Jean De 1645-1696 La Bruyere

LA BRUYERE, JEAN DE (1645-1696), French essayist and moralist. was born in Paris on Aug. 16, 1645. He himself signed the name Delabruyere in one word. His father was con troller-general of finance to the Hotel de Ville. The son was edu cated by the Oratorians and at the university of Orleans; he was called to the bar, and in 1673 bought a post in the revenue depart ment at Caen, which gave the status of noblesse and a certain income. In 1687 he sold this office. Bossuet introduced him in 1684 to the household of the great Conde, to whose grandson Henri Jules de Bourbon as well as to that prince's girl-bride Mlle. de Nantes, one of Louis XIV.'s children, La Bruyere became tutor.

His

Caracteres appeared in 1688, and at once brought him many enemies. At the head of these were Thomas Corneille, Fontenelle and Benserade, who were pretty clearly aimed at in the book, as well as other persons, men and women of letters as well as of so ciety, on whom the cap of La Bruyere's fancy-portraits was fitted by manuscript "keys" compiled by the scribblers of the day. The friendship of Bossuet and the protection of the Condes sufficiently defended the author, and he continued to insert fresh portraits of his contemporaries in each new edition of his book, especially in the 4th (1689). Those whom he had attacked were powerful in the Academy, and numerous defeats awaited La Bruyere before he could make his way into that guarded hold. He was defeated thrice in 1691, and on one memorable occasion he had but seven votes, five of which were those of Bossuet, Boileau, Racine, Pellisson and Bussy-Rabutin. It was not till 1693 that he was elected, and even then an epigram, which, considering his admitted insignificance in conversation, was not of the worst, haesit lateri:— Quand la Bruyere se presente Pourquoi faut it crier haro? Pour faire un nombre de quarante Ne falloit it pas un zero? His unpopularity was, however, chiefly confined to the subjects of his sarcastic portraiture, and to the hack writers of the time, of whom he was wont to speak with a disdain only surpassed by that of Pope. His description of the Mercure galant as "imme diatement an dessous de rien" is the best-remembered specimen of these unwise attacks; and would of itself account for the enmity of the editors, Fontenelle and the younger Corneille. La Bru yere's discourse of admission at the Academy, one of the best of its kind, was, like his admission itself, severely criticized, espe cially by the partisans of the "Moderns" in the "Ancient and Modern" quarrel. With the Caracteres, the translation of Theo

phrastus, and a few letters, most of them addressed to the prince de Conde, it completes the list of his literary work, with the excep tion of a curious and much-disputed posthumous treatise. La Bruyere died very suddenly on May io, 1696. Two years after his death appeared certain Dialogues sur le Quietisme, alleged to have been found among his papers incomplete, and to have been completed by the editor.

The plan of the Caracteres is thoroughly original, if that term may be accorded to a novel and skilful combination of existing elements. The treatise of Theophrastus may have furnished the first idea, but it gave little more. With the ethical generalizations and social Dutch painting of his original La Bruyere combined the peculiarities of the Montaigne essay, of the Pensees and Maximes of which Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are the masters respectively, and lastly of that peculiar 17th-century product, the "portrait" or elaborate literary picture of the personal and mental characteristics of an individual.

But La Bruyere has neither, like Moliere, embodied abstract peculiarities in a single life-like type, nor has he, like Shakespeare, made the individual pass sub speciens aeternitatis, and serve as a type while retaining his individuality. He is a photographer rather than an artist in his portraiture. With Racine and Massillon he is probably the very best writer of what is somewhat arbitrarily styled classical French.

The editions of La Bruyere, both partial and complete, have been extremely numerous. Les Caracteres de Theophraste traduits du Grec, avec les caracteres et les moeurs de ce siecle, appeared for the first time in i688, being published by Michallet, to whose little daughter, according to tradition, La Bruyere gave the profits of the book as a dowry. In the eight new editions published during his lifetime much new matter was incorporated. In recent times numerous editions of the complete works have appeared, notably those of Walckenaer (1845), Servois (1867, in the series of Grands ecrivains de la France), Asselineau (a scholarly reprint of the last original edition, 1872) and Chassang (1876). See also E. Fournier, Comedie de La Bruyere (1866) ; M. Paul Morillot, La Bruyere (19o4), in the series of Grands icrivains francais; E. Gosse, Three French Moralists (1918).