Les Caractères is a book both provocative and diverting, written in the clear, sinewy, reasonable language of Pascal and Fénélon: by no means without malice, but with a malice robbed of its virus by the air of detachment which La Bruyère has been careful to give it. When he pleases to be severe he uses the dramatic method. The portraits interspersed with his judgments enable him to move more freely than La Rochefoucauld. He is better, because livelier, reading, and the effect is not so depressing. However, his debt cannot be denied. He would be an acute critic who knew which was which in these:
“A woman with but one lover believes that she is not a coquette: she who has several that she is only that.
“A woman forgets of the man she no longer loves even the favours he has had of her.
“In her first passion a woman loves her lover. In the others she loves love.”
Here is La Rochefoucauld at his best: “Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue”; and here is La Bruyère when he chooses to sting: “There is wanting nothing to an old lover from the woman who claims him except the name of husband; but that is much. If it were not for that he would be a thousand times lost.” As a rule he is more of a moralist than the Duke, as here where his reflection flows from his axiom:
“A woman unfaithful, if the interested party knows it, is just faithless; if he believes her true, she is false. This advantage at least accrues from a woman’s falsity, that you are cured of jealousy.”
The reflection flows, I say—but is it true? It is safe to say that the man who generalises about women is as often wrong as right. “Women,” he says, “are always in the extreme, better or worse than men”; and again, “The generality of women have no principles. Their hearts direct them; they depend for their conduct upon those they love.” I should say that there were as many exceptions to those rules as examples of them. Then, what of this: “It costs a woman very little to say something which she does not feel; and a man still less to say something which he does”? It needs La Bruyère himself to determine from that which of the sexes is the more sentimental; but he leaves it there. I like the following, and believe it to be entirely true:
“It is certain that a woman who writes with transport is carried away, less so that she is touched. It would seem that a tender passion would render her mournful and taciturn; and that the most urgent need of a woman whose heart is engaged is less to persuade that she loves than to be sure that she is loved.”
The second term of that aphorism is an enlargement of the first. A woman, he would say, really in love would hide it by instinct. Her need is rather to be loved.
Try him on another tack. Here is a parallel with La Rochefoucauld. The Duke says, “Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer able to set bad examples.” La Bruyère’s is equally sharp: