Chapter 5

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. He wrote, "I warn everybody whom it may concern, in order that the world may be prepared and nobody be surprised, that if ever it should happen that one of the mighty of the earth should deem me worthy of his care, in other words if I should ever come into an immense fortune, there is a Godefroi de La Bruyère whom all the chroniclers place in the list of the greatest nobles of France who followed Godefroi de Bouillon to the conquest of the Holy Land. When that happens, I shall descend from him in the direct line." One would think that a child could perceive this to be a satire at the profiteers of the age, who invented ancestors, and so a child would to-day, but in the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century it was not safe to be funny. In particular, nonsense--the divine charm of which we now admit--had not been acclimatized, and was looked upon with grave displeasure. It wrings the heart that when Goldsmith, in a purple coat, pretended to think himself more attractive than the Jessamy Bride, his contemporaries severely censured this as an instance of his "vanity."

So the fools and fops of La Bruyère's time thought or pretended to think that he was seriously claiming to be of noble birth. Nothing was further from his intention; no La Bruyère had taken part in the Crusades, any more than any member of Charles Lamb's family had been Pope of Rome. The moralist's father, Louis de La Bruyère, was Comptroller-General of Rents of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris; his mother was an attorney's daughter. The eldest of five, he was born on August 17, 1645, in the centre of old Paris, close to the church of St. Christopher. It is only of late years that this fact has been discovered, and there are still immense blanks in the life of La Bruyère during which he disappears from us altogether, engulfed in the lanes of the Cité, not because of any adventurous mystery, but simply because of his total lack of adventure. There has scarcely lived a great man of letters in comparatively recent times about whose life there is so little to relate as about that of La Bruyère. He is believed to have gone to school to the Fathers of the Oratory, but even that is not certain. His knowledge of Greek is thought to prove it, but, though the Oratorians were admirable Hellenists, surely Greek could be learned elsewhere.

When he was twenty, he passed his examination in law in Orleans, and, coming back to Paris, practised as a lawyer for eight or nine years. He was concerned in no famous case, it is supposed, since his name is never mentioned in the gossip of the time. He inherited a competence from his father, and probably lived an idle life, diversified by a little legal business of a very mediocre nature. As his biographer says, he grew more and more "inclined by his temperament to a meditative existence." When he was in his thirtieth year, a crisis came. By some means or other, he secured a lucrative sinecure, that of treasurer of finances at Caen in Normandy. He hated the country and went down to Caen on the rarest occasions possible. La Bruyère, a Parisian to the marrow of his bones, says, "Provincials and fools are always ready to lose their temper and believe that one is laughing at them or despising them. You must never venture on a joke, even the mildest, except with well-bred, witty people." Perhaps he had been trying Godefroi de La Bruyère off on the stolid inhabitants of Caen. He received a salary, however, which was far from being all paid away to a substitute, and he rose, in the curious social scale of those days, from Mister (_roturier_) into Esquire (_écuyer_). The court in Normandy was extremely angry with him at periodical intervals, but apparently could do nothing to assert itself. When it raged, La Bruyère was like the East in Matthew Arnold's poem, he "bow'd low before the blast in patient, deep disdain."

He lived through these quiet years in one apartment after another in the heart of Paris. Vigneul de Marville saw him "nearer heaven than earth" in a room which a light curtain divided into two. "The wind, always at the service of philosophers, running ahead of visitors, would lift this curtain adroitly, and reveal the philosopher, smiling with pleasure at the opportunity of distilling the elixir of his meditations into the brain and the heart of a listener." He was always at work, but his work was confined to meditation, talk and study. Sometimes he left his garret, and studied "the court and the town" from the benches of the public gardens, the Luxembourg and the Tuileries. There has been an enormous amount of speculation and conjecture about the central period of the life of La Bruyère, but we really have only one positive document to go upon. During the illness of his own footman, he borrowed the services of his brother's man, who robbed him of money and clothes. La Bruyère put the case in the hands of the police, who failed to catch the thief. This is the only definite fact which has rewarded the patience of the investigators, and we must build round it what we can. We build round it his own glimpse of self-portraiture (in "Des Biens de Fortune") and find the philosopher bending over the volume where Plato discusses the spirituality of the soul, or measuring, with a rapt expression, the infinite distance between Saturn and Jupiter.[12]

[Footnote 12: "Vigneul de Marville," to whom we owe some picturesque impressions of La Bruyère at this time of social obscurity, was one of the pseudonyms of Bonaventure d'Argonne, whose real name appears to have been Noël Argonne. He was a Carthusian who dabbled in literature, and who towards the close of his career compiled a volume of "Mélanges," containing anecdotes which are often spiteful, but sometimes useful to the historian of literature. He seems to have visited La Bruyère in the days of his comparative poverty, when his mother kept home for the whole family, first in the Rue Chapon, and later in the Rue des Grands Augustins.]

When he is on the point of entering his fortieth year, La Bruyère suddenly breaks out of the cloud which encompasses him, and is revealed as professor of history to the Duke of Bourbon, and resident in the household of the great Prince de Condé. There is no evidence to show how Bossuet, then Bishop of Meaux, and the most influential man of intellect in France, became acquainted with the discreet and obscure treasurer of finances; but it is evident that he was struck by the vast learning and intelligence of this silent, smiling anchorite. 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. He possessed a sufficient though a modest competence already, and he exchanged a life of complete independence for a most painful and trying servitude, hung up between the insolence of those above and the impertinence of those below him. The situation of La Bruyère in the Maison de Condé was like that of Fanny Burney at the court of George III., only worse. Commentators have expended endless ingenuity in conjecturing what were the reasons which induced him to enslave himself.

A careful study of his great book must add to our amazement. No one ever locked himself up in prison with an exacter appreciation of the discomforts of captivity. La Bruyère has some remarks about freedom, which plunge us in bewilderment. "Liberty," he says, "is not laziness: it is a free use of one's time; it is having the choice of one's own work and exercise. To be free, in a word, is not to do nothing, but to be sole judge of what one shall do or not do. In this sense, what a boon is liberty!" This practical freedom he possessed to the full, when in August 1684 he accepted bondage to a spiteful monkey of a boy, a dwarf with a huge head and a dreadful face, to whom he was to impart, with tears of disappointment and humiliation, the rudiments of national history. He was immediately responsible to the father of this infant phenomenon, to Henry Jules, Duke d'Enghien, of whose "useless talents, wasted genius, imagination which was a torment to himself and others," Saint-Simon gives so copious an account. We have to think of our delicate and timid La Bruyère now for years the powerless plaything of this "unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband, detestable master, pernicious neighbour, without affection, without friends."

But after two centuries of canonization of the Condés, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Condé, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyère's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, _en souquenille_. But to dwell on all this is to forget that the great Condé, even in his ugly old age, was haloed by the glory of having been the first soldier of the world. It was a privilege, even at the end, to be admitted to his intimacy, and I believe that we pity La Bruyère more than he pitied himself. It scandalizes the biographers that the Prince, on one occasion, made La Bruyère dance a _pas seul_ before him, twanging a tune on the guitar. I suppose De Quincey would have been complaisant if the Duke of Wellington had asked him to whistle "Home, Sweet Home" to him. There is a limit, after all, to the modern theory of the Dignity of Letters.

Valincourt says that "All the time La Bruyère lived in the House of Condé, everybody was always making fun of him." Possibly the fear of appearing pedantic among all these people of fashion and these tinselled flunkeys made him lend himself to ridicule. They all teased and mocked him, I suppose, but not, I think, so as seriously to hurt him, and now, with his book in our hands, the laugh is on his side. For when we examine carefully we see that his position in the House of Condé improved as time went on. He got rid of his rivals, the other tutors; when the Grand Condé died, La Bruyère got rid of his dreadful pupil as well. We find him no longer "précepteur," but "gentilhomme de M. le Duc,"--no longer, that is, a mere scholastic drudge, but a sort of lord-in-waiting. He had probably a large increase of salary, since in 1687 he seems to have resigned his "charge" at Caen. Instead of being pinned to the dark apartment in the recesses of the Cité, he now revolved in ceaseless movement between Chantilly and Fontainebleau, Paris and Versailles. He became a sort of confidential reader to the Duke and Duchess, an essential part of the suite. After the first years, he had a great deal of leisure. He could retire to the security of a handsomely furnished apartment--upholstered in green--on the second floor of the Hôtel de Condé, opposite the Luxembourg, and he had another set of rooms at Versailles. The bondage became, I expect, no real bondage at all.

But why had he, so long completely his own master, consented to become the servant even of famous Royal princes? I think that as mothers accept irksome situations for the support of their children, so La Bruyère became the serf of the Condés for the sake of his book. For it is now time to reveal the fact that in this apparently listless, empty life there was one absorbing secret interest. This was the collection of the maxims, reflections, pictures, and what not which he had been quietly absorbing and turning into the honey of more and more exquisite prose ever since his early youth. I think that La Bruyère deliberately accepted all that might prove irksome in the captivity to the House of Condé for the sole sake of his book. He needed to see more types, and types of a more brilliant and effective kind than he could become familiar with in his mediocre condition. He knew all that was to be known about the artizans and the shopkeepers of the Cité; he wanted to examine the rulers of society, and while he watched them like a naturalist, they might make what contortions they pleased. How did one of his contemporaries describe him? "When Ménippe leaves his home, it is for the purpose of studying the attitudes of the whole human race and of painting them from the life. But he is not merely a portrait-painter, he is an anatomist as well. Do you see that vain and arrogant fellow in the midst of his good fortune? He is enchanted to think Ménippe is admiring him. What a mistake! At this very moment Ménippe is dissecting him and preparing him as a specimen for a public lecture in the schools. Not a vein, not a fibre will escape him, and from that man's heart he will draw the inmost springs of passion and expose the circulation of every vice."

It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all these investigations were noted, the cabinet where all these butterflies and less beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final title of it is "Characters; or, the Manners of this Age." It was published in January 1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from 1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, is short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caractères." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyère, always extremely fastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing to resemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began to diversify it with "portraits." These had been in fashion in Paris for more than a generation, but La Bruyère invented a new kind of portrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caractères," "you make a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make _my_ book," for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety of parts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructed at different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the most workmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument that moves and, rings.

What perhaps strikes us most, when we put down the "Caractères" after a close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in all literature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums and buzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We may expand the author's own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, but with a watchmaker's shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of a dozen chronometers. La Bruyère's observations are noted in a manner that is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part of his scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall find that he was incessantly improving his work, revising, extending and weighing it. He was one of those timid men who surprise us by their crafty intrepidity. It was dangerous to publish sarcastic "portraits" of well-known influential people, and there are few of these in the first edition, but when the success of the book was once confirmed these were made more and more prominent. It was not until the eighth edition, of 1694, that La Bruyère ventured to print the following study of one of the most influential men of letters of that day. Fontenelle--

THE PORTRAIT OF CYDIAS

"Ascange is a sculptor, Hegion a bronze-founder; Æschine a fuller, and Cydias a wit--that is his profession. He has a signboard, a workshop, finished articles for sale, mechanics who work under him. He cannot deliver for more than a month the stanzas which he has promised you, unless he breaks his word to Dosithée, who has ordered an elegy from him. He has an idyl on the loom; it is for Crantor, who is hurrying him, and from whom he expects a handsome price. Prose, verse, which do you want? He is equally successful with either. Ask him for letters to sympathize with a bereavement or to explain an absence, and he will undertake them. If you want them ready-made, you have only to enter his shop, and to choose what you like. He has a friend whose only duty upon this earth is to promise Cydias a long time ahead to a certain set of people, and then to present him at last in their houses as a man of rare and exquisite conversation; and, there, just as a musician sings or a lute-player touches his lute before the people who have engaged him, Cydias, after having coughed, and lifted the ruffle from his wrist, stretched out his hand and opened his fingers, begins to retail his quintessential thoughts and his sophistical arguments.... He opens his mouth only to contradict. 'It seems to me,' he gracefully says, 'that the truth is exactly the contrary of what you say,' or 'I cannot agree with your opinion,' or even 'that used to be my prepossession, as it is yours, but now----!'"

The idol of the gossips, "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyère in the French Academy.[13]

[Footnote 13: The contemporary "keys," which were generally ill-informed and ill-forming, said that Cydias was Perrault. But it is almost certain that Fontenelle was meant. M.A. Chassang has brought together a formidable list of Fontenelle's activity. He wrote for Thomas Corneille part of "Psyché" (1678) and of "Bellerophon" (1679); for Donneau le Visé the comedy of "La Comète" (1681); for Beauval the "Éloge" on Perrault (1688); for Catherine Bernard part of her tragedy of "Brutus" (1691), a discourse for the prize of eloquence given by the French Academy, and signed by Brunel (1695); and part of "L'Analyse des infiniments petits" for the Marquis de l'Hôpital (1696). This is merely part of the work turned out of Fontenelle's factory before the death of La Bruyère. Another candidate for the type of Cydias is Fontenelle's uncle, Thomas Corneille (1625-1709).]

There was great danger, or so it would seem to a timid man like La Bruyère, in affronting public opinion with a book so full of sarcasm and reproof, so unflinching in its way of dealing with success, as the "Caractères." He adopted a singular mode of self-protection. That was the day of the mighty dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns, and La Bruyère, at all events ostensibly, took the highly respectable side of the Greeks and Romans. There had lived a philosopher in the fourth century B.C., Theophrastus, the successor and elucidator of Aristotle, who left a book of "Ethical Characters" (_[Greek: HThikoi charaktêres]_), which had been introduced to the Western world by Casaubon at the end of the sixteenth century. For some reason or other, the greatest impression had been made by Theophrastus in England, where there appeared a large number of successive imitations or paraphrases of his "Characters." In France, on the other hand, Theophrastus was still unknown to the vulgar, when La Bruyère took him up. It seems likely that his own collection of portraits and maxims was practically finished, when, as M. Paul Morillot has put it, he determined to hoist the Greek flag as a safeguard. He made a French translation of the sketches of Theophrastus, and he put this at the head of his book, waving it to keep off the public, as a lady unfurls her parasol at a cow whose intentions are uncertain.

The evidences of La Bruyère's extreme caution are amusing. He hesitated long, but in 1687 he submitted his MS. to Boileau, who was highly encouraging, and to the poet-mathematician, Malizian, who said, "This will bring you plenty of readers and plenty of enemies." Finally he determined to risk the dive, and he took the book to Michallet, the publisher, saying as he did so, "If it is successful, the result shall be your daughter's dowry," the said daughter being a little child who was then seated on La Bruyère's knee. The ultimate success of the book being prodigious, Mlle Michallet must, by the time she was marriageable, have become a remarkable _parti_, but the story is not one which commends itself to the Incorporated Society of Authors. "Les Caractères" was published in January 1688, and the critics, with the veteran Bussy-Rabutin at their head, welcomed it with shouts of applause. Bussy frankly said, "It must be admitted that having proved the merit of Theophrastus by his translation, he has obscured the fame of that writer by what he has done next, for he has penetrated, in his own portraits, deeper into the heart of man than Theophrastus did, and has penetrated with even greater delicacy and by means of more exquisite language." This must have been very gratifying from the survivor of the great school of Malherbe and Balzac.

At the age of forty-three, then, previously unknown in the world of letters, this shy and obscure gentleman-in-waiting to the Princes of Condé, rose into fame, and enjoyed the admiration or the envy of whatever was most prominent in Paris. The public which he addressed was one which we may pause a moment to contemplate. The authority of the Academic and noble _salons_ was practically at an end, and intellectual culture had spread to a somewhat wider circle. Those who governed taste had thrown off many affectations of a previous generation, and in particular the curious disease of "preciousness." They were healthier, soberer and slightly less amusing than their forerunners. But they formed, in the heart of Paris, the most compact body of general intelligence to be met with at that time in any part of the world. They were certain, in their little sphere, of their æsthetic and logical aims. They were the flower of an intense civilization, very limited, in a way very simple; so far as the adoption of outer impulses went, very inactive, and yet within its own range energetic, elegant and audacious. To this world the "Caractères" was now offered, modestly, as though it were a summing up of the moralizations of the last fifty years. The author begins by deprecating the idea that he has anything new to impart. His trick is rather subtle; he concentrates our attention on the sayings of an ancient Aristotelian philosopher, and then, as if to fill up the time, he ventures to repeat a few reflexions of his own. These he introduces with the words: "Everything has been said, and we arrive too late into a world of men who have been thinking for more than seven thousand years. In the field of morals, all that is fairest and best has been reaped already; we can but glean among the ancients and among the cleverest of the moderns." In this insinuating manner, he leads the reader on to the perusal of his own part of the book, and soon we become aware how cold and dry and pale the Greek translation seems beside the rich and palpitating world of the new French morality.