and history, but that is L’Estoile’s fault at least as much as mine.
I might have stuffed my account of his book with criminal records, or
with sermons; for next to the doings of the great those are the matters
which concern him. Few days pass, never a week, in which he does not
record an execution or several of them. I don’t know whether the
Paris of the Henrys was worse than the London of James, and failing
an English L’Estoile, I shall never know. But Paris would be bad to
beat--not only for bestial crime but for bestial requital of it. In
London you might be decapitated or hanged: burning was rare towards the
end of Elizabeth’s reign. In Paris you might be hanged, or hanged and
strangled, or broken on the wheel, or hanged and burned; or, if you
were respectable enough you could be executed with a sword. Burning was
reserved for heresy: for _lèse-majesté_ there was death by horses--four
of them. L’Estoile saw Ravaillac die that death. He died, the wretch,
at the “deuxième tirage.” These things are shocking, as the crimes
were which they were designed, after the ideas of the times, to fit.
Then there were the duels which reached in France a point not known in
our country. The _mignons_ quarrelled in companies. That happened when
Quélus, Maugiron and Livarrot met d’Entragues, Ribérac and Schomberg in
the Marché-aux-Chevaux. Maugiron and Schomberg were killed outright;
Ribérac died the next day, and Quélus, with nineteen wounds, lingered
for a month, and died then. The King kissed the dead, cut off and
kept their fair hair, and took from Quélus the ear-rings which he had
himself put into his ears. “Such and the like ways of doing,” says
L’Estoile, “unworthy indeed of a great king and a high-hearted, as
this one was, caused him by degrees to be despised ... and in the
Third-Estate, to be made little by little their faction, which was the
League.” No doubt that is true.
Let me remember, as I end, this curious piece of news: on January 8th,
1608, it was so cold that the chalice froze in Saint-André-des-Ars,
and they had to get a brazier from the baker’s to thaw it. Saint-André
was L’Estoile’s favourite, or perhaps his parish church. The law cares
nothing for trifles, but history lives upon them. My last scrap,
however, is not of an age but of all time. “J’ay trente mil livres de
rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé of Bonport in his last
agony.
LA BRUYÈRE
If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is
not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good
word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then
nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue
lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy
summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La
Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me
your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them
to maxims. Nobody took the trouble to do it. He was read, as he wrote,
for entertainment; and entertainment certainly comes if we don’t read
too much of him at a time. He is for the bedside or the dressing-table.
You can glance at him as you shave: but if you linger on him, you had
better put away the razors. He has himself detected the source of the
entertainment. “In the misfortunes of our best friends we can always
find something which is not unpleasing.” He is dreadfully right; and
it was his accuracy, no doubt, which Madame de Sévigné found to be
“divine.” I obtain my own consolation out of the fact that, poor things
as we are, it has been possible for one at least of us to write us
down so well. But I am under no delusions about this duke. He is not
necessarily a good man struggling with adversity, but as human as the
rest of us. His only right to the microscope is that of user; and the
pose that he who sees so many beams in his neighbour’s eyes has no
motes in his own, it is fair to say, is not consciously assumed, but
inseparable from the aphoristic method.
In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims
with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate.
La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot
call him cynical; he is a _censor morum_. He combines the methods of La
Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first
because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than
the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the
same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his
wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. In _Les Caractères_ is but
one paragraph of unstinted praise; the _Historiettes_ is full of them.
Tallemant, however, did not write for publication, and La Bruyère did.
It is possible that he would have praised more generally than he did
if it had been as safe to praise as to condemn. But it was not. He had
been rash enough at starting to call attention to Bishop Le Camus, and
to be astonished at the red hat conferred upon a pious and devoted man.
Then he learned, first, that the King had been very much offended by
the Pope’s action, and secondly, that the Pope had intended him to be.
Just in time he cancelled the passage. No--a writer had to be sure of
his ground when he went about to praise. You were only perfectly safe,
indeed, in praising His Majesty.
His “pleasant” saying of Dangeau, as Saint-Simon calls it, that he was
not a grandee, but “after a grandee,” is typical of him, at once acute
and direct. It says more exactly what Dangeau was than a page. The
page is there too, but the few words shine out of it like an electric
light. It is as if he was talking round about his subject, seeking the
best aspect of it, and then, suddenly, with a pointing finger, you
get “_Pamphilius_ in a word desires to be a great man, and believes
himself to be one; but he is not; he is after a great man.” The rest
of the page goes for little. It is Thackerayan, as we should say.
Whether Thackeray owed anything directly to La Bruyère I am not able to
determine; but he owed a fair amount to Steele, who assuredly did.
If La Bruyère had desired to learn the worst of mankind he could not
have been trained in a better school than that which he found for
himself. He had been one of the Accountants-General in the Bureau
of Finance at Caen for a few years when M. le Prince--le Grand
Condé--called him to Chantilly to be tutor--one of several--to his
grandson the Duc de Bourbon. There, and at Versailles, he remained
for the rest of his life, and at Versailles he died. Of Condé, of
Henri-Jules, his terrible son, and of the grandson, “very considerably
smaller than the smallest of men,” as Saint-Simon declares him, and
very considerably more of a degenerate than most men, this learned,
accurate, all-observant, deeply-meditating man was content to be the
servant and the butt. When his pupil left his hands he stayed on as
“gentleman” to the father, who was in his turn M. le Prince. Prince as
he was, he was also, quite simply, a wild beast, biting mad; and his
son was little better: a pervert and proud of it, crafty, malicious,
tyrannical, and “extremely ferocious.” One does not know how life with
such masters can have been tolerable. La Bruyère was both neglected
and despised. He had nothing to do, for even as “gentleman” he was
a supernumerary--yet he must be there. To understand it you must
accept the _sang royal_ in its fullest implications. His book, which
yielded eight editions in his lifetime, went for nothing at Chantilly,
though the King himself had heard of it, and had his harangue at the
Academy read to him at Marly. Yet one of the inmates of Chantilly
(Valincourt), while admitting that “La Bruyère meditated profoundly
and agreeably, two things which are rarely found together,” went on
to say that “he was a good fellow at bottom, whom, however, the fear
of seeming pedantic had thrown into its ridiculous opposite ... with
the result that during all the time he spent in the household of M.
le Duc, in which he died, he was always held for a figure of fun.”
It seems that he tried to be sprightly, would dance, put on airs and
graces, make jokes, and walk on his toes. We may regard all that
as protective colouring, the instinct of the creature to hide his
continual mortifications. Elsewhere--in Paris, naturally--he had made
himself a personage. His book sold, if not to his profit, very much to
his credit; he had made himself imposing enemies, and had the better
of them at every turn; Bossuet was his friend, Pontchartrain, Racine
and the like. He still held his sinecure office at Caen. Why, then, did
he hang about Chantilly, and lodge in an attic at Versailles when M.
le Prince was there? Who is to say? That particular prince was a human
tiger--but in his service he lived on, and died. I think he ought to
have put himself into his own book--and perhaps he did:
“I see a man surrounded, and followed--he is in office. I see
another man whom all the world salutes--he is in favour. Here is
one caressed and flattered, even by the great--he is rich. There
is another, observed curiously on all hands--he is learned. Here
is another whom nobody omits to greet--a dangerous man.”
At any rate, his experiences provided that one of the shrewdest
sections of _Les Caractères_ is that headed “Of the Court.”
“The Court does not satisfy; it prevents you from satisfaction
anywhere else.
“It is like a house built of marble: I mean that it is made up of
men, very hard, but polished.
“One goes there very often in order to come away again and be
therefore respected by one’s country gentry, or the bishop.
“The most honourable reproach which can be made against a man is
to say of him that he knows nothing of the Court. In that one
remark there are no virtues unimputed to him.
“You speak well of a man at Court for two reasons: the first, that
he may learn that you have done so; the second that he may so
speak of you.
“It is as dangerous at Court to make advances as it is awkward not
to make them.”
The man who penned those caustic little sentences knew what he was
talking of. Yet La Bruyère’s portrait of himself sets him forth as a
creature apart, pointedly distinguishes him from _Clitiphon_, who has
been too busy to heed him.
“O man of consequence and many affairs,” he says to _Clitiphon_,
“when you in your turn have need of my good offices, walk into
my lonely study. The philosopher is at your service, and will
not put you off to another day. You will find him there, deep
in Plato’s dialogues, dealing with the spiritual nature of the
soul, distinguishing its essence from that of the body; or, pen
in hand, calculating the distance from us of Jupiter or Saturn.
I am adoring God in those books of his, seeking by knowledge of
the truth to conduct my own spiritual part into better ways. Nay,
come in, the door is open; there is no ante-chamber in which to be
wearied while you wait. Come straight in, without announcement.
You are bringing me something more to be desired than gold and
silver if it is a chance of serving you. Speak then, what do you
desire me to do for you? Am I to leave my books, studies, work,
the very line which I am now penning? Happy interruption, which is
to make me of service to you!”
Overwhelming invitation! The butter, you will agree, is spread too
thick. On another page he quotes the saying of the Roman patriarch,
that he had rather people should inquire why there was no statue to
Cato, than why there was one. But it had perhaps not occurred to Cato
as calculable that he might have to erect a statue to himself.
“Voilà de quoi vous attirer beaucoup de lecteurs, et beaucoup
d’ennemis,” said M. de Malezieu to La Bruyère on perusing _Les
Caractères_. There was no doubt about that. Although he set out with a
translation of Theophrastus, in going on to be a Theophrastus himself
the temptation to draw from nature was obvious, and not resisted.
Theophrastus generalised; he wrote of abstractions, Stupidity,
Brutality, Avarice and what not. If he had had instances in his head,
nobody knew what they were, and nobody cared. But La Bruyère did not
write of qualities: he wrote of things and of people--women, men,
the Court, the sovereign; and by his treatment of them in examples,
in short paragraphs, with italicised names, with anecdotes, snatches
of dialogue and other aids to attention, provided the quidnuncs with
a fascinating game. “Keys” sprang up like mushrooms in a night. The
guess-work was dangerously unanimous. The instances he had chosen
were recent: there could not be much doubt who were _Menalcas_ and
_Pamphilius_, _Clitiphon_ and _Arténice_. Three editions were called
for in 1688, a fourth in 1689, and then one a year until 1694. On the
whole he came off very lightly. The _Mercure Galant_ and its supporters
furiously raged together. But the King had been elaborately flattered,
and no harm came to La Bruyère.
_Les Caractères_ is a book both provocative and diverting, written in
the clear, sinewy, reasonable language of Pascal and Fénélon: by no
means without malice, but with a malice robbed of its virus by the
air of detachment which La Bruyère has been careful to give it. When
he pleases to be severe he uses the dramatic method. The portraits
interspersed with his judgments enable him to move more freely than La
Rochefoucauld. He is better, because livelier, reading, and the effect
is not so depressing. However, his debt cannot be denied. He would be
an acute critic who knew which was which in these:
“A woman with but one lover believes that she is not a coquette:
she who has several that she is only that.
“A woman forgets of the man she no longer loves even the favours
he has had of her.
“In her first passion a woman loves her lover. In the others she
loves love.”
Here is La Rochefoucauld at his best: “Hypocrisy is the tribute which
vice pays to virtue”; and here is La Bruyère when he chooses to sting:
“There is wanting nothing to an old lover from the woman who claims him
except the name of husband; but that is much. If it were not for that
he would be a thousand times lost.” As a rule he is more of a moralist
than the Duke, as here where his reflection flows from his axiom:
“A woman unfaithful, if the interested party knows it, is just
faithless; if he believes her true, she is false. This advantage
at least accrues from a woman’s falsity, that you are cured of
jealousy.”
The reflection flows, I say--but is it true? It is safe to say that the
man who generalises about women is as often wrong as right. “Women,” he
says, “are always in the extreme, better or worse than men”; and again,
“The generality of women have no principles. Their hearts direct them;
they depend for their conduct upon those they love.” I should say that
there were as many exceptions to those rules as examples of them. Then,
what of this: “It costs a woman very little to say something which she
does not feel; and a man still less to say something which he does”? It
needs La Bruyère himself to determine from that which of the sexes is
the more sentimental; but he leaves it there. I like the following, and
believe it to be entirely true:
“It is certain that a woman who writes with transport is carried
away, less so that she is touched. It would seem that a tender
passion would render her mournful and taciturn; and that the most
urgent need of a woman whose heart is engaged is less to persuade
that she loves than to be sure that she is loved.”
The second term of that aphorism is an enlargement of the first. A
woman, he would say, really in love would hide it by instinct. Her need
is rather to be loved.
Try him on another tack. Here is a parallel with La Rochefoucauld.
The Duke says, “Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console
themselves for being no longer able to set bad examples.” La Bruyère’s
is equally sharp:
“A modern writer will generally prove to you that the ancients are
inferior in two ways--by reason and example. The reason will be drawn
from his own taste, and the examples from his own works.” Very neat
both, but I think La Bruyère’s has the more comic turn. If the Duke
had had less prudence, or more bitterness (with as much reason for
it), we might have been able to compare his treatment of _la Cour_.
But he hardly touches it. La Bruyère cannot leave it alone. “Let a
favourite,” he says, “have a sharp eye on himself; for if he keep me in
his ante-chamber a shorter time than usual; if his look be more open;
if he frown less, listen more willingly, show me a little further from
the door, I shall be thinking him in the way of losing credit; and I
shall be right.” Then he breaks into this bitter reflection: “A man
can have little resource in himself if he must fall into disgrace or
be mortified in order to become more human, more tractable, less of a
brute and more of a good fellow.”
There is a note very familiar to us in this:
“How comes it about that _Alciopus_ bows to me this morning,
smiles, throws himself half-way out of the carriage window for
fear of missing my eye? I am not a rich man--and I am on foot. By
all the rules he ought not to have seen me. Is it not rather so
that he himself may be seen in the same coach with a lord?”
Thackeray all over; but I don’t think Thackeray had it straight from
_Les Caractères_. The first translation into English was in 1699, and
by “Eustace Budgell, Esq.” There were many others--two, anonymous,
in 1700 and 1702, one by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, one by “H. Gally” in
1725. Was not Budgell one of the _Spectator’s_ men? Steele and Addison
both may have quarried in his version. Here is a specimen _Spectator_
paragraph:
“_Narcissus_ rises in the morning in order that he may go to bed
at night. He takes his time for dressing like a woman, and goes
every day regularly to mass at the _Feuillants_ or the _Minims_.
He is an affable fellow, who may be counted on in a certain
quarter of the town to take a _tierce_ or a _cinquième_ at Ombre
or Reversi. So engaged you will see him in his chair for hours
on end at _Aricia’s_, where every evening he will lay out his
five gold pistoles. He reads punctually the _Gazette de Hollande_
and the _Mercure Galant_; he will have read his Cyrano, his des
Marete, his Lesclache, Barbin’s story books, assorted poetry. He
walks abroad with the ladies; he is serious in paying calls. He
will do to-morrow what he does to-day and did yesterday; and after
having so lived, so he will die.”
The sting in the tail is perhaps too sharp for Steele, though it is not
for Addison. You will find the former more exactly foreshadowed in
the fable of _Emira_, an insensible beauty of Smyrna, who finds that
she cannot love until she has first been jealous, and finds that out
too late. Style and handling are the very spit of Steele’s. I have not
seen the suggestion anywhere, and put it forward for what it may be
worth, that Budgell’s translation inspired our pair of essayists to hit
off friends and foes under the stock names of _Belinda_, _Sacharissa_,
_Eugenio_ and the like. The “portrait” had been a popular literary
form in France from the days of Richelieu; but it was new to England
when Addison and Steele went into journalism. Are there “keys” to the
_Spectator_ and _Tatler_? I suppose so.
Not all his portraits are malicious, not all of them so simple as
that of Narcissus; but some of them are really malignant. It is
safe to say that a man of whom Saint-Simon had nothing but good to
report, had nothing but good to be reported. Such a man was the Duc
de Beauvilliers. La Bruyère says of him that he was greedy after
office--exactly what he was not. The Comte de Brancas, who figures as
_Menalcas_, is very good fun. Brancas was the George Dyer of Paris and
his day, _distrait_ in ways which a knowledge of his time will excuse.
The best story of him, when he failed to see the Queen Mother using a
certain _prie-dieu_, and knelt on her, has been told. Another shows
him at home, putting down his book to nurse a grandchild; then, when a
visitor was announced, jumping to his feet, and flinging the baby on to
the floor, where he had just flung the book. There are dozens of such
tales, none of them ill-natured. Probably even La Bruyère could not
have been unkind to Brancas.
He is certainly more severe than Tallemant, but that is because he
will always introduce himself into the story, and always to his own
advantage. Tallemant never does that, but uses the historical method
invariably. A good example of La Bruyère’s intrusion is in his dealing
with a Lord Strafford of ours, a peer whom Saint-Simon calls “une
espèce d’imbécile,” and accuses of having 50,000 _livres de rentes_ in
England and spending them in Paris. La Bruyère calls him Philémon, and
strikes the attitude of Diogenes in his regard:
“Gold, you tell me, glitters upon _Philémon’s_ coat? It glitters
as keenly at the tailor’s. He is clothed in the finest tissue? Is
it less well displayed in shop-lengths? But the embroideries, the
enrichments make him splendid! I praise the needlewoman. But ask
him the time, and he will pull out a masterpiece of a watch: the
guard of his sword is of onyx; there is a diamond on his finger
of a water ...! You have managed to make me curious at last. I
must see these priceless things. Send me Philémon’s clothes and
gimcracks. You may keep Philémon.”
That is the better part of it. In the next paragraph he turns to scold
the old lord, and calls him a fool in so many words. That is a mistake
of his. It is not playing the game of satire, but the kind of game
which is played at the street corner. On the same page is Harlay, the
very unepiscopal Archbishop of Paris, but only a part of him. He leaves
the bishop out of the question (as assuredly he was), and gives us the
courtier. Harlay was famous for his manners. _Theognis_, as he calls
him,
“is careful of his appearance, goeth forth adorned like a woman.
He is hardly out of doors before he has composed his looks and
countenance so that he may appear all of a piece when he is in
public, the same thing to all men. Passers-by are to find him
graciously smiling upon them; and nobody must miss it. He goes
into the corridor, turns to the right where everybody is, or to
the left where there is no one: he will salute those who are
there, and those who are not. He will embrace the first man he
comes across and press his head to his bosom; then he will ask
you who it was he was greeting. Perhaps you have need of him in
some little business or other, you go to him, ask him to help.
_Theognis_ lends you a ready ear, is overjoyed to be of use,
implores you to find him other chances of serving your occasions.
Then, when you urge your immediate affair, he will tell you that
he cannot manage that; he will ask you to put yourself in his
place, judge for yourself. So you take your leave, escorted to the
door, caressed, and puzzled, but almost gratified to have been
refused.”
That is excellent, done with a light-hearted malice worth all the
_coquins_, _fats_ and _sots_ in the world. But of all his “portraits”
by far the most agreeable is that of Madame de Boislandry, whom
he calls _Arténice_. It appears as a fragment in the section _Des
Jugements_, but I don’t think really belongs there. There is nothing
else like it; it has a gusto and charm of its own. Steele comes to mind
again, with his Lady Elizabeth Hastings. It must be my last example:
“ ... He was saying that the mind of that beautiful person was
like a well-cut diamond; and continuing his talk of her, ‘There
is,’ he added, ‘a ray of reasonableness and charm in it which
engages at once the eyes and the hearts of those who converse
with her. One hardly knows whether one loves or admires: she has
that in her to make her a perfect friend, and that too which
might lead you beyond friendship. Too young and too lovely not
to please, too modest to dream of it, she makes little account
of men but upon their merits, and looks for no more from them
than their friendship. Brimming over with life and quick to
feel, she surprises and attracts; and while perfectly aware of
the delicate shades and subtleties of the best conversation, she
is yet capable of happy improvisations which among other charms
have that of inspiring repartee. Her intercourse is that of one
who, without learning of her own, is aware of it, and desires to
inform herself; and yet she listens to you as one who, after all,
knows a good deal, can appraise the worth of what you say and will
lose nothing that you may choose to impart. Far from seeking to
contradict you, she takes up your points, considers them as her
own, enlarges and enhances them. You find yourself gratified to
have thought them out so well and to have put them forward better
than you had supposed....’”