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Updated: May 4, 2025
They spare other men the trouble of sowing, digging and harvesting to live, and thus deserve not to lack that bread which they have sown." This description, eloquently written by La Bruyere, has been quoted by a hundred authors.
Appointment to Cambrai. Disclosure of Madame Guyon's Doctrines. Her Disgrace. Bossuet and Fenelon. Disgrace of Fenelon. Death of Archbishop Harlay. Scene at Conflans. "The Good Langres." A Scene at Marly. Princesses Smoke Pipes! Fortunes of Cavoye. Mademoiselle de Coetlogon. Madame de Guise. Madame de Miramion. Madame de Sevigne. Father Seraphin. An Angry Bishop. Death of La Bruyere.
Descartes, their philosopher, drew all his inferences from consciousness; Madame de Sevigne, the epistolary queen, had for her central motive of all speculation and gossip the love of her daughter; Madame Guyon eliminated her tenets from the ecstasy of self-love; Rochefoucauld derived a set of philosophical maxims from the lessons of mere worldly disappointment; Calvin sought to reform society through the stern bigotry of a private creed; La Bruyere elaborated generic characters from the acute, but narrow observation of artificial society; Boileau established a classical standard of criticism suggested by personal taste, which ignored the progress of the human mind.
At home and abroad, in France and in Europe, he had to a great extent continued the reign of Henry IV., and had completely cleared the way for that of Louis XIV. "Such was the strength and superiority of his genius that he knew all the depths and all the mysteries of government," said La Bruyere in his admission-speech before the French Academy; "he was regardful of foreign countries, he kept in hand crowned heads, he knew what weight to attach to their alliance; with allies he hedged himself against the enemy. . . . And, can you believe it, gentlemen? this practical and austere soul, formidable to the enemies of the state, inexorable to the factious, overwhelmed in negotiations, occupied at one time in weakening the party of heresy, at another in breaking up a league, and at another in meditating a conquest, found time for literary culture, and was fond of literature and of those who made it their profession!"
Compare them in this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La Fontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin and a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities of the caressed professor. It is more than difference of race. It is the difference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.
He left our centre at first pretty well alone, and thrust along the river bank and to the wood of La Bruyere, where we linked up with the division on our right. Lefroy was in the first area, and Masterton in the second, and for three hours it was as desperate a business as I have ever faced ... The improvised switch went, and more and more of the forward zone disappeared.
Fontenelle tells us that Bossuet, who had been tutor to the Dauphin, "made a practice of supplying to the princes such persons, meritorious in letters, as they had need of." In 1684, then, we know not why nor how, Bossuet recommended La Bruyère as tutor to the House of Condé. It is a matter of ceaseless wonderment, however, that the philosopher accepted and retained the post.
And the judgement which La Bruyère passes on this vision is one of withering scorn. His criticism is more convincing than La Rochefoucauld's because it is based upon a wider and a deeper foundation. The vanity which he saw around him was indeed the vanity of the Preacher the emptiness, the insignificance, the unprofitableness, of worldly things.
The position of even enlightened men of the world in that age might be called semi-sceptical. La Bruyere, no doubt, expresses the average of opinion: "Que penser de la magie et du sortilege?
Both external and internal evidence go to prove, I think, that they are substantially the work of La Bruyère, and for those who are not alarmed at theological discussions conducted in rather a profane spirit, they make very good reading.
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