François VI. de La Rochefoucauld

François de La Rochefoucauld was a French nobleman and moralist whose Maximes, first published in 1665, established a new genre and a new standard of psychological honesty in European literature. Born in 1613 in Paris into one of the great families of France, he was a military man who fought in the Fronde — the aristocratic rebellion against Cardinal Mazarin — and was seriously wounded, losing the sight in one eye. The Maximes emerged from the literary salons of Paris in the 1660s, especially that of Madame de Sablé, where pithy moral observations were a fashionable game. La Rochefoucauld's contribution to that game was the most penetrating and the most disturbing: five hundred or so short sentences that find self-interest and amour-propre beneath the surface of every apparently generous or virtuous act. The collection has never been out of print. He died in 1680, having revised the Maximes through five editions.

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