There was a sort of collaboration. We find La Rochefoucauld writing to
Esprit, "I shall be much obliged if you will show _our_ last sentences
to Mme de Sable; it may perhaps induce her to write some of her own."
And to the lady he writes, "Here are all my maxims which you have not
yet seen, but as nothing is done for nothing, I beg you to send me in
return the receipt for the carrot soup which we had when Commander de
Souvre dined at your house," The three maximists consulted one
another, polished up one another's sentences, and suggested subjects
which were first discussed round the dinner-table or in the summer
parlour and then worked up, sometimes by all three conjointly, to the
highest pitch of perfection. It was probably Esprit by whom many of
the original suggestions were started, indeed it is he who seems to
have first laid down the formula that "the mind is the servant and
even the dupe of the instincts," which both Pascal and La
Rochefoucauld were presently to expand in such brilliant forms. But it
is quite an error to presume, as some writers have done, that there
was a kind of factory for maxims, out of which sentences were turned
which really belonged to no one in particular.
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