“Il n’y a que l’inutilite du premier deluge qui empeche
  Dieu d’en envoyer un second.”

  “L’homme arrive novice a chaque age de la vie.”

  “Sans le gouvernement on ne rirait plus en France.”

With a difference, these come very near Rochefoucauld’s own.  “Take self-love from love, and little remains,” might be an extract from that Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read.  “Self-love is the Love of a man’s own Self, and of everything else, for his own Sake”:  so begins his terrible analysis of human motives, and no man escapes from a perusal of it without recognition of himself, just as there is no escape from Meredith’s Egoist.  All of us move darkly in that awful abyss of Self, and as the fourth Maxim says, “When a Man hath travelled never so far, and discovered never so much in the world of Self-love, yet still the Terra Incognita will take up a considerable part of the Map.”  On the belief that self-love prompts and pervades all actions, the greater part of the maxims are founded.  The most famous of them all is the saying that “Hypocrisy is a sort of Homage which Vice pays to Virtue,” but there are others that fly from mouth to mouth, and treat more definitely of self-love.  “The reason why Ladies and their Lovers are at ease in one another’s company, is because they never talk of anything but themselves”; or “There is something not unpleasing to us in the misfortunes of our best friends.”  These are, perhaps, the three most famous, though we doubt whether the last of them has enough truth in it for a first-rate maxim.  Might one not rather say that the perpetual misfortunes of our friends are the chief plague of existence?  Goethe came nearer the truth when he wrote:  “I am happy enough for myself.  Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side.  Only, for others, I am not happy.”  But Rochefoucauld had to play the cynic, and a dash of cynicism adds a fine ingredient to a maxim.

Nevertheless, after reading this book of Maxims through again, all the seven hundred and more (a hideous task, almost as bad as reading a whole volume of Punch on end), I incline to think Rochefoucauld’s reputation for cynicism much exaggerated.  It may be that the world grows more cynical with age, unlike a man, whose cynical period ends with youth.  At all events, in the last twenty years we have had half a dozen writers who, as far as cynicism goes, could give Rochefoucauld fifty maxims in a hundred.  In all artificial and inactive times and places, as in Rochefoucauld’s France, Queen Anne’s England, the London of the end of last century, and our Universities always, epigram and a dandy cynicism are sure to flourish until they often sicken us with the name of literature.  But in Rochefoucauld we perceive glimpses of something far deeper than the cynicism that makes his reputation.  It is not to a cynic, or to the middle of the seventeenth century in France, that we should look for such sayings as these: