La Rochefoucauld

"Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples."

-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Yesterday evening, as Peg was immersed in planning for the furnishing of the new Manhattan apartment (it's so small I figure she's given several minutes of her attention per square foot on the subject), I was reading an online essay that casually dropped a quote from one of my favorite little books, La Rouchefoucauld's Maxims:

"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue."

It was like a surprise encounter with an old friend after losing touch for years.

I first ran across the Maxims during that sad, searching phase of my career after I returned to Panama City from Charleston, just in time for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. I'd really loved academia, felt the luxury of being paid to think and write. Then I was back to the parade of human misery that is life as a litigator. I'd always kept a worn copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius on the shelf in my office, having encountered his writings not long after I returned from the Gulf War in 1991. Marcus's brand of stoicism kept me pedaling away between the lines as I worked through those days fifteen years ago reviving my law practice, but it all felt a little too ideal, the author admonishing himself to be a better person, the sort of individual one rarely encounters in real life.

Then I found Maxims, and felt the pull of a kindred spirit.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld was born into the highest ranks of the French nobility during the rough-and-tumble seventeenth century. He lived the intrigues and the ephemeral alliances. He fought in the annual military campaigns that were the main distraction of wealthy young men every summer, at one point getting shot through the head for his trouble. He was known and respected in the salons of those days, before the Sun King built Versailles and forced the nobility to come live with him so he could keep an eye on them.

Late in life, after decades in the fray, he sat down in retirement and penned Maxims, distilling his observations about people and relationships into a pamphlet of pithy aphorisms. In that way his style resembles the Meditations, but with a more jaundiced eye.

Some of my favorites:

"We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."

"There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not."

"Our repentance is not so much sorrow for the ill we have done as a fear of the ill that may befall us."

"Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power."

I would've loved to have had a beer with that guy, picturing a wry smile as he comments on the folly marching past over the course of a life.

My copy of Maxims disappeared with a lot of other things in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael. Life went on, I got older, and then last night there he was again, reminding me of the delight and imparted wisdom I gained from him, from Marcus, from Pascal, from Montaigne. One could have far worse mentors, looking back on it.

I ordered my copy of Maxims last night. It's time to get reacquainted.