Editing Jean de La Bruyère (section)

==The ''Caractères''==
{{wikiquote|Les Caractères}}
Although it is permissible to doubt whether the value of the ''Caractères'' has not been somewhat exaggerated by traditional French criticism, they deserve a high place.{{sfn|Saintsbury|1911|p=30}}

The plan of the book is thoroughly original, if that term may be accorded to a novel, and skillful combination of elements exists in it. The treatise of Theophrastus may have furnished the concept, but it gave little more. With the ethical generalizations and social Dutch paintings accompanying his original, La Bruyère combined the peculiarities of the [[Michel de Montaigne|Montaigne]] ''[[Essais]]'', of the ''[[Pensées]]'', and ''Maximes'' of which [[Blaise Pascal|Pascal]] and [[François de La Rochefoucauld (writer)|La Rochefoucauld]] are the masters respectively, and lastly of that peculiar seventeenth-century product, the "portrait" or elaborate literary picture of the personal and mental characteristics of an individual. The result was quite unlike anything that had been seen previously, and, it has not been exactly reproduced since, although the essay of Addison and Steele resembles it very closely, especially in the introduction of fancy portraits.{{sfn|Saintsbury|1911|p=31}}

La Bruyère's privileged position at Chantilly provided him with a unique vantage point from which he could witness the hypocrisy and corruption of the court of Louis XIV. As a Christian moralist, he aimed at reforming people's manners and ways by publishing records of his observations of aristocratic foibles and follies, which earned him many enemies at the court.{{Citation needed|date=April 2024}}

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 [[Maxim (saying)|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.{{sfn|Saintsbury|1911|p=31}}

These last are the greatest feature of the work and that which gave it its immediate, if not its enduring, popularity. They are wonderfully piquant, extraordinarily lifelike in a certain sense, and must have given great pleasure or (more frequently) exquisite pain to the apparent subjects, who in many cases were unmistakable and most recognizable.{{sfn|Saintsbury|1911|p=31}}