[In the essay below, Thweat contends that the Réflexions diverses deserve to be studied in their own right because they offer an account of the author's concept of the social self, and provide insight on seventeenth-century social life.]

More often than not La Rochefoucauld's Réflexions diverses are considered primarily as they relate to the Maximes or as background material for the Classical concept of wit and taste. On occasion they have also been presented as proof of La Rochefoucauld's somewhat dubious Epicureanism, and they are frequently proposed as a companion piece to the purely aesthetic art de plaire propounded by the Chevalier de Méré. Little is known about the composition of the various essays that make up the work. Although it would seem likely that they circulated privately during La Rochefoucauld's lifetime, they did not appear in print until the beginning of the eighteenth century; and in many instances knowledge of the dates at which they were composed remains uncertain. In his edition of La Rochefoucauld's work, Truchet dates the composition of the various essays over a period ranging from 1659 to about 1679, in accordance with the composition dates of those epigrams that appear in both the Maximes and the Réflexions; Lafond, on the other hand, proposes a later date of composition, basing his argument on the worldly tone and vocabulary that the essays share with the final edition of La Rochefoucauld's major work¹. Whether certain epigrams were transferred almost verbatim from La Rochefoucauld's longer essays to the Maximes or whether they were taken from the Maximes and incorporated in the text of the Réflexions, the kinship of the two works is an evident one. Certainly the Réflexions provide a precise frame of reference for a number of specific maxims², and in a more general way they furnish the context for La Rochefoucauld's social commentary—for the many epigrams concerned with friendship, with love, and with the conversational art.

The Réflexions deserve, however, to be studied in their own right. They constitute the most comprehensive presentation of La Rochefoucauld's concept of the self in society, and they are quite literally a «reflection» of social life in the second half of the seventeenth century. Where the Maximes retain their ties with the medieval tradition of homeletic allegory based on the personification of vices and virtues, the Réflexions are almost exclusively concerned with social relations and social types. This in itself tends to mislead. It is not so much that ethical considerations are absent or that amour-propre is necessarily divorced from its metaphysical connection with the self-dilection of post-lapsarian man, but rather that the orientation and the vocabulary are so clearly social and secular. For the most part, La Rochefoucauld does not speak in the Réflexions of specific virtues or of the vicious and vitiating passions but of beauty and truth, of social servitude and liberty, of integrity and lucidity, of politesse and the perimeters of personal dignity.

It is nevertheless true that the Augustinian outlook and the Jansenist bias, which are clearly evident in the Liancourt manuscript and to a lesser degree in the first edition of the Maximes, continue to color La Rochefoucauld's writing in his essays. The picture of the self in «Du vrai,» «Du faux,» «Des goûts,» and «De l'air et des manières» owes a considerable debt to the Augustinian tradition and quite probably to Port-Royal as well; and the affinity of «Du rapport des hommes avec les animaux» with La Fontaine's Fables and with the theories of Hobbes and Le Brun³ only reinforces La Rochefoucauld's radical pessimism as to the fundamental orientation of being. The view that human nature is corrupted by both sin and the physical senses is, however, considerably mitigated in the Réflexions. Here the duplicity, self-delusion, and inconstancy that characterize La Rochefoucauld's concept of the self in his early texts no longer constitute the entire thrust of his argument. They are, rather, the dark side of a double perception of the human condition. This change from a single optic to a bipolarity of vision appears as well in the Maximes, but in most cases it is evident only in the later editions and is so understated as to be frequently overlooked. The bifocalism of the Réflexions dominates the thought and directs the text.

This double perspective is accompanied by a change in emphasis or proportion; and in comparison with the Maximes, a significantly greater section of the text is devoted to the social manifestations of esprit, goût, and judgment. In addition, the Réflexions are most directly concerned with the relationship of ethics and aesthetics. Although this presentation takes its point of departure from a consideration of beauty in the visual arts, not only in «Du vrai» but throughout the Réflexions what seems at first glance to be a concern with aesthetics and with the paraître of social being is, more accurately, a use of aesthetic terminology to express La Rochefoucauld's ethical stance. The proportion, perspective, and chiaroscuro that serve as the faire of Classical art become, in the Réflexions, the idiom of a study in social authenticity—with regard to the style of the self, to the concept of rôle, and to the concept of honnêteté. Thus, La Rochefoucauld's essays are not only a mirror of his world but his personal reflections on the words and concepts that constituted the seventeenth-century criteria of the self and that governed the conversational style of salon society.

It is this personal interpretation that predominates and that sets the Réflexions apart from La Rochefoucauld's other writing. In both the published and unpublished versions of the Maximes, La Rochefoucauld views his social comedy from a distance that is sometimes Olympian. In the Réflexions he walks among the personalities, the cas types, and the heroes of his world. Even the set pieces—the comparison of love and life and of love and the sea, the psychosomatic study of the self, and the phenomenological presentation of man's animal nature—communicate a sense of personal involvement. And the conventional comparison of Condé and Turenne is the work of a man who knew them both and who took their measure during the days of the Fronde. Many of the essays in the work are shaded by the increasing pessimism of age and at the same time colored by a more equable acceptance of life so that the contrasts of shadow and light are more marked and infinitely more moving here. The Réflexions are not simply a codicil to La Rochefoucauld's published work. They are his témoignage, the testament of his thought, and the personal legacy of his experience and his art.

Thus, the comparison with the Essais is an almost inevitable one. Much more than do the Maximes themselves, the Réflexions diverses bear the mark of Montaigne. The être of the Essais is in certain respects the literary progenitor of La Rochefoucauld's more socially oriented being. Many of the chapters in the Réflexions are «essays» of the self in the Montaigne manner, and the influence of Montaigne's third book is evident to some degree in almost all of La Rochefoucauld's studies. «De trois commerces,» «Sur des vers de Virgile,» «De l'art de conferer,» and «De la vanité» shape La Rochefoucauld's chapters on friendship, love, and the conversational art, and «Du rapport des hommes avec les animaux» is in the tradition of both «De la phisionomie» and the «Apologie.» «De la retraite» and, in a less obvious manner, «De l'amour et de la vie» and «De l'inconstance» have a clear kinship with «Du repentir,» and Montaigne's final summation in «De l'experience» is echoed in «Des événements de ce siècle.» The influence of Montaigne's doublets and his binary oppositions of classical personalities may be seen in «Des modèles de la nature et de la fortune» although the comparison of Condé and Turenne quite probably was more directly influenced by the classical doublets of the précieux. Montaigne's «De l'utile et de l'honneste,» together with «De l'amitié» and Cicero's «De amicitia»⁴, impinge on «De la confiance,» and in some instances Molière appears alongside the author of the Essais. The correspondence between the Misanthrope and «Des coquettes et des vieillards» is an evident one, and it seems quite likely that «Du faux» was influenced by Tartuffe as well as by Montaigne's «De la gloire» and «De la praesumption.»

To a remarkable extent, however, it is Montaigne's «De l'art de conferer» that furnishes La Rochefoucauld's point of departure and serves to pattern his thought. The Réflexions, says Moore, present the art of conversation «not as a social pastime but, in the sense of Montaigne, as a social approach to the truth»⁵. The influence of «De l'art de conferer» is not only pervasive but precise. The relationship of truth and hypocrisy, of liberty and obligation, of merit and fortune, and of judgment and the deformations of both «opiniastreté» and the «desreglement de sens» are the subjects of La Rochefoucauld's Réflexions as they were in Montaigne's essay. The role of honnêteté in social commerce, the relationship of style and the inner self, the portrait gallery of sots that announces La Rochefoucauld's finely shaded catalogue of esprits, the opposition of «fuite» and «suite,» of what is «propre» or «estranger,» of «le vrai» and «le faux,» the study of the «maniere du dire» or what La Rochefoucauld calls the «air» of social communication—all of these aspects of «De l'art de conferer» reappear in the Réflexions, assimilated and re-evaluated by the perceptive and highly civilized mind of their author and shaped and molded both by his Augustinian pessimism and by his own masterly prose style⁶.

The close ties of La Rochefoucauld's studies with Montaigne's later essays make it somewhat difficult to accept Starobinski's contention that the Réflexions advocate a «morale substitutive,» a «bonheur de la forme» to cover the «noirceur du fond»⁷. Although La Rochefoucauld accepts amour-propre as a given factor of the unregenerate self, «trop naturel en nous pour nous en pouvoir défaire» (III, 185-86), it is precisely the prestidigitation of style and the patina of paraître that the Réflexions condemn. La Rochefoucauld makes a distinction between the private and the social visage of the self, one that Montaigne certainly does not make and one that is the product of the aesthetic theory and the social structure of his time. The Réflexions nevertheless constitute, as do Montaigne's final essays, a series of prises de position whereby La Rochefoucauld defines what is for him the frontier between the necessary accommodations of social commerce and the unacceptable compromise of the essential liberty, integrity, and inner sincerity of the self.

Thus it is that the Réflexions set the reality of the social commerces against the ideals they represent; and by the ceaseless calibration of habileté and finesse, of sincerity and self-love, of lucid perception and interested self-delusion, La Rochefoucauld finds in the confluence of virtue and vice the shifting marker that defines the limit of his personal social accommodation. He balances the «weight» of true friendship against the imposition of friends and the «ouverture du cœur» that is «sans réserve» against a fidelity to entrusted confidence to be maintained «sans en peser les suites» (V, 194, 196, 197). He looks behind the ideal of love and sees the tensions of its pleasure and the tyranny of its pain, its «grâce de la nouveauté» and the taedium vitae of its consummation, its fleeting constancy and its enduring force (IX, 200-01). And where the commerce des femmes is concerned, La Rochefoucauld's bipolarity of vision is expressed with an eloquence and a concision seldom equaled in the Réflexions: «l'amour, lui seul, a fait plus de maux que tout le reste ensemble, … mais comme il fait aussi les plus grands biens de la vie, au lieu de médire de lui, on doit se taire; on doit le craindre et le respecter toujours» (XII, 207).

Seen on the dark side, however, La Rochefoucauld's judgment of both friendship and love is severe. Although friendship may be perfect, friends unfortunately are not. The other face of fidelity and reciprocal respect is the tyranny of the rapacious self: «la plupart de nos amis … se font un droit sur notre confiance et … veulent tout savoir de nous» (V, 197). Given the human condition, the mutual esteem on which true friendship depends is more often than not an ephemeral one. Both intérêt and humeurs vary with age and «les hommes sont trop faibles et trop changeants pour soutenir longtemps les poids de l'amitié» (XVII, 223). If friendship is a perfection seldom realized, love is a will-of-the-wisp of self-delusion; and in the Réflexions the disappointments of desire lead inevitably to the sécheresse of encroaching age and to the endless ennui of mind and heart. The words themselves evoke the boredom and lassitude of love's last, lingering Götterdämmerung: «anéantissement» and «assoupissement»; «trop longs attachements,» «incertitude éternelle» and «inconstance involontaire»; «la crainte de laisser» and «la crainte d'être quitté»; «on ne vit plus» and «on vit encore»; «on n'a pas la force de finir,» «on est fatigué,» «on fait naufrage dans le port» (VI, 197-98; IX, 200-01)—the phrases fall peal on peal with the sad, inexorable cadence of the tolling bell.

Where friendship is le vrai and love an ideal all too fleeting in its realization, conversation is a pragmatic compromise and its sincerity only relative. Here the proportion, perspective, and shading of the truth adapt inner integrity to a variety of social realities and mutual social needs. The frontier between habileté and finesse or between sincerity and fausseté is barely perceptible, but La Rochefoucauld is at pains to define it: reciprocal «égards» and a necessary «complaisance» rather than Méré's self-serving art de plaire; an «application» to the «pente,» the needs, and the individual perimeters of privacy and dignity rather than an art de pénétrer; a harmonious accord «selon l'humeur et l'inclinaison» rather than interested agrément; and a choice of word or tone in proportion to the idea rather than a bienséance that caters to the shibboleths of social usage. The balance is, however, a tenuous one:

Chacun veut trouver son plaisir et ses avantages aux dépens des autres; on se préfère toujours à ceux avec qui on se propose de vivre … ; c'est ce qui trouble et qui détruit la société. Il faudrait du moins savoir cacher ce désir de préférence, puisqu'il est trop naturel en nous pour nous en pouvoir défaire: il faudrait faire son plaisir et celui des autres, ménager leur amour-propre et ne le blesser jamais.

Pour rendre la société commode, il faut que chacun conserve sa liberté: … La complaisance est nécessaire dans la société, mais elle doit avoir des bornes; elle devient une servitude quand elle est excessive; il faut du moins qu'elle paraisse libre …⁸

The line between «ne le blesser jamais,» and «ménager leur amour-propre,» or between «que chacun conserve sa liberté» and «il faut au moins qu'elle paraisse libre» is very thin indeed. La Rochefoucauld's view of social commerce nevertheless indicates a sustained sensitivity to precisely these «bornes»—to the frontier that separates the hypocrisy of social politesse and the demands of honnêteté, to the difference between the hidden drive for self-affirmation and genuine social consideration. His criterion is not the aesthetics of persona but the integrity of the self, in the full sense of the term.

So it is with esprit as well. Where this sine qua non of social conversation is concerned, La Rochefoucauld's standard is that droiture which, in the Liancourt manuscript, «prend toujours le bon biais des choses»⁹, and his habileté is the social skill or the bien faire of the honnête homme. In the Réflexions as in the Maximes, finesse is, on the other hand, a pejorative term. For La Rochefoucauld it depends not on the perspective of truth but on «des biais et des détours … pour faire réussir les desseins» (XVI, 220). The choice is an ethical one: the circuitous calculations of amour-propre or the droit fil, the crooked way or the straight. La Rochefoucauld's scorn for finesse has a biblical basis—the censure of the «voie mauvaise,» of «ceux qui délaissent les droits sentiers»—«leurs pistes sont tortueuses,» says Proverbs, «leurs sentiers sont obliques»¹⁰. Although La Rochefoucauld's attempts to define the multiple manifestations of esprit tend to obscure his ethical stance, his definitions are, nevertheless, almost invariably aimed at finding the reality behind the mask of social conventions. They are centered on certain basic questions with regard to the acceptable accommodations of mind and wit to the requirements of social commerce and of the conversational art.

In «Des goûts» and in «De la différence des esprits,» there is a tacit recognition that felicitous expression and instinctive judgment—agrément and justesse—frequently enhance the second-rate, and «De la différence» contains as well a capsule résumé of a fundamental dilemma in the Misanthrope—the inconvenience of droiture in human relationships as opposed to the social value of vacuous facility. In addition, these two essays develop the ethical frame of reference for certain considerations of the Maximes: the perniciousness of mindless good intentions, the deplorable effectiveness of well-regulated malignité, the special destructiveness of good done with evil intent, the distinction between man's occasional folly and the constant sottise of the «esprit de travers»¹¹. In the vertiginous shifts of perspective from the objective to the subjective and from the evaluation of wit in itself to the evaluation of the style and substance of its manifestations, one fact is clear. La Rochefoucauld is concerned with the divergence between the good and the pleasing with regard to intellect itself just as he is with the disparity, in personal and social relationships, between the ethical ideal and its faulty or fallacious realization.

He is concerned as well with what we now term genius, and what the seventeenth century called the grand esprit. In «De la différence,» La Rochefoucauld's analysis marks a departure from the general tendency of his time to prize instinctive savoir faire to the detriment of intellect and learning per se. La Rochefoucauld makes a distinction between natural taste, judgment, and lumières on the one hand and the intellectual capacity of the grand esprit on the other, but in the Réflexions both instinct and intellect receive their due. «Un esprit brillant a de la vivacité, de l'agrément et de la justesse,» says La Rochefoucauld; «un esprit de feu va plus loin et avec plus de rapidité» (XVI, 212). The multiple implications of «raillerie» are subjected to the same precision of definition and analysis, and this ironic play of mocking wit is viewed as a special manifestation of esprit, in terms of its sometimes wounding effect on others, and in terms of the reputation that it engenders. In «De la différence» and in «Des goûts,» La Rochefoucauld looks as well at the dark side of the mind. He weighs the aberrations of taste and judgment in the double scale of Augustinian pessimism and material predeterminism, thus linking the perception of the self once more to the refrain that is, in the Réflexions, the leitmotiv of man's état déplorable—«nous sommes si remplis de la fausseté. … » (VII, 199; X, 202-03; XVI, 218).

In the Réflexions, as in the Pensées, remplir must be taken in the liturgical, and Augustinian, sense that gave to «graceful» and «truthful» their original meaning of «full of grace and truth.» For La Rochefoucauld, and for his contemporaries, qualities quite literally «fill» the person and thus give shape and meaning to the material self. Where a given quality exists to its maximum potential, the person becomes an absolute within, translated by the «air» or «manner» without, so that Form and Idea are one. In «Du vrai,» liberality both «fills» and fulfills, as does cruelty in the case of children and of princes or beauty in the case of Chantilly and Liancourt. It is in this sense that the characters of the Princesse de Clèves «ne sont pas des personnages, ce sont des essences: la passion, la vertu, l'honnêtet黹². It is in this sense as well that Corneille's Auguste is «le généreux,» that Mme de La Fayette was «la vraie,» and that La Rochefoucauld was called the Franchise of the Fronde. The curious change of wording in La Rochefoucauld's reference to the widow's mite may also reflect this particular seventeenth-century point of view—in «Du vrai» she gives all that she is rather than all that she has¹³. For La Rochefoucauld, then, the root of beauty is truth in the sense of the integer vitae; and in all probability his voir les choses comme elles sont should be understood not as the lucidity of reasoned and «Enlightened» thought but as the intuitive perception of the scope and variety of inward truth.

Thus, «Du vrai» is more than the opening chapter of the Réflexions. It is in many ways the unifying theme of La Rochefoucauld's work. In this essay and throughout the Réflexions, the relationship of inner good to outward beauty, or the Platonic kalon-kagathon, and the Classical relationship of nature to art are almost identical to La Rochefoucauld's concept of the style of the self in society. The Réflexions are far from advocating the substitution of style for substance, but La Rochefoucauld's view of the connection between the two is a subtle one. For Montaigne the se dire of the Essais was an unvarnished representation of the self; for La Rochefoucauld there is an intermediate step whereby Montaigne's maniere du dire ceases to be a direct communication and becomes instead the faire that forms the genuine social image of the self. The relationship of the self to its social face is that of nature to the image of nature created and corrected by art, that of inner truth to outward beauty. What La Rochefoucauld is proposing is truth in packaging, an outward vraisemblance that is an earnest of the inward vrai. The social image is this vraisemblance. It conveys the spirit rather than the essence of inner being.

To consider that La Rochefoucauld advocates the aesthetics of social paraître is, then, to miss the central point of the Réflexions. The distinction between paraître and vraisemblance in the representation of the social self is the same distinction that La Rochefoucauld makes in «De la différence» between finesse and habileté. In one instance the dividing line is the droiture of wit and intellect; in the other it is the truth and integrity of the social style. Proportion, perspective, and the subtle shading of the self are not themselves the true. In conversation as in the visual arts, they are the means of creating an image consonant with the inward self. La Rochefoucauld's social vraisemblance is neither the corruption of Pascal's unregenerate heart nor the seemliness without substance of Méré's «se connoistre à ce qui doit plaîre»¹⁴. It is not a mask to disguise the self but the authentic outward face of inner reality and truth.

The style or faire of the social self is, above all, a matter of rôle—of the elusive and frequently neglected concept that each man, from the medieval Actor Dei to the honnête homme of the salon, has his part to play on the stage of life. The constant shifting in the Réflexions from a perception of the thing in itself to the individual conception of truth and beauty perceived and the particular combination of Platonic absolutes and modern relativity characteristic of La Rochefoucauld's aesthetics mark his work as a transitional one. Where rôle is concerned, however, his ties are with the past. He is the child of Corneille, of Charron, and of the Astrée; and in the Réflexions, rôle brings with it the assumption of qualities in a manner quite close to d'Urfé's mystic concept of identity. Thus, when the role is properly assumed both in the sense of seemliness and in the sense of sincerity, it becomes a second nature much as custom does in the Essais. The interaction of function and the facts of the self is genuine or not depending on whether the role is inauthentic and extraneous to the self or is so assimilated as to create a new integrity of being. La Rochefoucauld's magistrate who defines himself in the idiom of the battlefield is, for this reason, as incongruous and inauthentic as was Montaigne's «procureur … à cheval» in «De l'art de conferer,» and it is more than likely that the one derives from the other¹⁵. To the extent that La Rochefoucauld tends to see the self in terms of a civil role as well as a social one, he is closer to Charron than he is to Montaigne, but the relationship between personality and persona in the Réflexions is nevertheless quite different from that in the Sagesse. For Charron, the role absorbs the self; for La Rochefoucauld the self absorbs the role and natural being is «augmented,» improved, and enhanced thereby (III, 189).

Although almost all of La Rochefoucauld's studies present both the pessimistic and the optimistic aspects of his thought and of his view of the self, there is in most of his chapters a prevailing optic that sets the tone of the entire essay. Certain studies—«De la société,» «De la conversation,» «De la confiance,» «De la différence des esprits,» and «Du vrai»—constitute the more positive, and idealistic, pole of La Rochefoucauld's reflections on the social self. «Du faux,» «De l'air et des manières,» and «Des exemples,» on the other hand, are for the most part a sweeping indictment of the corruptions inherent in this ideal. In these three essays and elsewhere in the Réflexions, the falsehood that fills the self is a composite of many qualities: instinct, ambition and temperament, conformity, commodité and the rootless imagination that turns «grands originaux» into «mauvaises copies» (VII, 198). «Chacun veut être un autre,» says La Rochefoucauld, «et n'être plus ce qu'il est» (III, 189).

It is when the Réflexions turn to these conscious and unconscious self-delusions of human nature and to the false paraître assumed by the self for the deception of others that La Rochefoucauld is at his most perceptive and his most modern. The other face of the authentic social self is the empty visage of the play actor endowed with the esprit de finesse. His is a wit whose polished brilliance is nothing more than a pleasing mask assumed to hide intentions as well as insufficiencies and designed to disguise arrivisme and self-aggrandizement as well as lack of substance. Here La Rochefoucauld stands with Pascal but apart from him. For La Rochefoucauld, «Du vrai» and «Du faux» exist side by side; for Pascal honnêteté is a faked copy of charity and the ordered beauty of social life no more than the chimera of the concupiscent self. The hallucinative quality of life is Pascal's reality; for La Rochefoucauld the dark side of his world is a distortion of truth, not its demonstration.

The envers of salon society is nevertheless a nightmare world where vues, goûts, lumières, tempérament, instinct, eye, and ear are so flawed that man cannot distinguish between the genuine and the false copy. Here ambition, arrivisme, and the vanity of unfounded pretentions intentionally distort the true; the uncertain desert their own «biens» for those that are «étrangers»; and imaginative instability tries out one mask after another. The «faux» seek «une contenance hors d'eux-mesmes» and «un autre esprit que le leur»; «au lieu d'être en effet ce qu'ils veulent paraître, ils cherchent à paraître ce qu'ils ne sont pas» (VII, 188-91). Thus, the empty self in search of an identity goes hand in hand with the one that cannot or will not accept the impoverished dimensions of its own diminished truth. One practices the mimesis of the chameleon personality, while the other feeds on the flattery that fleshes out its paltry substance and parades its ersatz wares; both are motivated by an intérêt d'honneur et de gloire as false as the shadow play of which they are a part.

This is a world out of touch with reality and out of touch with genuine feeling, one where neither the unconsciously false nor the deliberately fraudulent are capable of seeing les choses comme elles sont, whether it is because they fail to recognize the truth or because they cannot bear to accept it. Here nothing is fixed. The self «s'oublie,» «s'éloigne insensiblement,» and strays from «le chemin de la vertu» (III, 190; VII, 199). It remains the eternal prisoner of deliberate misrepresentation and of intentional and unintentional self-delusion, forever in search of a «nature» not its own. The roles in this nightmare world succeed not because of expertise or finesse but because of the willing delusion of those who see the false and call it true.

The Maximes are peopled with these bad actors and poor copies. Some of them La Rochefoucauld must have modeled on the living. Others he created with words that breathe life and form into abstract thought and with a gift for the grotesque that grants no quarter to the pretentions of the inauthentic self. Two of these grotesques come into the Maximes from the Réflexions: the coquette and the vieillard, one the empty self and the other the diminished truth. They are the gift of Molière and they announce Balzac, but they stand together in the Réflexions as La Rochefoucauld's own inspired creation, each thrown in sharp relief by the presence of the other: the coquette a study in deliberate deception and the vieillard the epitome of self-delusion. Both are endowed with a depth and a dimension which are universal and which pose that most lucid of questions, one that denies lucidity itself—«Je ne sais même si cette tromperie ne leur vaut pas mieux encore que de connaître la vérité» (XV, 217).

Throughout the Réflexions, La Rochefoucauld returns again and again to the study of the style of the self and to his effort to maintain the inner core of authentic being beneath the conventions of social commerce and conversation. The ethics and aesthetics of the self in society are at the heart of the Réflexions. These considerations merge imperceptibly with the constant interplay of amour-propre and humeurs, of instinct and reason, of nature and civilization—of the heights and depths of the human condition. They are set against the three ages of La Rochefoucauld's time as he lived them: the heroism of his youth, the honnêteté of his maturity, and the disillusionment and decrepitude of his age.

For the self is enhanced not only by rôle but by the «jour» and the «lumière» in which it stands (I, 185). Both for La Rochefoucauld and for Montaigne, nature furnishes the matter and fortune puts it to work. From this felicitous conjunction of favorable forces are formed the grands originaux whose «truth» is self-evident and whose possibilities are so eminently fulfilled. In «Des modèles de la nature et de la fortune,» historical truth and actual truth coincide, and fortune confirms what the nature of the self alone no longer can. The perspective here is the historical or civilized state, stretching from Cato to Condé and from Caesar to Cromwell in a never-failing succession of heroes en mal and en bien. But man is a physical being and another truth endures as well. Thus it is that in «Du rapport des hommes avec les animaux» unregenerate nature has its jour. In this instance the optic is the Hobbesian state of pre-history, sensed rather than seen and forever layered beneath the civilized surface of the visible world. Neither is complete without the other, just as Condé is not «complete» without the comparison with Turenne, nor is Cato fully understood unless seen in the perspective of Caesar. The summation of animal types passes in review, under a different light, the personalities and predilections that produced the «événements de ce siècle.»

In what La Rochefoucauld calls in maxim 215 «l'espace qui est entredeux» stands the honnête homme of salon society. Seen in the light of the grands originaux and the grands animaux that posit the positive and negative poles of the self, his truth is limited, but it is a genuine one considered in and of itself. Nowhere in the Réflexions does La Rochefoucauld speak more clearly and succinctly than when he turns to honnêteté. Read alone, as they are in the Maximes, the epigrams that carry the core of La Rochefoucauld's concept of honnêteté mislead. In the Réflexions it is eminently clear that La Rochefoucauld's optic is neither one of covert individualism and heroic fulfillment nor of Jansenist abêtissement, neither Méré's Epicurean aestheticism nor the sterile Neo-Stoicism of the Sagesse. La Rochefoucauld's perspective of the self is one established by the confines of the salon of his day, and it is as concerned with truth as it is with the grace and beauty of its style. In one short section of «Du faux,» La Rochefoucauld summarizes what he means by true honnêteté. It is, as it was for Montaigne, a concept that is both ethical and aesthetic, both sincere and seemly:

Les honnêtes gens doivent approuver sans prévention ce qui mérite d'être approuvé, suivre ce qui mérite d'être suivi, et ne se piquer de rien. Mais il y faut une grande proportion et une grande justesse; il faut savoir discerner ce qui est bon en général, et ce qui nous est propre, et suivre alors avec raison la pente naturelle qui nous porte vers les choses qui nous plaisent. Si les hommes ne voulaient exceller que par leurs propres talents et en suivant leurs devoirs, il n'y aurait rien de faux dans leur goût et dans leur conduite; ils se montreraient tels qu'ils sont; ils jugeraient des choses par leurs lumières, et s'y attacheraient par raison; il y aurait de la proportion dans leurs vues et dans leurs sentiments; leur goût serait vrai, il viendrait d'eux et non pas des autres, et ils le suivraient par choix, et non pas par coutume ou par hasard¹⁶.

Seen within its proper context, La Rochefoucauld's «ne se piquer de rien» has little relation to the Epicurean indifference or to the religious apathy to which it has so often been ascribed. It is an inner equanimity born of proportion and justesse and shaped equally by «talents» and by «devoirs,» the product of both temperament and a rigorous siège magistral of instinctive judgment reinforced by reason. Taste, in the sense of discrimination and predilection, is a choice consciously made, relatively unshackled by custom and fortune even as it accepts them both. On the limited terrain circumscribed by «fausseté» and «mécompte,» honnêteté involves a clear and rigorous commitment—«sans prévention» in the right, «sans réserve» in obligations of friendship, «sans en peser les suites» in a man's fidelity to the deposit of faith. It is as well a preservation of the essential perimeters of privacy and personal liberty—perhaps the only liberty possible in the world as La Rochefoucauld saw it—a liberty deriving from a discernment based not on blind adherence to social structures and bienséance but on the independent vitality and truth of the inner self.

For La Rochefoucauld as for Montaigne, «il n'y a rien de pur»¹⁷. In the Réflexions as in the Essais, one finds the same shifts back and forth from the positive to the negative poles of the self. La Rochefoucauld's pessimism is, however, the more dominant note in the Réflexions. He not only shares but surpasses what was in the Essais a more ephemeral discouragement. With Montaigne the balance is tipped on the side of an enduring and triumphant optimism. His is the chivalric quest, a perpetual aller et retour of ever-widening, concentric circles and his the free allure and the bonne assiette of the roide jousteur, ceaselessly probing and constantly enriched against the day that the contrerolle and registre of the earthbound self will be forever closed¹⁸. La Rochefoucauld's personal myth is the myth of Sisyphus and his metaphor the water imagery of the sea and the river—in life as in love the sense of the subtle slipping away of force and of the vitality that the Maximes call the «principe de vie»¹⁹. In this regard, La Rochefoucauld is at one with Descartes, Corneille, and Charron. Energy is the activating force of grandeur, of heroic intrépidité, and of the long march across the face of France during the Fronde. It is the redeeming side of the restless force of amour-propre which twists and turns the self and which ebbs and flows and changes from the «relève du matin» to the «marée du soir»²⁰. Energy is the lifeline that binds together Cato, Condé and Cromwell, La Rochefoucauld and Retz. Once spent, it is forever lost, leaving the self in the backwash of history—flotsam and jetsam on the current of time, imperceptibly slipping «down to a sunless sea.»

In the Réflexions, the honnête homme stands against the tide, but it is much as Ionesco's Berenger stands amidst the débris of the shrinking world that was his kingdom. For La Rochefoucauld, age is the limbo of the living dead and the lot of the old is the task of Sisyphus: «avec beaucoup d'ennuis, d'incertitudes et de faiblesses, … ils soutiennent les poids d'une vie insipide et languissante» (XVIII, 225). It is not so much Pascal's eternal silence of infinite space that weighs on the spirit of the self in the Réflexions diverses as it is the eternal boredom of the Ancient Mariner for whom love is the albatross about his neck and life's voyage a Voyage à Cythère with its lilting promise of high adventure and blissful fulfillment and, at its inevitable end, the empty shell of the self and the slow, still wash of waves on the farther shore.

Notes

1. François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, «Maximes,» suivies des «Réflexions diverses,» du «Portrait» de La Rochefoucauld par lui-même et des «Remarques de Christine de Suède sur les ‘Maximes’,» ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier, 1967), pp. xxx-xxxii; and Jean Lafond, «La Rochefoucauld moraliste, le penseur et l'écrivain,» Thèse, Lettres (Université de Paris, IV, 1974), 3 vols., I, 334 et seq. See also Michelle Leconte, «Recherches sur les dates de composition des Réflexions Diverses de La Rochefoucauld,» Revue des Sciences Humaines, No. 118 (1965), pp. 177-89. All quotations from the Maximes and the Réflexions are taken from the 1967 Truchet edition of La Rochefoucauld's work.

2. Specifically maxims 53, 104, 153, 203, 222, 242, 274, 451, 456, 457, L 41, and MS 58.

3. See Maximes, note 1, pp. 203-04; and Leconte, p. 181.

4. See Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny, Harvard Classics (New York: Collier & Sons, 1909), IX, 18: «Therefore I gather that friendship springs from a natural impulse … from an inclination of the heart, combined with a certain instinctive feeling of love rather than from a deliberate calculation of the material advantage it was likely to confer.»

5. W. G. Moore, «The Problem of the Réflexions diverses,» in La Rochefoucauld: His Mind and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 108. The present study is indebted in a general way to Moore's treatment of the Réflexions as well as to that of Truchet in Maximes, pp. xxviii-xxx, and to Paul Bénichou, «L'Intention des Maximes,» in L'Ecrivain et ses travaux (Paris: Corti, 1967), pp. 29-37.

6. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1962), III, 8: 355-81. For a detailed analysis of the aspects of «De l'art de conferer» discussed in this study, see Vivien Thweatt, «L'Art de conferer: art des Essais, art de vivre,» Romanic Review, 68 (1977), 103-17.

7. Jean Starobinski, «La Rochefoucauld et les morales substitutives,» Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 163 (1966), p. 277.

8. Réflexions, II, 185-86. See also IV, 192.

9. Maxim L 41.

10. Proverbes, 2: 12-15, éd. de Jérusalem.

11. See maxims 90, 121, 155, 162, 269, 273, 284, 451, and 468. For the «esprit de travers,» see maxims 318, 448, and 502.

12. Bernard Pingaud, Mme de la Fayette par elle-même (Paris: Seuil, n.d.), p. 71.

13. Saint Luke 21: 4, King James Version: « … but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.» Cf. Réflexions, I, 181.

14. Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Méré, Lettres de Monsieur le Chevalier de Méré, 2 vols. (Paris: La Compagnie des Librairies, 1789), I, no. 19.

15. Essais, III, 8: 356. Cf. Réflexions, III, 191 and VII, 199.

16. Réflexions, XIII, 208-09. For a study of both the ethical and the social aspects of honnêteté in La Rochefoucauld's work, see Maximes, p. lxci; and Lafond, III, 690-729.

17. The original expression is Montaigne's. A paraphrase appears in the preface of La Rochefoucauld's first edition, Maximes, pp. 271-72.

18. Essais III, 3: 244 and III, 8: 378.

19. Maxim L 73. The phrase disappears with the first edition.

20. The expressions are those of Montherlant.