We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers the sort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day. La Rochefoucauld, although he begins in the first person, has nothing which he chooses to tell us about his own childhood and education. He was married, at the age of fifteen, to a high-born lady, Andree de Vivonne, but her he scarcely mentions. By the side of those glittering amatory escapades of his on the grand scale, with which Europe rang, he seems to have pursued a sober married existence, without upbraidings from his own conscience, or curtain-lectures from his meek duchess, who bore him eight children. La Rochefoucauld's "Memoires" open abruptly with these words:--"I spent the last years of the Cardinal's administration in indolence," and then he begins to discourse on the audacities of the Duke of Buckingham (pleasingly spelled Bouquinquant) and his attacks on the heart of the Queen of France. We gather that although the English envoy can have had no personal influence on the future moralist--since Buckingham was murdered at Portsmouth in 1628, while La Rochefoucauld did not come to court till 1630--yet the young Frenchman so immensely admired what he heard of the Englishman, and so deliberately set himself to take him as a model, that our own knowledge of Buckingham may be of help to us in reproducing an impression of La Rochefoucauld, or rather of the Prince de Marcillac, as he was styled until his father died. After describing the court as the youth of seventeen had found it, he skips five years to tell us how the Queen asked him to run away with her to Brussels in 1637. History has not known quite what to make of this amazing story, of which La Rochefoucauld had the complacency to write more than twenty years afterwards-- "However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I may say that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I was at an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startling things, and I felt that nothing could be more startling or more extravagant than to snatch at the same time the Queen from the King her husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, and Mlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her." He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as an episode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, as though he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own life had not been of much consequence. Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillac was known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youth who carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past the confines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who was twenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describing him--surely by repute--as the type of--