François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) did not invent the form known as the maxim, but instead, fairly early in its history, merely perfected it. Defying any notion of progress in the arts, nobody has come along in more than three centuries who has done it better; he remains unsurpassed. “We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others,” he wrote, and later, not gilding but crushing the lily, he added: “We are easily consoled for the misfortunes of our friends, if they afford us an opportunity of displaying our affection.” He also wrote that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue” and that “however much good we hear of ourselves, we never learn anything new.” Bull’s-eyes, all of them, but then La Rochefoucauld hits the target more than any other writer of maxims in the history of the form, making him, beyond all argument, the maximum maximist.
Epigrams, aphorisms, apothegms, maxims, there is a small problem of nomenclature here, but scarcely an intolerable one.
The taste for maxims is rather like that for oysters: a taste for something sharp, faintly metallic, a pleasure brief but memorable, leaving an aftertaste (afterthought) and causing a felicitous ping to go off at the back of the throat (head). Epigrams, aphorisms, apothegms, maxims, there is a small problem of nomenclature here, but scarcely an intolerable one. The element
