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This was a pardonable illusion in an old-fashioned lady who had not received the polyglot education of the present day; but I observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring acceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by the fashionable prejudice in favour of La Bruyère's idiom.
Turn from Bossuet's orations to Boisguillebert's Détail de la France; from the pulpit rhetorician's courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the misery of the common people; from Corneille and Racine to La Bruyère's picture of "certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burned by the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet they show a human face, and, in fact, are men."
He had evidently not been long in this situation before he had nibbled a part of Cicero's Orations, and eaten nearly all the index of a folio edition of Seneca in Latin, a large part of a volume of La Bruyère's 'Maxims' in French, and several pages of 'Cecilia. He had done no other mischief whatever." Spare your wit, Sir, or Madam! Why should you laugh, and apply the sting in Mr.
It is the feeling expressed in La Bruyère's famous book: "Everything has been said, everything has been written, everything has been done." Here in America everything was to do; we were forced to conjugate our verbs in the future tense. No doubt our existence has been, in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has been the barbarism of life and not of death.
Anim. cap. xv. 'Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae' La Bruyere's Menalque was identified with a M. de Brancas, brother of the Duke de Villars. The adventure of the wig is said really to have happened to him at a reception by the Queen-Mother. He was said also on his wedding-day to have forgotten that he had been married. No. 78. Wednesday, May 30, 1711. Steele.
La Bruyère's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary, and a complete mastery of the art of rhetorical effect.
Hence the outcome of La Bruyere's remark: Il n'y a rien de si d�li�, de si simple, et de si imperceptible o� il n'y entrent des mani�res, qui nous d�c�lent: un sot ni n'entre, ni ne sort, ni ne s'assied, ni ne se l�ve, ni ne se tait, ni n'est sur ses jambes, comme un homme d'esprit.
The books I would particularly recommend, are Cardinal Retz's maxims, Rochefoucault's moral reflections, Bruyere's characters, Fontenelle's plurality of worlds, Sir Josiah Child on trade, Bollinbroke's works; for style, his remarks on the history of England, under the name of Sir John Oldcastle; Puffendorff's Jus Gentium, and Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis: the last two are well translated by Barbeyrac.
But here again, in reality, it is not the question at issue that is interesting one learns more of the true nature of Love in one or two of La Bruyère's short sentences than in all Beyle's three hundred pages of disquisition; but what is absorbing is the sense that comes to one, as one reads it, of the presence, running through it all, of a restless and problematical spirit.
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