The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère
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The Characters of Jean de La Bruyère (Original French: Les Caractères) is a book by Jean de la Bruyère based on Theophrastus's The Characters. It was published in 1688, and at once, as Nicolas de Malezieu had predicted, brought him "bien des lecteurs et bien des ennemis" (many readers and many enemies). It was translated into English in 1929 by Henri van Laun. Poe's short story "The Man of the Crowd" begins with this quote in its epigraph: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul". It translates to Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone.
The Caractères
Although it is permissible to doubt whether the value of the Caractères has not been somewhat exaggerated by traditional French criticism, they deserve beyond all question a high place.
The plan of the book 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 Bruyère combined the peculiarities of the Montaigne Essais, of the Pensées and Maximes of which Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are the masters respectively, and lastly of that peculiar 17th century product, the "character sketch" or elaborate literary picture of the personal and mental characteristics of an individual. The result was quite unlike anything that had been before seen, and it has not been exactly reproduced since, though the essay of Addison and Steele resembles it very closely, especially in the introduction of fancy portraits.
In the titles of his work, and in its extreme desultoriness, La Bruyère reminds the reader of Montaigne, but he aimed too much at sententiousness to attempt even the apparent continuity of the great essayist. The short paragraphs of which his chapters consist are made up of maxims proper, of criticisms literary and ethical, and above all of the celebrated sketches of individuals baptized with names taken from the plays and romances of the time. These last are the great feature of the work, and that which gave it its immediate if not its enduring popularity. They are wonderfully piquant, extraordinarily life-like in a certain sense, and must have given great pleasure or more frequently exquisite pain to the originals, who were in many cases unmistakable and in most recognizable.
