Extract

We are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

Our virtues are most often only our vices in disguise, and with that single corrosive insight a duke who had been shot through the head in the Fronde began dismantling the noble self-image of seventeenth-century France one polished sentence at a time. Retiring from political intrigue to the Parisian salons, he spent decades refining these aphorisms into their lethally compressed final form, published in 1665. Each maxim is a small, cold jewel that catches the light of human vanity from a new angle: self-love is the greatest flatterer, gratitude is merely the anticipation of future favours, and what we call generosity is usually only ambition wearing a finer coat. The brevity is the weapon. Nothing is spared. Nothing is wasted.