Essay
The Characters
Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle
Jean de La Bruyère · 1688
Opening lines
Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent.
Everything has been said, and we come too late, now that there have been men, and men who think, for more than seven thousand years.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Sixteen chapters, from works of the mind to freethinkers, by way of the town, the court, the great and the sovereign, bring together brief remarks and satirical portraits designated by fictitious names: Giton the rich man and Phédon the poor man, or Arrias, who speaks of everything with assurance until the truth confounds him. The book thus composes, in fragments, a moral picture of the society of its time.
Context
The book appeared without an author's name in 1688 with Michallet, following a translation of the Characters of the Greek Theophrastus, under the title Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle. The first edition contained four hundred and twenty remarks; from one edition to the next, their number rose to one thousand one hundred and twenty, and the portraits took up a growing place. Manuscript keys circulated, claiming to name the people targeted behind the fictional names.
Who it is for
A book of brief remarks, which can be opened at any page, in the language of the end of the seventeenth century.
Prizes and reception
An immediate success, the book went through nine enlarged and revised editions during its author's lifetime.
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