LA BRUYÈRE, JEAN. - French writer, b. in Paris on 16 Aug. 1645, d. at Versailles on 11 May 1696. From a lower-middle-class family, in 1673 he purchased a financial office at Caen, which allowed him to remain in the studious idleness he held dear. He then entered, presented by Bossuet, the household of the Great Condé, first as tutor and then as gentleman of the duke. Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, published by him in 1688, procured for him a celebrity as vast as it was sudden, opening for him the doors of the Academy (1693).
The society genre of the portrait had already flourished widely in the cultivated society that gathered around the Grande Mademoiselle, the duchess of Montpensier (1627-93), just as that of the maxime had, cultivated by the frequenters of the marquise de Sablé, among them La Rochefoucauld (v.). Under La B.'s pen both genres seem to renew and broaden themselves, completing and illuminating each other in a superior balance between the overly bitter and almost abstract concision of the maxime as it had been fashioned by the duke of La Rochefoucauld and the prolixity of the portraits brought into vogue by préciosité. A more concrete and human taste for satire, for everyday life, for homely truths (and the first great success of the Caractères was one of scandal, as of a roman à clef) brings his vision of the world back to a less tragic pessimism, though equally aware of man's pettiness and his worldly bustling; it suggests to him wisdom, withdrawal into himself, the taste for meditation of the Christian and of the man of culture open to new currents and to the demands of his time. Already one senses in him both the authentic man of letters and the liveliness of the eighteenth century.
To the Caractères, renewed and enlarged from 418 to about 1120 through eight editions, between 1688 and 1693, La B. added no other works. Nor do the Dialogues sur le quiétisme, reworked and published posthumously by l'Elle du Pin (1698), attest only the part he took in the Quietist polemic of his friend Bossuet, between '95 and '96, but also his gifts as a polemicist.
Bibliography7 works
Enzo Bottasso