*La Bruyère, Jean de
Jean de La Bruyère
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La Bruyère, Jean de
French, 1645–1696
The story is told about La Bruyère that he often visited Étienne Michallet, who would eventually become his publisher, and enjoyed playing with the book dealer’s young daughter. On the day he offered Michallet the manuscript of Les Caractères ou moeurs de ce siècle (The Characters, or the Manners of the Age), La Bruyère, uncertain of the book’s chances for success, proposed that any profits from the work become the dowry of Michallet’s daughter. Since her dowry was substantial, the story may well be true. The author who emerges from the pages of the Characters, however, is anything but a carefree, resilient man given to spontaneous gestures of liberality. On the contrary, La Bruyère is a sharp, at times bitter observer of the foibles of humankind. His trenchant prose cuts to the core—often unpleasant—of issues and personalities. In its acuity of perception, attention to detail, and insistence on stylistic perfection, La Bruyère’s work reflects, above all, the author’s devotion to writing.
La Bruyère is best known for his Characters, first published in 1688 together with his translation of the Characters of Theophrastus (wr. c. 319 BCE). The translation of Theophrastus is based primarily upon the Latin translation by Isaac Casaubon (1592 and 1599), although La Bruyère clearly knew Greek and consulted the original text. In 1693, La Bruyère was elected to membership of the French Academy. The Discours (Discourse) he delivered on the day of his reception was immediately attacked, and he had it reprinted in the eighth edition of his Characters, this time with a preface in which he defends himself. Aside from some letters, most of them to Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé about his grandson, for whom La Bruyère had been appointed tutor, the author’s only other published work is the Dialogues sur le quiétisme (Dialogues on Quietism). Here La Bruyère sides with his friend and supporter the Bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, against the Quietists, a small sect of religious mystics who believed in the total abandonment of the human will in the contemplation of God’s presence. The nine dialogues were published posthumously in 1698, but carry a 1699 publication date. Ellies du Pin, their editor, appears to have written the last two dialogues and undoubtedly altered the others. This work is not an important literary achievement.
La Bruyère is, finally, a writer whose greatness rests on one text—the Characters. That work was far more popular than either its author or its publisher had foreseen.
During La Bruyère’s lifetime, eight successive editions appeared, and in the course of their publication, the work more than doubled in size. Taking his society and its inhabitants as raw material, La Bruyère set out, as he says in the preface of the Characters, to “paint mankind in general.” He was simply giving back to the public what it had given him. This he did in a series of aphorisms, remarks, descriptive passages, and portraits, organized into 16 chapters whose titles cover a wide diversity of subjects, among them the works of the mind, women, the heart, the court, the town, the sovereign, humankind, the pulpit, and freethinkers. La Bruyère claimed that the individual fragments of each chapter had “a certain gradual connection,” but this seems to be more selfjustification than the enunciation of a principle to which he consciously adhered as he wrote.
The most memorable and controversial passages in the Characters are the portraits of imaginary individuals. These are drawn with brilliant stylistic finesse and are recognized as models of literary portraiture. Some of the best known of these character studies are those of Ménippe, who has no thoughts of his own but merely repeats the sentiments of others; the hopelessly absent-minded Ménalque; the hyper-hypocritical Onuphre, based on Molière’s Tartuffe; and the couple Giton and Phédon, whose physical beings correspond exactly to their financial circumstances of extraordinary wealth in the one case and abject penury in the other.
From shortly after the first appearance of the Characters, clefs (keys) claiming to identify the imaginary characters began to be published. However, La Bruyère maintained that he did not, in creating each portrait, take specific people as his subjects.
The real interest of the Characters has little to do with whom La Bruyère may have had in mind in any particular passage. In the preface to his speech before the French Academy, he asserts that “every writer is a painter, and every excellent writer an excellent painter.” He later defends his Characters as being precisely what he had said they would be: a portrayal of “mankind in general.”
La Bruyère’s portrait of humankind as it develops through the editions of the Characters has a paradoxical quality. As one of the major moralistes of 17th-century French literature, La Bruyère, like his counterparts La Rochefoucauld and Pascal, is a keen observer of human beings. What he observes, however, does not always correspond perfectly with what this orthodox Catholic monarchist believes; and therein lies something of the fascination that his work holds for readers today. On the one hand, La Bruyère thinks it possible to penetrate beyond the surface of human existence to uncover a fixed reality, the essence of a human being. On the other, he wonders, “…how shall I fix this restless, giddy, and irascible man… I depict him as devout…and he is already a freethinker.” Whence La Bruyère’s definition of a devout person as “one who under an atheistical king, would be an atheist.” In the end, La Bruyère admits, “Such a man’s inmost feelings can really not be described…he is not exactly what he thinks he is himself or what he appears to be.”
La Bruyère is one of the few major writers of 17th-century France to evince compassion for those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. A committed monarchist convinced of the necessity of a social hierarchy, he believed, nonetheless, that the king should behave as a shepherd concerned for the wellbeing of his flock. A famous passage in the Characters evokes the plight of France’s peasants, reduced to the state of animals and unable to reap the benefits of the crops they have sown. Given the choice between belonging to the society of a nobility that does little good and is capable of great evil and that of the common people, La Bruyère declares firmly that “I should select, without hesitation, being a plebeian.”
What the Characters portray is not always an attractive sight, but each of the work’s perfectly crafted passages reveals an author who attempts to lay bare the truth. The drama of the text lies in the disparity at times apparent between what it reveals and what its author had imagined he would discover.
MICHAEL S.KOPPISCH
See also Character Sketch
Biography
Born probably August 1645 (baptized 17 August 1645) in Paris. Studied law in Orléans, licence in law, 1665; admitted to the bar, Paris, 1665. Bought office as king’s counselor and financial treasurer, Caen, 1673 (sold, 1686); tutor to his sister’s daughters, from 1674; tutor, 1684–87, then secretary and librarian to Duke Louis II de Bourbon. Elected to the French Academy, 1693. Died (of apoplexy) in Versailles, 10–11 May 1696.
Selected Writings
Essays and Related Prose
Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec, avec Les Caractères ou moeurs de ce siècle, 1688; several substantially revised and enlarged editions, 1689–96; edited by R.Garapon, 1962, and J. P.Kaminker, 2 vols., 1966; as The Characters, or the Manners of the Age (various translators), 1699; translated by Henri van Laun, 1885 (reprinted 1992), Helen Stott, 1890, and Jean Stewart, 1970; selections translated by Elizabeth
Lee, 1903
Other writings: dialogues, a discourse, and correspondence.
Collected works editions: OEuvres complétes, edited by Gustave Servois, 4 vols., 1865– 82, revised edition, 1922; OEuvres completes (Pléiade Edition), edited by Julien Benda, 1951.
Further Reading
Brody, Jules, Du style à la pensée: Trois études sur Les Caractères de La Bruyère, Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1980
Delft, Louis van, La Bruyère moraliste, Geneva: Droz, 1971
Garapon, Robert, Les Caractères de La Bruyère, La Bruyère au travail, Paris: Société d’Édition d’Énseignement Supérieur, 1978
Gray, Floyd, La Bruyère, amateur de Caractères, Paris: Nizet, 1986
Jasinski, René, Deux accès à La Bruyère, Paris: Minard, 1971
Kirsch, Doris, La Bruyère ou le style cruel, Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1977
Knox, Edward C., Jean de La Bruyère, New York: Twayne, 1973
Koppisch, Michael S., The Dissolution of Character: Changing Perspectives in La Bruyère’s Caractères, Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1981
Michaut, Gustave, La Bruyère, Paris: Boivin, 1936
Mourgues, Odette de, Two French Moralists: La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978
Richard, Pierre, La Bruyère et ses Caractères, Paris: Nizet, 1965
Soler, Patrice, Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994
Stegmann, André, Les Caractères de La Bruyère, Paris: Larousse, 1972
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