The Great Mademoiselle would have liked to marry her cousin Louis XIV, but since she shot at him with a cannon, he has been lacking enthusiasm. What a marvelous era was that of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld! Especially when it is so well recounted by a historian of Georges Minois’s caliber. During these times of a deeply troubled French history, where rebellious nobles engaged in war against the royal power as though they were going hunting, out of boredom as much as for distraction, the first son of an illustrious family was born. Even though he participated in some famous episodes of the Fronde, the Prince of Marcillac and Duke of La Rochefoucauld remained throughout his life, the author tells us, more of an “observer and spectator.” He certainly never shied from a fight, but his actions always seemed to display a certain restraint. Sufficiently so for his enemy Cardinal de Retz to say that he had a “certain indefinable quality”, a “habitual irresolution,” probably the fruit of his aristocratic education and the spirit of the times. “Let’s not forget,” the biographer reminds us, “that melancholy was the fashionable disease in the first half of the 17th century.”
La Rochefoucauld was immersed in intrigue and conspiracy from his adolescence. And for good reason. First, the young Louis XIII was undressed, dragged, and locked in the queen’s bedroom to secure an heir from Anne of Austria, which would save the crown from the overly handsy ranks of soldiers under Gaston d’Orléans. Then, the numerous dark machinations orchestrated by Richelieu to preserve his royal influence, though he himself was the target of many conspiracies schemed by princes, from Condé to Rohan and Vendôme, ultimately orchestrated by a relentless circle of as seductive as they were ambitious women. It’s understandable that the Duke, in his old age, might deem that “vices enter into the composition of virtues just as poisons are part of the composition of remedies”!
After the Fronde, whose failure forced him to spend some time on his lands in Angoumois, the episode of Port-Royal came about, with, in the meantime, the quarrel of the “Important.” This string of events could never quench his thirst for feminine conquests. Although married and a family man, despite his friendships within the devout party, our hero flirts. Cheerfully. He courts the Duchess of Chevreuse, completely devoted to the causes, sometimes opposing, of her various lovers, and it is politically fortunate, it was thought at the time, that she “had many in succession but only one at a time”. He begins an affair with the Duchess of Longueville, which, according to the historian, “left deep marks on his spirit.” The consequences were not only spiritual since she gave the Duke a natural son, whose death he deeply mourned. He frequents the salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, those of the Hôtel de Condé and the domain of Chantilly, there meeting the infamous Ninon de Lenclos “in whose bed all of Paris parades.” He forms an “ambiguous affection” with Madame de Lafayette whose successful novel “The Princess of Cleves” is, according to Georges Minois, an “illustration of his Maxims.” He also develops a vivid friendship with the Marquise de Sablé whose psychological finesse served as much in writing the Maxims as the recipes and jars of jam with which she gifted him, on her return of age, their author. The gout from which he suffered in his old age did not prevent him from courting the daughter of the Marquise de Sévigné with the benevolent and affectionate complicity of the mother. A question of the era.
With many years and somewhat less remorse, all these ladies become virtuous and take refuge in devotion, even in convents. Once the action on the ground has passed, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, for his part, turns to writing. With enough modesty to refuse the Academy but enough talent to arouse the admiration of Queen Christina of Sweden. Beyond the petty stories, extraordinarily well documented, which also constitute the Great, the real merit of Georges Minois’s work lies also in giving, if one dares say, intellectual flesh to the entirety of an already ample work. When addressing the “Jansenist quarter-hour,” the historian injects all the necessary details to understand the birth and life of this politico-religious movement without ever altering the pace and picturesque nature of the narrative. When discussing the time of the Maxims, the biographer progressively restores the complex genesis of the work, between libertine inspiration and Jansenist influence, without separating it from the daily life of its author. He illuminates it intelligently while ensuring not to dazzle with too many philosophical references: Seneca to contrast, Epicurus to understand, and Gassendi to bring it closer, mastering his subject to allow himself some personal reflections on the all-Pascalian illusions of the “self.” The astounding clarity of human nature contained in the Maxims sharply contrasts with the “schematic” nature of the Memoirs, written around the same period. “The Memoirs study the trees and the Maximes, the forest,” says the historian.
At the time of his agony, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld “seems to distance himself from his own death.” In this sense, concludes Georges Minois, he remains true to himself, to his “tactic of evasion” which joins his posture of noble condescension. The idea of this death, approached during one of his military bravadoes, will still obsess him to the point of devoting one of his very first reflections to it. Which is worth much as an epitaph: “the sun, like death, cannot be looked at squarely.”
Georges Minois, “La Rochefoucauld,” Editions Tallandier, 2007, 488 pp., 25 euros.
