and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of
Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim,
"Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul."
Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon
counter-scuffle--such was the life of the young French nobleman of whom
La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type
and specimen.

La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the "Maximes," but of a
second book which is much less often read. This is his "Memoires," a
very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary
history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary
to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must
be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book is
like a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to a
different scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but they
make up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times.
No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with these
authentic fragments of the social and political history of France
under Richelieu and Mazarin. These Memoirs had a very remarkable
influence on the general literature of France. They turned out of
favour the chronicles of "illustrious lives," the pompous and false
travesties of history, which the sixteenth century had delighted in,
and in this way they served to prepare for the purification of French
taste. The note of the best of them was a happy sincerity even in
egotism, a simplicity even in describing the most monstrous and
grotesque events. Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seems
to me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is not
to be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personal
recollections.

We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers the
sort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day. La
Rochefoucauld, although he begins in the first person, has nothing
which he chooses to tell us about his own childhood and education. He
was married, at the age of fifteen, to a high-born lady, Andree de
Vivonne, but her he scarcely mentions. By the side of those glittering
amatory escapades of his on the grand scale, with which Europe rang,
he seems to have pursued a sober married existence, without
upbraidings from his own conscience, or curtain-lectures from his meek
d