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, resentments, and observations into cold universal claims: human conduct as callous machinery, virtue as performance, affection and loyalty as pretty lies. He died in 1680, leaving a book that refuses comfort.