Discovering La Rochefoucauld.(Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld)

I remember the day I discovered La Rochefoucauld; or rather, to put it the way round that is now de rigueur among historians of the Spanish conquest of America, the day La Rochefoucauld discovered me. I was twelve years old, and I had been sent to the local barbers for my two-weekly haircut. I had half a crown pocket money to spend, and I was in the habit of buying books that were slightly too difficult for me to read. Those were the last days in British history when people wanted to appear cleverer, instead of stupider, than they were.

Next door to the barbershop was a newsagent that had a small revolving rack of books. How can I put this without sounding absurdly nostalgic or golden-ageist? You could go to a lot of newsagents in England nowadays without finding a copy of La Rochefoucauld. Anyway, this Penguin Classic, whose bright green border I remember vividly, suited my purposes admirably; a slender volume, it offered a high ratio of intellectual kudos to number of pages.

I took it with me to the barbers. Sometimes I had to wait a long time for my haircut because a small boy was always at the end of the queue, no matter how many people arrived after him. I didn't mind, so long as I had a book with me, and I have since learned that there is no surer way of irritating the officious than contentedly to read while they make you wait.

I didn't much like haircuts, but I liked the barbers who worked in the shop. I admired the way they sharpened their cutthroat razors on the thick leather straps attached by metal rings to the basin stands. I admired the tauromachian flourish with which, at the end of a haircut, they removed the white bib they had placed around their customers' necks. I was intrigued by the little mauve and purple envelopes propped up against the mirrors, that my older brother eventually told me contained condoms. I wasn't much the wiser for this information, however, because in those days they still taught you in school to recite Wordsworth ("Earth has not anything to show more fair," etc.) rather than how to slip prophylactics over bananas--a skill that, oddly enough, has not proved incompatible with an enormous rise in the number of teenage pregnancies.

The barbers also ran an illegal operation: a betting shop. In those days, off-course betting was still illegal in England--how primitive we were!--and gamblers had to resort to a network of clandestine bookies. The barbers would rush to the phone when it rang--leaving their customers half shaved or their scalps still wrapped, turban-like, in a steaming white towel--and speak a strange argot, which even now I do not fully understand, into the receiver, sotto voce in case the mirrors had ears. Two to one against, three to one on, a fiver each way: I could have asked an uncle of mine, who dissipated a small fortune on what some have called the sport of kings, but he called the gee-gees, for the meaning of these arcane phrases, but I never did. I nonetheless sensed that something mildly disreputable, though not truly wicked, was taking place; I also realized also that these men, who wrote nothing down, were possessed of formidable memories. They remembered everything, as preliterate people remember epics and their genealogy. The barbershop was not a place in which I ever expected to have one of the formative literary experiences of my life.

Disregarding copies of The Sporting Life and The Racing Times left on the chairs for the entertainment of waiting customers, I started to read the maxims of the good duke. I was captivated at once, and it struck me as being not in the least strange that a failed intriguer at the court of Louis XIII and vanquished Frondeur should have had something to say to a suburban London schoolboy almost exactly three centuries later. It didn't strike me as strange because at the time I knew nothing of French history other than the military defeats that the French seemed invariably to suffer at the hands of my own dear nation; they had a walk-on part in history, as it were, which was to be smartly and patriotically biffed on the nose. I learnt about the various Louis only two years later: my first school essay on that subject beginning with a stern reprimand to the Sun King. "Louis XIV," I wrote, "was not a good king." A bas Versailles!

I didn't know much about life, but I already knew enough about myself to know that La Rochefoucauld had me in mind when he wrote his maxims. But how, I wondered, did he know so much about me almost three centuries before I was even born? It was uncanny, as if he had not only been watching me closely, but had also entered my brain and read my guilty thoughts--or rather, my thoughts that ought to have been guilty. His maxims exerted an almost physical effect on me, like a sharpened bicycle spoke pushed straight into my solar plexus.