SOURCE: Green, Robert. “Lost Paradise and Self-Delusion in the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld.” The French Review 48, no. 2 (December 1974): 321-30.

In the following essay, Green claims that La Rochefoucauld's use of the maxim to present his ideas and observations fails, in part because he stresses the importance of the concept of self-love.

The maxims of La Rochefoucauld¹ purport to reveal to the reader the naked face of man by showing him the Truth. The emblem of the frontispiece is a portrait of “The Love of Truth” ripping off a mask from Seneca's face, and the fourth edition bears the definitive epigraph: Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices déguisés. This rather pretentious and grandiose aim is supposedly accomplished by means of several hundred moral statements all treating the motives of human conduct which thus expose universal man. Having probed the human soul, La Rochefoucauld...