Maxims

"We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others." That is one of the gentler verdicts La Rochefoucauld hands down, and it has been waiting, perfectly poised, for three and a half centuries to catch you flattering yourself. The Maxims is some five hundred such sentences, each filed to a single edge in the salons of Paris until argument becomes impossible. Their relentless claim is that self-love is the engine hidden inside every virtue: that our generosity is vanity, our friendships are arithmetic, our courage often only the fear of a larger fear. A duke who took a musket ball through the face in the Fronde and rose half-blind, he wrote with the calm of a man who had already lost his illusions about glory. Read a page and you will start defending yourself. Read ten and the defence collapses, leaving the quiet, unshakeable suspicion that your finest qualities are your most elaborate disguises.