His Maximes portrays the callous nature of human conduct, with a cynical attitude towards putative virtue and avowals of affection, friendship, love, and loyalty.

Leonard Tancock regards Maximes as "one of the most deeply felt, most intensely lived texts in French literature", with his "experience, his likes and dislikes, sufferings and petty spites ... crystallized into absolute truths.

"[1] Born in Paris in 1613, at a time when the royal court was vacillating between aiding the nobility and threatening it, he was considered an exemplar of the accomplished seventeenth-century nobleman.

La Rochefoucauld was given the education of a nobleman of his era, which concentrated on military exercises, hunting, court etiquette, elegance of expression and comportment, and a knowledge of the world.

Under the patronage of Madame de Chevreuse, whom he met at this time, the first of the three celebrated women who influenced his life, he joined the service of Queen Anne of Austria.

In one of Madame de Chevreuse's quarrels with Cardinal Richelieu and her husband, a scheme apparently was conceived by which La Rochefoucauld was to carry her off to Brussels on horseback.

Other cabals against Richelieu once resulted in La Rochefoucauld being sentenced to eight days in the Bastille, and he was occasionally required to leave the Court, exiled to his father's estates.

In the power vacuum following Richelieu's death in 1642, La Rochefoucauld, among others, took an active role in urging the queen and Condé to act together against Gaston, Duke of Orléans.

However, the growing reputation of Mazarin impeded the ambition of the plotters, and La Rochefoucauld's 1645 liaison with Duchess of Longueville made him irrevocably a frondeur (aristocratic rebel).

La Rochefoucauld did not return to court life until just before Mazarin's death, when Louis XIV was about to assume absolute power, and the aristocratic anarchy of the Fronde was over.

[7] But above all La Rochefoucauld was recognized by his contemporaries, including the king, as an exemplar of the older noblesse, the nobility that existed under the great monarch before the brilliance of his reign faded.

A book purporting to be La Rochefoucauld's memoirs was published in the Dutch Republic whence, despite the author's protest, it continued to be reprinted for some thirty years.

In fact, in his introduction, he advises, ...the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities.

[13] Previous editions were superseded by that of Jean Désiré Louis Gilbert and Jules Gourdault (1868–1883), in the series Grands Écrivains de la France, 3 vols.