He is instinct with the spirit of society, "la bonne compagnie," as it
was called in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a crowd of
refined and well-trained pens competed to make of the delicate
language of France a vehicle which could transfer from brain to brain
the subtlest ingenuities of psychology. He is a typical specimen of the
Frenchman of letters at the moment when literature had become the ally
of political power and the instrument of social influence. Into this
new world, before it had completely developed, the future author of
the "Maximes" was introduced at a very early age. He was presented to
the wits and _precieuses_ of the Hotel Rambouillet at the age of
eighteen. It is amusing to think that he may have seen Voiture, in the
Blue Room, seize his lute and sing a Spanish song, or have volunteered
as a paladin in the train of Hector, King of Georgia. But the
pedantries and affectations of this wonderful society seem to have
made no immediate impression upon La Rochefoucauld, whose early years
were those of the young nobleman devoid of all apparent intellectual
curiosity. It is true that he says of himself that directly he came
back from Italy (this was in 1629, when he was only sixteen), "I began
to notice with some attention whatever I saw," but this was, no doubt,
external; he does not exhibit in his writings, and in all probability
did not feel, the slightest interest in the pedantic literature of the
end of Louis XIII.
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