We are now beginning to see the real author of the "Maximes," when, at the age of forty, he begins to peep forth from the travesty of his aristocratic violence and idleness. Whether the transformation would have been gradual instead of sudden is what can never be decided, but we date it from July 2, 1652, when he was dangerously wounded in a riot in the Faubourg St. Antoine, at the Picpus barricade, where he was shot in the forehead and, as it at first appeared, blinded for life. According to the faithful Gourville, when La Rochefoucauld thought he would lose his eyesight, he had a picture of Madame de Longueville engraved with two lines under it from a fashionable tragedy, the "Alcyonee" of Duryer-- _That I might hold her heart and please her lovely eyes I made my war on kings and would have fought the skies._ With this piece of rodomontade the old Rochefoucauld ceases and makes place for the author of the "Maximes." When he recovered from his wound, his spirit of adventure was broken. He submitted to the cardinal, he withdrew from Conde, and in 1653, still his head bound with bandages and wearing black spectacles to hide those clear and seductive eyes which Petitot had painted, he crept, a broken man, to his country house at Verteuil, in the neighbourhood of Ruffec, now in the Charente. This chateau, built just two hundred years before that date, still exists, a noble relic of feudal France, and a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the author of the "Maximes." No one was ever more suddenly and more completely cured of a whole system of existence than was La Rochefoucauld by the wound which was so nearly fatal. He said, "It is impossible for any man who has escaped from civil war to plunge into it again." For him, at all events, it was impossible. His only wish in 1653 was to bury himself and his slow convalescence among his woods at Verteuil. In this enforced seclusion, at the age of forty, he turned for solace to literature, which he would seem to have neglected hitherto. We know nothing of his education, which had probably been as primitive as that of any pleasure-seeking and imperious young nobleman of the time. He went to the wars when he was thirteen. In an undated letter he says that he sends some Latin verses composed by a friend for the judgment of his unnamed correspondent, but he adds, "I do not know enough Latin to dare to give an opinion." M. Henri Regnier, in his invaluable "Lexique de la langue de La Rochefoucauld" (1883) points out that the Duke's evident lack of classical knowledge is a positive advantage to him, as it throws him entirely on the resources of pure French. In like manner we may rejoice that Shakespeare had "little Latin and less Greek."