_]
When Mme de Sevigne, in 1675, received the third edition of the Duke's
book, which contained more than seventy new maxims, she wrote, "Some of
them are divine; some of them, I am ashamed to say, I don't understand."
Probably she would have partly agreed with some one's criticism of them,
"De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit--trop
d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation
wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he
sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are
disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces.
Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into
which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime
companion. Mme de Sevigne describes such talks with her delicate irony,
and says, "We plunged into subtleties which were beyond our
intelligence." An example is the dispute whether "Grace is to the body
what good sense is to the mind," or "Grace is to the body what delicacy
is to the mind" should be the ultimate form of a maxim. They sometimes
drew the spider's thread so fine that it became invisible.
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