The French have always loved epigrams. The “ancien régime” in France has been described as a “despotism tempered by epigrams” and the peculiar genius of French thought has always found expression through the aphorism. Pascal, Montesquieu, De Retz, La Bruyère, and chiefly La Rochefoucauld stand as masters in the art, and it is not at all surprising that a race, says Voltaire, whose taste was formed and whose sense of justice and precision determined by the collections of maxims of Rochefoucauld should have paused some time before the psychoanalytic theory should be of interest to them. They were unconscious psychoanalysts already. When for nearly three centuries such a