[619] B ... was a certain Barbereau who sold Seine water for mineral water, or perhaps Brimbeuf, another quack, who sold a specific for perpetual youth.
[620] This may be Caretti (see page [186], note 390), or Domenico Ammonio, another Italian quack.
[621] A good many panders at the court of Louis XIV. were politely called Mercuries, after the messenger of Jupiter; it is therefore difficult to say whom La Bruyère meant. Some say he spoke of Bontemps, first valet-de-chambre of the king; others imagine he wished to hit the Marquis de Lassay, who had the reputation of being pander to the Duke de Bourbon, the former pupil of our author.
[622] In La Bruyèreʼs time people wore long wigs but were closely shaved.
[623] Tityrus is a shepherd, who, according to the first line uttered by Melibœus in Virgilʼs first “Eclogue,” is one of those men who “lay at ease under their patrimonial beech trees.”
[624] This is an allusion to the Siamese ambassadors, who came to Paris in 1686, and produced a great sensation.
[625] The original has agreste, taken with the meaning it sometimes has in Latin. La Bruyère says in a note: “This word is used here metaphorically.”
[626] Our author was probably for a month either at Rouen or Caen as trésorier-général des finances, an office which he bought in 1673, and, whilst there, might have had a quarrel with some of his colleagues. This is the more likely as in the first three editions of the “Characters” the magistrates alone were named.
[627] A game played with four cards, formerly in use; it was primero when the hands were shown, and the four cards were of different colours; grand primero when more than thirty points were made. In Shakespeareʼs King Henry VIII. (act v. scene 1), Gardiner tells Sir Thomas Lovell that he left the king “at primero with the Duke of Suffolk.”
[628] This is supposed to have been a portrait of M. de Noailles, who was Bishop of Châlons when La Bruyère wrote this paragraph, but who in 1695 became Archbishop of Paris and a Cardinal. The number of bishops residing in their dioceses was very small at the end of the seventeenth century.