SOURCE: Weber, Joseph G. “The Maximes as Theatre.” In L'Image du souverain dans le theatre de 1600 a 1650/Maximes/Madame de Villedieu, edited by Milorad R. Margitic and Byron R. Wells, pp. 15-33. Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1987.

In this essay, Weber argues that the use of personification, movement, disguises, and other elements in the Maximes are characteristic of classical drama.

Faced with one of the more elusive and cryptic works of literature, analysts have gone to considerable length to identify, contextualize and systematize the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. The discontinuity of the work itself is suggested by its full title: Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665). Initially La Rochefoucauld appears to have thought of them as sentences—“la maladie des sentences,” as he put it—but later adopted a suggestion, if we are to believe Huet, to call them maximes. A good number of fragments...