LA BRUYÈRE

Life and Works. — Jean de la Bruyère was born in 1645 at Paris, of bourgeois parents in easy circumstances. He was called to the Bar, but did not practise, and in 1671 bought an officiai post, which carried with it a title to nobility. Little is known of his life. Ovving to the recommendation of Bossuet, he became tutor to the grandson of the Great Condé, and when the éducation of his pupil was considered complète, La Bruyère remained as a kind of pensioner in the house of Condé. His position, though it gave him leisure, was not an easy or a pleasant one. The ■ ferocity ' of his former pupil is said to hâve been ■ extrême,' and other members of the Condé family were subject to great outbursts of violence. La Bruyère was made to feel that he was a dépendent, and this, added to the sensé of grievance that results from the subjection of personal merit to pride of birth, accounts for much of the bitterness which appears in his writings. | In revenge, the society into which he was thrown provided him with an excellent field for observation. That he cultivated it to some purpose is évident in the pages of the famous Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du Grec avec les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle, published for the first time in 1688. The ■ characters ' of Aristotle's pupil

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Theophrastus were forgotten in the interest excited by La Bruyère's own work, which owed much of its immédiate success to the fact that many typical characters in it fitted so many living personalities. Everybody was engaged in supplying ■ keys ' to the characters, and the originals who fancied themselves caricatured were far from pleased.

La Bruyère was admitted to the Academy in 1693, and died three years later. It was rumoured that his death was due to poison administered by one of his enraged ' originals,' but there is no évidence for this supposition. " Besides the Caractères, La Bruyère left the Dialogues sur le Quiêtisme, published after his death, and so mutilated by its editor that it can scarcely be regarded as his work, and also some letters. St. Simon, in his Memoirs, has left us the following epitaph on La Bruyère : ! C'était un fort honnête homme, de très bonne compagnie, simple, sans rien de pédant, et fort désintéressé.' He gave the total profits of his work, mounting to over a hundred thousand francs, as a dowry to the daughter of his publisher, Michallet.

The Caractères are a collection of maxims, portraits, dialogues, stories, and pictures which embody the thought and the manners of the society in which La Bruyère moved. They are classed under headings, just as the spécimens of a botanist or conchologist are classed, but there is no real séquence in his writings. It would be possible to eut out almost any paragraph ' sans couper dans le vif ' and ' sans déranger le tout,' as Fénelon puts it (see text, p. 141). In this La Bruyère differs from the other great prose writers of the seventeenth century, as also in his comparative neglect of the period, for which he often substitutes the short, nervous sentence of the eighteenth century. The literary method of La