collected maxims and other reflections with parallel french text apr 2007

[...]... first authorized edition of the maxims appeared on  October , with the title Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales (Moral Reflections or Sententiae and Maxims) Its textual history shows the haste with which it was prepared In its original state, three maxims were accidentally duplicated, two were assigned the same number, several contained obvious textual errors, and at least one politically... at home with the longer, less concise format (even within the Maxims, the longer pieces tend to be xxvi Introduction less stylistically poised than the very short ones) Their outlook is consistent with that of the Maxims wherever the two can be compared, but they deal with many matters that the published book avoids; and even when they cover similar terrain (as with  , ‘Social Contact’, and  ,... Rochefoucauld’s maxims were products of French Classicism, exact contemporaries of Racine’s secular plays (–) and Boileau’s Art poétique () Their vocabulary is simple and economical, shunning archaisms and neologisms, and using few rare or technical terms Imagery is relatively infrequent (the commonest source being health and disease:  : , , , , , , , ;  : , , ) and is... of a close parallel to this behaviour in any writer from La Rochefoucauld’s time and place No doubt his outlook was coloured by Jansenists, libertins, and other people with whom he came in contact; but we must not forget its sheer individuality Advocates of an Augustinian La Rochefoucauld have cited strikingly close parallels to many of his maxims in the writings of seventeenth-century and earlier... : ,  : ,  : , and s : ) 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 Note on the Text and Translation xxxv the results;... struck a responsive chord in a maxim writer increasingly preoccupied with such themes;  : , first published in , might almost stand as an epigraph to the play) His library apparently contained a  edition of Corneille’s collected dramatic works, as well as many other plays (by Thomas Corneille, Molière, Racine, and others) and novels (especially those of Madeleine de Scudéry); most of these,... discussed them and sometimes suggested modifications to them As time passed, however, La Rochefoucauld’s series of maxims began to separate from the others The surviving documents suggest that there may have been several reasons for this By  Esprit had married, and some time later he left Paris, after which he had little direct contact with the others Madame de Sablé began to feel that her own maxims were... for  September , André Gide distinguishes between ‘the maxims dealing with self-love’ and ‘those that are not associated with any theory or thesis’) Self-love had been an important concept in Western philosophical and moralistic writing ever since the days of ancient Greece; the theme can be pursued through Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Montaigne, Erasmus, and post-Renaissance writers... Miscellaneous Reflections are more diverse in form and content In form some of them are not very different from the longer maxims, but others are multi-paragraph prose meditations up to several thousand words long, recalling the essays of Seneca or Montaigne In style they are less consistently elegant than the Maxims, with some notable clumsinesses of wording and even lapses of syntax Perhaps this is simply... attention, and seems to have sold out within a couple of years La Rochefoucauld’s maxims were much read in fashionable French society, and widely discussed––not always favourably, but there was no serious outcry and no attempt to ban them By the time of the second authorized edition ( September ) the work needed no serious defence La Rochefoucauld’s preliminary address ‘To the Reader’ was rewritten and . manuscripts. E. H. and A. M. B and F G have translated Twelve Plays by Alfred de Musset and George Sand’s Five Comedies and The Devil’s Pool and Other Stories. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore. 1613–1680. [Maximes, English] Collected maxims and other reflections / François de la Rochefoucauld ; translated with an introduction and notes by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère. (Oxford.  COLLECTED MAXIMS AND OTHER REFLECTIONS F  L R, a member of a prominent French aristocratic family, was born in Paris in . He was married at the age of  and took