François de La Rochefoucauld

Born in Paris in 1613 as Prince de Marcillac, when the court swung between coddling and crushing the nobility, he carried the weight of lineage—his great-grandfather died a Huguenot in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. He became the model seventeenth-century nobleman, until 1650 when he assumed his dukedom. What survives of his dense literary work are two published pieces: the Memoirs and the Maximes, the latter a collection of aphorisms that Leonard Tancock called "one of the most deeply felt, most intensely lived texts in French literature." The Maximes distilled his experience, resentment…