Roche is connected by steam tramway with Melreux, a station on the main line from Marloie to Liége.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, the name of an old French family which is derived from a castle[1] in the province of Angoumois (department of Charente), which was in its possession in the 11th century. François de La Rochefoucauld (1494–1517), godson of King Francis I., was made count in 1515. At the time of the wars of religion the family fought for the Protestant cause. François (1588–1650) was created duke and peer of France by Louis XIII. in 1622. His son François was the author of the Maxims, and the son of the latter acquired for his house the estates of La Roche-Guyon and Liancourt by his marriage with Jeanne Charlotte du Plessis-Liancourt. Alexandre, duc de La Rochefoucauld (d. 1762), left two daughters, who married into the Roye branch of the family. Of the numerous branches of the family the most famous are those of Roucy, Roye, Bayers, Doudeauville, Randan and Estissac, which all furnished distinguished statesmen and soldiers.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS DE (1613–1680), the greatest maxim writer of France, one of her best memoir writers, and perhaps the most complete and accomplished representative of her ancient nobility, was born at Paris in the Rue des Petits Champs on the 15th of September 1613. The author of the Maxims, who during the lifetime of his father (see above) and part of his own most stirring years bore the title of prince de Marcillac, was somewhat neglected in the matter of education, at least of the scholastic kind; but he joined the army before he was sixteen, and almost immediately began to make a figure in public life. He had been nominally married a year before to Andrée de Vivonne, who seems to have been an affectionate wife, while not a breath of scandal touches her—two points in which La Rochefoucauld was perhaps more fortunate than he deserved. For some years Marcillac continued to take part in the annual campaigns, where he displayed the utmost bravery, though he never obtained credit for much military skill. Then he passed under the spell of Madame de Chevreuse, the first of three celebrated women who successively influenced his life. Through Madame de Chevreuse he became attached to the queen, Anne of Austria, and in one of her quarrels with Richelieu and her husband a wild scheme seems to have been formed, according to which Marcillac was to carry her off to Brussels on a pillion. These caballings against Richelieu, however, had no more serious results (an eight days’ experience of the Bastille excepted) than occasional exiles, that is to say, orders to retire to his father’s estates. After the death of the great minister (1642), opportunity seemed to be favourable to the vague ambition which then animated half the nobility of France. Marcillac became one of the so-called importants, and took an active part in reconciling the queen and Condé in a league against Gaston of Orleans. But the growing credit of Mazarin came in his way, and the liaison in which about this time (1645) he became entangled with the beautiful duchess of Longueville made him irrevocably a Frondeur. He was a conspicuous figure in the siege of Paris, fought desperately in the desultory engagements which were constantly taking place, and was severely wounded at the siege of Mardyke. In the second Fronde Marcillac followed the fortunes of Condé, and the death of his father, which happened at the time (1650), gave rise to a characteristic incident. The nobility of the province gathered to the funeral, and the new duke de La Rochefoucauld took the opportunity of persuading them to follow him in an attempt on the royalist garrison of Saumur, which, however, was not successful. We have no space to follow La Rochefoucauld through the tortuous cabals and negotiations of the later Fronde; it is sufficient to say that he was always brave and generally unlucky. His run of bad fortune reached its climax in the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine (1652), where he was shot through the head, and it was thought that he would lose the sight of both eyes. It was nearly a year before he recovered, and then he found himself at his country seat of Verteuil, with no result of twenty years’ fighting and intriguing except impaired health, a seriously embarrassed fortune, and some cause for bearing a grudge against almost every party and man of importance in the state. He spent some years in this retirement, and he was fortunate enough (thanks chiefly to the fidelity of Gourville, who had been in his service, and who, passing into the service of Mazarin and of Condé, had acquired both wealth and influence) to be able to repair in some measure the breaches in his fortune. He did not, however, return to court life much before Mazarin’s death, when Louis XIV. was on the eve of assuming absolute power, and the turbulent aristocratic anarchy of the Fronde was a thing utterly of the past.
Somewhat earlier, La Rochefoucauld had taken his place in the salon of Madame de Sablé, a member of the old Rambouillet coterie, and the founder of a kind of successor to it. It was known that he, like almost all his more prominent contemporaries, had spent his solitude in writing memoirs, while the special literary employment of the Sablé salon was the fabrication of Sentences and Maxims. In 1662, however, more trouble than reputation, and not a little of both, was given to him by a surreptitious publication of his memoirs, or what purported to be his memoirs, by the Elzevirs. Many of his old friends were deeply wounded, and he hastened to deny flatly the authenticity of the publication, a denial which (as it seems, without any reason) was not very generally accepted. Three years later (1665) he published, though without his name, the still more famous Maxims, which at once established him high among the men of letters of the time. About the same date began the friendship with Madame de la Fayette, which lasted till the end of his life. The glimpses which we have of him henceforward are chiefly derived from the letters of Madame de Sévigné, and, though they show him suffering agonies from gout, are on the whole pleasant. He had a circle of devoted friends; he was recognized as a moralist and man of letters of the first rank; he might have entered the Academy for the asking; and in the altered measure of the times his son, the prince de Marcillac, to whom some time before his death he resigned his titles and honours, enjoyed a considerable position at court. Above all, La Rochefoucauld was generally recognized by his contemporaries from the king downward as a type of the older noblesse as it was before the sun of the great monarch dimmed its brilliant qualities. This position he has retained until the present day. He died at Paris on the 17th of March 1680, of the disease which had so long tormented him.
La Rochefoucauld’s character, if considered without the prejudice which a dislike to his ethical views has sometimes occasioned, is thoroughly respectable and even amiable. Like almost all his contemporaries, he saw in politics little more than a chessboard where the people at large were but pawns. The weight of testimony, however, inclines to the conclusion that he was unusually scrupulous in his conduct, and that his comparative ill-success in the struggle arose more from this scrupulousness than from anything else. He has been charged with irresolution, and there is some ground for admitting the charge so far as to pronounce him one of those the keenness of whose intellect, together with their apprehension of both sides of a question, interferes with their capacity as men of action. But there is no ground whatever for the view which represents the Maxims as the mere outcome of the spite of a disappointed intriguer, disappointed through his own want of skill rather than of fortune.
His importance as a social and historical figure is, however, far inferior to his importance in literature. His work in this respect consists of three parts—letters, Memoirs and the Maxims. His letters exceed one hundred in number, and are biographically valuable, besides displaying not a few of his literary characteristics; but they need not further detain us. The Memoirs, when they are read in their proper form, yield in literary merit, in interest, and in value to no memoirs of the time, not even to those of Retz, between whom and La Rochefoucauld there was a strange mixture of enmity and esteem which resulted in a couple of most characteristic “portraits.” But their history is
- ↑ The castle was largely rebuilt in the reign of Francis I., and is one of the finest specimens of the Renaissance architecture in France.
