"We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others." That is one of the gentler verdicts 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.