A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR
OF
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE.
OR a long time it has generally been taken for granted that our author first saw the light at Dourdan, a small town in the department of Seine-et-Oise, but it has only lately been discovered that he was born in Paris in the month of August 1645. His father, Louis de la Bruyère, was contrôleur des rentes de la ville, a sort of town-tax collector, whilst his mother, Elizabeth Hamonin, belonged to a respectable family of Parisian burgesses. His grandfather and great-grandfather on the fatherʼs side, declared partisans of the Ligue, were both exiled from France when Henri IV. came to the throne. Perhaps, therefore, the feelings our author entertained for the people may be explained by atavism. A younger brother of his father and our authorʼs godfather, a very wealthy man, and most likely a money-lender, as well as interested in the farming of certain taxes, seems to have produced no favourable impression on his god-son, for the latter always attacks the farmers of the revenue.
Jean de la Bruyère was educated at the Oratorians in Paris, and two years before his father died, in the month of June 1664, took his degree of licentiate at law at the University of Orléans. He became an advocate, but in 1673, when twenty-eight years old, he forsook the bar, and bought for about 24,000 livres the post of trésorier des finances in the Caen district, in Normandy. There were fifteen trésoriers at Caen, of whom only some were obliged to reside there, but all became ennobled by virtue of their office, and received as non-residents a yearly salary of about 2500 livres. La Bruyère had bought this treasurership of a certain Joseph Metezeau, said to have been a relative by marriage of Bossuet, but this is not at all proved; and in 1686, about two years before he was going to publish the “Characters,” and when already he had been for some time one of the teachers of the Duke de Bourbon, a grandson of the Prince Louis de Condé, he sold again his post for 18,000 livres to Charles-François de la Bonde, Seigneur dʼIberville.