NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION

Five authorized editions of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims appeared in his lifetime. These are conventionally designated by Roman numerals, as follows:

I	Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1664; postdated 1665 on its title page). Some of its maxims exist in two states (designated 1 and 2), as La Rochefoucauld made textual alterations while the work was passing through the press.
II	Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1666).
III	Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1671).
IV	Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1674; postdated 1675 on its title page).
V	Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1678). Less than a fortnight later 107 of its maxims were issued separately by the same publisher, in a booklet entitled Nouvelles Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales; this corrects a couple of errors in the main volume, and is therefore used as our copytext in cases where the two editions differ.

Pages 2–143 of the present book reprint the complete contents of v (a preliminary address to the reader, an unnumbered epigraph, 504 numbered maxims, and a thematic index). To avoid ambiguity, maxims from this edition are cited with a prefixed v, from v: 1 to v: 504. In the French texts, the punctuation and capitalization of the 1678 edition have been preserved for the first time since the seventeenth century. Recent scholarship has attached increasing importance to such details; they were probably determined by the publisher and compositors rather than by La Rochefoucauld himself, but so diligent a reviser would no doubt have altered anything that did not meet with his approval. Spelling has been modernized where appropriate.

At the end of each English translation, a parenthesis in square brackets lists the editions in which this particular maxim appeared. ‘[III—V]’, for example, indicates that the maxim was first published in III and was reprinted in IV and V.

Pages 144–175—‘Maxims Finally Withdrawn by La Rochefoucauld’—contain maxims that had been published in one or more of the four earlier editions (I-IV) but were not reprinted in v. These are numbered according to the last edition in which they appeared. Thus ‘1: 259²’ is the second state of maxim 259 in La Rochefoucauld’s first authorized edition. The punctuation and capitalization of the copytexts have been preserved, and a parenthesis at the end of each English translation lists the editions that contained the maxim in question.

Pages 176–191 —‘Maxims Never Published by La Rochefoucauld’—contain maxims absent from 1–V, but preserved in the following sources:

L	A partly autograph manuscript (compiled between about 1659 and 1663) formerly at the Château de Liancourt.
PV124	Portefeuilles Vallant, tome 2, folios 124–5, a small manuscript collection of maxims sent by La Rochefoucauld to Jacques Esprit, probably in 1660.
SL	Bibliothèque Nationale Smith-Lesouëf ms 90, a manuscript copy dated 1663 (several similar copies also survive).
PV158	Portefeuilles Vallant, tome 2, folio 158, a small manuscript collection of maxims sent by La Rochefoucauld to Madame de Sablé in 1667.
VIs	A collection of fifty maxims compiled between 1671 and 1674, and published posthumously as a supplement to the sixth edition, Réflexions ou Sentences morales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1693).

Again, these are numbered according to their source. Thus ‘VIS: 2’ is maxim 2 in the 1693 supplement. Ten of these maxims (L 113, L 121, L 122, L 210, L 212, PV124: 4, PV158: 1, PV158: 3, PV158: 4, and VIS: 39) have been preserved in La Rochefoucauld’s own handwriting: in those cases the original punctuation (or absence of punctuation) has been retained. The other maxims in this section were diversely and heterogeneously punctuated by their early copyists, and there is no reason to believe that La Rochefoucauld authorized the results; in those cases, therefore, punctuation has been silently standardized or emended where appropriate.

Most editions of La Rochefoucauld contain a section of withdrawn and unpublished maxims, but they disagree markedly as to which items should be included, and they number them in bewilderingly different ways. vis: 21, presented as a distinct maxim by Gilbert, is regarded by Truchet and Lafond as a mere variant of v: 368; L 207, presented as distinct by Truchet, is treated by Gilbert and Lafond as a variant of v: 504; L 249, presented as distinct by Lafond, is treated by Gilbert and Truchet as a variant of v: 243; 1: 101, regarded by all three of those editors as a variant of v: 88, is printed as a distinct maxim by Aimé-Martin and Duplessis. Our own policy has been simple. We have included every item that has been reckoned as a separate maxim by any editor at any time during the past two centuries. A table at the back of the volume (pages 324–7) provides a concordance to the different editors’ numbering systems. The reader will therefore be able to find quickly the text and translation of any item that has been cited in any reference work whatsoever—regardless of the specific edition on which that reference work was based.

The following abbreviations are used for the works presented on pages 192–275:

RD	Réflexions diverses (Miscellaneous Reflections), numbered RD 1 to RD 19.
RDA	Four short prose pieces annexed to the Réflexions diverses in one manuscript (325bis); they are numbered RDA 1 to RDA 4.

These works were never published by La Rochefoucauld and survive only in imperfect later copies, which are designated as follows:

A(163)	A seventeenth-century manuscript of RD 1–19, now lost, but transcribed partly in Œuvres inédites de La Rochefoucauld, ed. Édouard de Barthélemy (Paris: Hachette, 1863), and fully in Œuvres de La Rochefoucauld, tome 1, ed. D. L. Gilbert (Paris: Hachette, 1868). Barthélemy’s transcript is denoted A(163)B, and Gilbert’s A(163)G; A(163)BG denotes the agreement of the two. In three places the manuscript contained corrections reportedly in La Rochefoucauld’s own hand; 1 denotes the uncorrected state, 2 the corrected.
325bis	A seventeenth-century manuscript of RD 1–5, 7–11, 13–19, and RDA 1–4; it too is now lost, but its variant readings were fully recorded in Œuvres de La Rochefoucauld, Appendice du tome 1, ed. Adolphe Regnier (Paris: Hachette, 1883).
Ch	The Morgand, Hanotaux, or Chapet manuscript, an eighteenth-century copy of RD 1–19.
Gr	RD 2–5, 10, 13, and 16, as printed in Recueil de pièces d’histoire et de littérature, tome 1, ed. François Granet (Paris: Chaubert, 1731).
Br	RD 2–5, 10, 13, and 16, as printed in Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales de M. le duc de la Rochefoucauld, ed. Gabriel Brotier (Paris: J.-G. Mérigot, 1789).

All currently available French editions of the Réflexions diverses were prepared forty or more years ago, and do not reflect the findings of recent scholarship. Some (including the Pléiade editions) simply reprint A(163)^G; others (including Lafond and Plazenet) reproduce Jacques Truchet’s 1967 reconstruction of the text, based mainly on 325^bis. Truchet recognized that 325^bis represented a later state of the text than A(163), and believed that it was prepared by La Rochefoucauld himself. (The most radical changes were that 325^bis omitted RD 6 and 12, and transposed RD 17 to the very end of the series; all three of those alterations had been recommended by an unknown hand—or hands—in the margin of A(163).) However, subsequent research has established that the revisions need not have been made under the author’s supervision or even within his lifetime; during the first century after La Rochefoucauld’s death there were undoubtedly various attempts to improve the Réflexions diverses, principally by reworking phraseology and deleting sections that did not appeal to the revisers. Therefore, the present volume contains a new reconstruction of the text, using A(163)^G as copytext, but correcting it from the other copies where appropriate. For RDA 1–4, which were not included in A(163), the text is based on 325^bis. We have preserved the punctuation and capitalization of our copytexts, even though it cannot reflect La Rochefoucauld’s own practice in every respect.

Because both Gilbert’s and Barthélemy’s transcripts of the lost manuscript A(163) were inaccurate, there are places where the text of the Réflexions diverses cannot be reconstructed with certainty. Nevertheless, more can perhaps be achieved than previous editors have supposed. To take one small example, in the second-last sentence of RD 1 all currently available French texts follow Gilbert’s transcript of A(163), reading bien qu’il ait infiniment plus. However, Barthélemy’s transcript of the same manuscript reads bien qu ’il y ait infiniment plus—and this is clearly what the manuscript had, because it is the reading found in both the other textual witnesses to the passage (325^bis and Ch), neither of which could have been seen by Barthélemy.

Unfortunately, Truchet’s textual apparatus was not as complete as his note on the text suggests (in particular, he selectively under-reported errors of 325^bis). Therefore, the Explanatory Notes to the present volume contain a new textual apparatus to RD 1–19, recording the variants of all the above sources at all points where A(163)^G and 325^bis differ substantively, and at all points where our reconstruction differs substantively from other editions now in print.

Throughout the present volume, our translations aim to imitate the syntax and word-order of the original wherever this can be done without falsifying or obscuring the sense. Each French term is usually rendered by a single English term, though not always. The vocabularies of the two languages do not match precisely; moreover, even the most punctilious of professional philosophers have not been absolutely consistent in their use of words, and we must expect La Rochefoucauld’s practice to be at least equally flexible.

The term honnête poses particular problems for a translator. In the seventeenth century, as the separate entries in La Rochefoucauld’s Index implied, it had one range of meanings when applied to women, and another range of meanings when applied to men. In relation to women it referred principally, though not exclusively, to sexual morality; in relation to men it implied both a social and a moral standing, the latter being concerned more with personal integrity in general than with sexuality in particular. A woman could not possibly be an honnête femme without being chaste, but even a very unchaste man—Louis XIV, for instance—could be an honnête homme. (‘Honest’ in seventeenth-century English carried some of the same ambiguities. When Othello wonders whether Desdemona is ‘honest’ he is concerned primarily—if not solely—with her chastity; when he describes Iago as ‘honest’ he is not at all considering whether the man is chaste.) In modern English, very few terms have both the moral and the social resonances of honnête homme; we have chosen the rendering ‘man of honor’, ‘honorable man’, using the -or spelling to distinguish it from honneur, which we always render ‘honour’ with a u. (Many seventeenth-century French writers, especially poets, played on the verbal similarity between honneur and honnête, as if it reflected a kinship in sense.) For honnête femme we have chosen the translation ‘virtuous woman’, which nowadays tends to be used primarily of sexual virtue without being absolutely restricted to that.

We have striven to imitate the distinctive stylistic features of La Rochefoucauld’s prose—to the very limited extent that this can be done in modern English. La Rochefoucauld sometimes tended to employ a word in ways that surprised his contemporaries a little, and seemed out of keeping with its accepted meaning. The 1678 preliminary note acknowledged that the book did not generally use the term intérêt in its most familiar sense; some of the work’s first readers made similar comments about various other words—including some of the most important ones (amour-propre and maxime itself were among them). Such readers were slightly unsettled by the book’s use of language: it gave them a little series of jolts, confronting them now and then with words used in marginally unidiomatic ways, or not quite in any accustomed sense. The present translation occasionally aims to reproduce this characteristic, and significant, trait in modern English—though of course it cannot always ‘stretch’ the usage of exactly the same words as La Rochefoucauld does. We have also tried to imitate in English some of the important stylistic variations within La Rochefoucauld’s output, such as the difference between the crisp, epigrammatic manner of the short maxims and the slightly stiff, ungainly phraseology of the more expansive essays.

The translations (unlike the facing French texts) nearly always use modern punctuation and capitalization; very occasionally, however, we have allowed ourselves a seventeenth-century comma, colon, or capital letter, at points where this might help to clarify the sense.

Explanatory Notes will be found at the back of the volume. In the few cases where a note does not refer to the whole of a maxim or reflection, the section discussed is identified by an asterisk in the English translation.

Judith Luna of Oxford University Press and the Press’s anonymous pre-publication readers provided valuable assistance with the preparation of this volume. To Dr and Mrs H. J. Blackmore and Drs Warner and Erica Quarles de Quarles we have long and extensive debts of many kinds, which no acknowledgement could adequately summarize.