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Updated: May 4, 2025
Certainly there is no lack of documents, but they are absolutely contradictory. To the celebrated description of La Bruyere we may oppose the enthusiastic picture drawn by the English traveller Young of the prosperous condition of the peasants of some of the French provinces.
Les Caractères is the title of La Bruyère's book; but its sub-title 'Les Moeurs de ce Siècle' gives a juster notion of its contents. The whole of society, as it appeared to the subtle and penetrating gaze of La Bruyère, flows through its pages. In them, Versailles rises before us, less in its outward form than in its spiritual content its secret, essential self.
"We know nothing or nearly nothing of the life of La Bruyère, and this obscurity adds, it has been remarked, to the effect of his work, and, it may be said, to the piquant happiness of his destiny.
Not only did my talent feeble as it seemed to me when I thought of the great masters cause me to be sought after and welcomed by society, but I sometimes was the object of attentions which I might call public, and of which, I avow, I was very proud. For example, I had made portraits of Cardinal Fleury and La Bruyère, copied from engravings of ancient date.
"No one has ever spoken with more correctness, clearness, and rapidity, neither in a manner more noble or more natural," said Mlle. de Launay. Through this feminine La Bruyere, as Sainte-Beuve has styled her, we are introduced to the life at Sceaux.
The author of the "Maximes" was the head of one of the great princely houses of France. The author of the "Caractères" was the type of the plebeian citizen of Paris. If La Rochefoucauld offers us the quintessence of aristocracy, La Bruyère is not less a specimen of the middle class. His reputation as an honest man long suffered from his own joke about his ancestry.
We do not pretend to compare the authors of these admirable delineations with Molière and La Bruyère in profundity of insight or in grasp and ethical mastery, but they are certainly altogether in a new vein even from those two great writers, when we speak of the familiar, the real, and the particular, as distinguished from old classic generality.
The first is a historical witness, the second a mere academic rhymer. From La Fontaine it is possible to reconstruct the whole society of his epoch, and the old Champenois with his beasts remains the only Homer France has ever possessed. He has as many portraits of men and women as La Bruyere, and Moliere is not more humorous. His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of grossness.
The consequence was that the public instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued to contemplate with reverence Bossuet's huge historical outlines, but to turn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyère's finished etchings of the tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings. Everyone who approaches an analysis of the "Caractères" is obliged to pause to commend the style of La Bruyère.
What La Bruyère saw with the spiritual gaze of a moralist rushed upon the vision of Saint-Simon in all the colour, the detail, the intensity, the frenzy, of actual fact. He makes no comments, no reflections or, if he does, they are ridiculous; he only sees and feels.
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