gave her: Mélusine. Mélusine is the watersprite who is said to have married Count Raymond de Lusignan. She appears in the Lusignan coat of arms, and the La Rochefoucaulds, like their close relatives, the Lusignans, are supposedly descended from her. Mélusine turns into a snake once a week and is the protectress of the virtue of unmarried giris. That may have been one (or two) of the reasons why it amused La Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sévigné to call Madame Marans Mélusine. (La Rochefoucauld probably also enjoyed this little joke because it allowed him to poke fun at the obsession with bloodlines, parentage, and family that he shared with his fellow aristocrats, a particularly absurd obsession when descent from an imaginary creature was claimed. As a duke, indeed as a member of the family himself, he could permit himself such persiflage.) It was only after Madame Marans had stopped leading a scandalous life (she had born Condé's son, the Duc d'Enghien, an illegitimate child, and was reported to be the mistress of La Rochefoucauld and the Duchesse de Longueville's illegitimate son, the Comte de Saint-Paul) and had turned pious (following the example of many other women “with a past,” including Madame de Sablé and the Duchesse de Longueville herself), that Madame de Sévigné forgave her, and then only after carefully examining the question of whether her “conversion” was real or not.

In various letters to her daughter, Madame de Sévigné tells of La Rochefoucauld's laughter, sometimes at the expense of Madame Marans: she is delighted to quote him making what sounds like cruel fun of the haircut the lady has just had—“Approchez un peu, ma mère, que je voie … ma foi, ma mère, vous voilà bien” (I:230)—and sometimes provoked by a joke he has heard, yet laughter seems to be specifically barred from the maxims. The first words of maxim 19 in the Édition de Hollande, “Rien n'est plus divertissant que …” and of maxim 27 in the same edition, “Qui ne rirait de …” disappear when these maxims appear as M 116 and M 293 respectively in the 1678 edition. But the evidence that he found much to laugh at in the mutual deceptions of those who ask for advice and those who give it (M 116), or in the notion that la modération can overcome l'ambition when in fact these two qualities are antithetical and cannot exist in the same person (M 293), is inescapably present in the wording of the original versions. He was certainly much concerned with reader response to his maxims and perhaps he wished to avoid the deflationary effect of the frequently heard response to any proposition as laughable or diverting: “I don't see anything funny about that.” Or perhaps he felt that while “le rire est le propre de l'homme,” it was not “le propre de l'honnête homme.” An honnête homme may properly invite others to laugh, but should he laugh himself? Isn't a smile, or even better a bitter smile, more becoming? La Rochefoucauld may have shared the haughty views that one of his many English admirers, Lord Chesterfield, expressed many years later. Chesterfield told his son that there was nothing so illiberal or so ill-bred as audible laughter.

But La Rochefoucauld certainly enjoyed teasing people. We do not know what part he may have played in the writing of the “Avis au lecteur” that precedes the first edition, but readers such as Corrado Rosso and Jean Lafond, and Louis Van Delft, who know the writings of La Rochefoucauld very well, speak about it in terms that suggest that he wrote it himself. The “Avis” presents itself as if Barbin, the publisher, were speaking. He explains that the author (le peintre) never wanted his “portrait du cœur de l'homme” to appear and that one of the author's friends has given him the manuscript only because an unauthorized version published in Holland has been circulating. This is certainly what La Rochefoucauld wanted him to say, and most likely the rest of the text is too. And the rest of the text consists of a provocative, not to say offensive, teasing of the reader. He surmises that l'amour-propre of the reader will prevent him from recognizing that what the maxims say is true, and advises him to believe that they apply only to other people “et qu'il en est seul excepté” (268). If he does that, he will agree completely with them and will conclude that they are a little too indulgent.

The same cavalier, teasing, attitude toward the reader, so different from the ceremonious courtesy with which he usually addresses his correspondents in his letters, appears in the dedication of the portrait of l'amour-propre which originally appeared in the Recueil de pièces en prose; it later became the first of the maxims in the first edition (later still he dropped it, and it now appears in the Truchet edition as MS [maxime supprimée] 1.) He dedicated it to Mademoiselle d'Épernon, yet another well-born lady who achieved fame by her “conversion.” She more than converted; in fact, she became a Carmelite nun and took the name of Anne-Marie de Jésus. Her nunnery was in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, the pious quartier he refers to jokingly in one of his letters to his niece. By dedicating the portrait of l'amour-propre to this pious lady who has allegedly abandoned any vestige of amour-propre, La Rochefoucauld is displaying the same sort of skepticism he displayed when he more forthrightly declared that Retz's widely publicized conversion was “la plus éclatante et la plus fausse action de sa vie” (243). Withdrawal from public life, and a very visible embrace of the life of piety, brought with them much applause, and suspicion was perhaps inevitable. Nonetheless, La Rochefoucauld strays far from the civilité that he is proud of showing to women when he addresses this mockery to Mademoiselle d'Épernon. L'amour-propre speaks to her directly in the dedication and expresses his regret that she has declared herself to be his enemy. He will not retaliate. When he assures her: “[J]e ne vous abandonnerai jamais” (133, n. 1), La Rochefoucauld's teasing goes as far as it can go. Mademoiselle d'Épernon's amour-propre will never abandon her. She has taken it to the convent with her. But she is not the only victim of his mockery. Jacqueline Plantié argues persuasively (548-53) that he published his portrait of l'amour-propre to make fun of the self-approval and self-display that are so apparent in all the self-portraits (including his own) that appeared in the earlier Sercy recueil.

The impulse to tease and to provoke is strong in him. Perhaps his fundamental approach to the reader amounts to: “I am going to tell you some truths about human behavior, about our behavior” (because he surely includes himself in the nous and the on that keep appearing in the maxims: 373 and 327 times respectively [Holman and Barchilon 151, 159]) “that will provoke and displease you. Or perhaps a few of them will provoke you to laughter.” The response that Madame de La Fayette sent to Madame de Sablé, written in answer to the latter's attempt to measure how readers would respond to the maxims, and well before Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld became close friends—“Ha, Madame! Quelle corruption il faut avoir dans l'esprit et dans le cœur pour être capable d'imaginer tout cela” (577)—cannot have displeased him as much as bland approval or indifference would have, and what she goes on to say about plaisanteries and choses sérieuses must have assured him that she did not suppose him to be a moralist of a humorless and severely censorious disposition: “J'en suis si épouvantée que je vous assure que, si les plaisanteries étaient des choses sérieuses, de telles maximes gâteraient plus ses affaires que tous les potages qu'il mangea l'autre jour chez vous” (577).

The quid vetat that appears in the frontispiece is part of a line from a Horace satire (I.I.24): “Ridentum dicere verum quid vetat?” (“What prevents one [namely La Rochefoucauld] from telling the truth while laughing?). Nothing does. The intention of the maxims is to tell people uncomfortable truths. But it is also part of his intention to tell them laughingly. That he hopes to make his reader uncomfortable, to scandalize him (or her) seems more than likely. But he also intends to provoke laughter now and then. In his self-portrait, where he is so obviously anxious to put his best foot forward, he says he enjoys conversation: “J'aime qu'elle soit serieuse, et que la morale en fasse la plus grande partie.” Coming from the man who was later to write the maxims, that comes as no surprise. But neither does what he goes on to say: “[C]ependant je sais la goûter aussi quand elle est enjouée, et si je n'y dis pas beaucoup de petites choses pour rire, ce n'est pas du moins que je ne connaisse bien ce que valent les bagatelles bien dites” (255). Perhaps he considered those few maxims that are essentially jokes as “des bagatelles bien dites.” But there is much humor in many of the other maxims as well. It is the humor of denigration, pessimism, negation, reduction, and belittlement. His use of that form of humor allies him, in some small measure, to the comedians who tell you how things really are and explain that so-and-so is nothing but so-and-so. His command of language, however, puts him in a category of his own. A small number of the maxims may be des bagatelles. But all of them are unmistakably bien dites. He does not like people who take themselves too seriously. He does not like to take things seriously himself. But there is every reason to believe that the shape and elegance of each of his maxims was a subject that he always took seriously. To be sure, in a letter to Jacques Esprit in which he begins “par parler de ses ouvrages,” he exclaims, in an outburst of self-mockery: “Voilà écrire en vrai auteur” (542). But he took great pride in his ability to write maxims. He simply did not want that pride to show. That is probably why the maxim which says: “[I]l est aussi ridicule de vouloir faire des sentences sans avoir la graine en soi que de vouloir qu'un parterre produise des tulipes quoiqu'on n'y ait point semé les oignons” does not appear in the definitive edition; it does not become a maxime supprimée either and appears in Truchet's edition as MP 9. Other “vegetative” maxims survived. He was lucid and self-observant enough to know that he had not achieved success as a military leader or as a conspirator, but, as MP 9 puts it, “Dieu a mis des talents différents dans l'homme,” and it surely cheered him to discover that God had endowed him with a distinctive talent that no one he knew possessed. As he entered the ranks of “les vieillards” who “aiment à donner de bons préceptes” (M 93), and of the “vieilles gens” who have many reasons to “se retirer du commerce du monde” (223), he continued to cultivate his sentences and to see to it that each was as beautiful and as fragrant as a tulip, and as self-contained and compact as well. At the same time, he continued writing the réflexions diverses. But they are not maxims, and he did not write them for publication. He never considered himself to be an auteur and never wrote anything with an eye towards eventual publication, other than the maxims. But he knew that he had the talent it takes to “faire des sentences,” and enjoyed stirring a response in his chers lecteurs—shock, disapproval, admiration, and sometimes amusement.

Notes

1. Parenthetic page references are to the Truchet edition (La Rochefoucauld 1967); they are either to Truchet's introduction, or to writings other than the maxims, or to letters and comments by contemporaries of La Rochefoucauld's. Maxims from the 1678 edition are identified by M. MS means maxime supprimée and MP maxime posthume. RD means réflexion diverse.

2. Perhaps it was because of the banality of this commonplace that he omitted this maxim from the definitive edition. It does not even appear among the maximes supprimées.

3. Although there are many references to plant life in the maxims, animals do not appear, nor do ordinary household objects. The one exception, more of a proverb than a maxim, appears as MP 507 in La Rochefoucauld 1964: “Tout le monde est plein de pelles qui se moquent du fourgon” (475).

4. La Fontaine dedicated “Tircis et Amarante” (Book VIII, Fable 13) to Mademoiselle de Sillery and says that she had complained that his contes were obscure and had asked him to go back to writing fables. A request coming from such a highly esteemed and divine person was not to be denied.

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