1764–1830 · French duke, soldier & aphorist; Académie française
Pierre-Marc-Gaston, duc de Lévis (1764–1830) was a French soldier, royalist politician and man of letters, elected to the Académie française in 1816. He is best remembered as an aphorist for his Maximes et réflexions sur différents sujets de morale et de politique (1808), a slim collection in the French moralist tradition. His terse maxims were later, and wrongly, absorbed into the vast pool of quotations pinned on Voltaire.