Courtin, heir to and censor of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes in the Traité de la paresse (1677)

Courtin admires La Rochefoucauld, who provides him with quotations and sometimes secretly provides him with an inheritance. But the juxtaposition of the different lessons from the Traité de la paresse, and the preferences in rhetoric he expresses in the Nouveau traité de la civilité and the unpublished manuscript L’Art de devenir éloquent, testify to the ambivalence of his judgment: it will be important to see how Courtin makes explicit, moralizes, and, it seems, discreetly rewrites a text that he considers equally enlightening and dangerous.