[316] The “herdsman” alluded to in the above paragraph seems to have been the financier La Touanne, trésorier de lʼextraordinaire des guerres. He had a mansion near the park of Saint Maur, part of an estate formerly belonging to Catherine de Medici (Zenobia), on which he spent enormous sums, whilst the other part belonged to the Prince de Condé, who in vain tried to induce the parvenu to sell him his property. Hence the attack of our author on the man who dared to oppose the wishes of his noble patron. However, when this paragraph appeared, La Touanne did not yet live at Saint Maur.
[317] According to the commentators, this refers to Jacques Bordier, intendant des finances, who, after having spent more than a million on his estate at Raincy, was obliged to leave it; but his creditors did not expel him, for it was sold by his heirs after his death.
[318] The Marquis de Seignelay is supposed by some to have been the original of Eumolpus; he did not, however, enjoy a long life. (See page [149], note 255.
[319] Libertin, in the original, which first meant a man of free-and-easy manners, came to be chiefly used in the second half of the seventeenth century for a “freethinker.”
[320] Superstitieux sometimes had the above meaning; Littré gives two examples of it in his dictionary.
[321] Giton and Phædo do not apply to any one in particular, though some commentators maintain that by the first the Marquis de Barbézieux, the son of Louvois, was meant.
[322] Now we speak of town and country, but in La Bruyèreʼs time people mentioned the town or city and the court, wholly different in customs and manners. Boileau begins his Satires with the two following lines—
“Damon, ce grand auteur dont la muse fertile,
Amusa si long-temps et la cour et la ville.”
Our author places his chapter “Of the Town” before that “Of the Court” and “Of the Great,” and leads up to that “Of the Sovereign.”