He was content to be the
violent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of
Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim,
"Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul."
Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon
counter-scuffle--such was the life of the young French nobleman of whom
La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type
and specimen.
La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the "Maximes," but of a
second book which is much less often read. This is his "Memoires," a
very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary
history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary
to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must
be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book is
like a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to a
different scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but they
make up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times.
No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with these
authentic fragments of the social and political history of France
under Richelieu and Mazarin.
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