PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public: An Ancient’s Modern Commonplace Book P EADAR K AVANAGH U NIVERSITY OF C HICAGO In the conclusion to Public et littérature en France au XVII e siècle, Hélène Merlin retraces a figure for the emergence of a new literary public in the preface to Les Caractères. 1 La Bruyère reflects, and reflects on, the literary practice that transformed civil society into the public by representing readers and commenting on that depiction. 2 In publishing this discontinuous representation of his readers, La Bruyère holds up a mirror where individuals see their particular condition generalized in the notion of the public. 3 Most recently, in La Bruyère’s remarks on writers and the Académie Française, Laurence Giavarini has interpreted this nascent public of Les Caractères as a community of readers that should share a new understanding 1 “Je rends au public ce qu’il m’a prêté : j’ai emprunté de lui la matière de cet ouvrage ; il est juste que l’ayant achevé avec toute l’attention pour la vérité dont je suis capable, et qu’il mérite de moi, je lui en fasse la restitution. Il peut regarder avec loisir ce portrait de lui que j’ai fait d’après nature, et s’il se connaît quelquesuns des défauts que je touche, s’en corriger.” All excerpts of the paratext and text (designated by chapter, number and edition) have been taken from Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, ou, les Mœurs de ce siècle, ed. Robert Garapon, Garnier, 1962, p. 61. 2 “[...] la pratique ‘littéraire’, activité particulière publique, qui se situe dans l’espace de la société, transforme cette société (civile) en public par l’effet de sa publication, et la réfléchit comme telle, dans sa représentation fictionnelle et dans son discours critique.” Hélène Merlin, Public et littérature en France au XVII e siècle, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1994, p. 386. 3 Merlin defines this new public as “[...] l’ensemble virtuel des lecteurs et spectateurs d’une œuvre ‘littéraire’, ou plus exactement à l’ensemble des particuliers susceptibles d’être touchés―affectés, engagés, transformés―par la publication d’une œuvre ‘littéraire’.” Merlin, op. cit., p. 385. Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 350 of literary value during the institution of the first champ littéraire. 4 Indeed, the long run of Les Caractères and their reception can be read alongside the quarrels surrounding Le Cid and La Princesse de Clèves as another literary event that was crucial in the formation of the reading public during the seventeenth century. However, La Bruyère’s own critical discourse, and the figure of the mirror he reuses, cannot account entirely for how this book not only interrogates but also projects a new public. Furthermore, this renovated knowledge of “ouvrages de l’esprit” must be perceived in contrast to that culture in ancient letters which was the very notion of “littérature” in the seventeenth century. 5 To reconsider his teasing preface in this light, by what rhetorical means did La Bruyère reconstitute, or indeed constitute, his reading public? Les Caractères can be read, we will see, as an ironic assimilation of longstanding Humanist practices of compilation. While the excerpts from ancient literature that filled the commonplace book inscribed the individual into the concept of humanitas, La Bruyère’s remarques projected readers onto a new, limited notion of the universal that defined the literary public in the late seventeenth century. It is by inverting the universalist aspiration of ancient rhetoric, which this humanistic form still cultivated, that La Bruyère reconstitutes his public as universal. 6 In comparing Les Caractères to the commonplace book through this perspective, the fundamental place of the res publica literaria in the emergence of the literary public out of the res publica can be reconsidered. 7 The inversion of humanistic patterns of thinking provoked by La Bruyère’s singular book informs not only our modern concept of literature, 8 but also our understanding of how readers relate to that modern commonplace. 4 Giavarini examines in particular the liminal first chapter, “Des ouvrages de l’esprit,” and La Bruyère’s praise for founder Richelieu in the preface to his reception speech at the Académie Française. Laurence Giavarini, “Les Caractères, le savoir de la littérature” in Autres regards sur La Bruyère, dir. Françoise Poulet, Myriam Tsimbidy & Arnaud Welfringer, Paris, Atlande, 2020, p. 105 et sq. 5 Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique [1980], Genève, Droz, 2002, p. 24. 6 Fumaroli, op. cit., p. 22 et passim. 7 Marc Fumaroli’s history of the res publica literaria, as a solution for a failing res publica christiana, holds a crucial but limited place in Merlin’s enduring model for the emergence of the public. “Espace (fictif) de droit, la république des lettres évoque un univers cohérent de présupposés communs” in the quarrel surrounding Le Cid. Merlin, op. cit., pp. 126 & 159. 8 « [...] les belles lettres antiques, telles qu’elles ont été lues et comprises par nos siècles ‘classiques’, ont déterminé le rôle et la place qui seront donnés, dans le champ de la morale et du savoir, à la res literaria moderne que nous appelons La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 351 An Ancient’s Modern Commonplace Book In his general preface, La Bruyère divides his readers into two categories. For his learned readers La Bruyère reserves his translation of the Characters of Theophrastus: “Quelques savants ne goûtent que les apophtegmes des anciens et les exemples tirés des Romains, des Grecs, des Perses, des Égyptiens. 9 ” In contrast, it is for his courtly readers, with little learning but plenty of wit, who only have eyes for their own century, that the author claims to have added his “nouveaux Caractères.” Although La Bruyère exaggerates the division of his readers into Ancient and Modern camps, he does exploit the long decline of a humanistic conception of the reading public. 10 By “apophtegmes” and “exemples,” La Bruyère refers to the enduring humanistic practice of cutting and arranging, digesting and recomposing excerpts from ancient literature, such as the ancient Athenian portraits of Theophrastus. 11 These aphorisms and examples were collected in books whose specific uses and functions informed the way books in general were put together and read well into the seventeenth century. 12 In these telling terms, La Bruyère suggests what his book of Caractères could have been, or rather, what it would not be in 1688: a commonplace book. 13 It is only in littérature.” Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse. L’invention de l’honnête homme : 1580-1750, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996, p. 7. 9 La Bruyère, op. cit., p. 3. 10 On the negligeable authority and influence of the learned in French literary culture at the end of the seventeenth century, see Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011. Among other models for the destination of texts in the seventeenth century postulating the pressure of the public on the work, Merlin recognizes the humanistic type, which supposes the anteriority of the Republic of Letters: “l’auteur et l’œuvre sont une partie expressive du public, font corps avec lui; ” Merlin, op. cit., p. 390. 11 Emmanuel Bury, “Les ‘lieux’ de la sagesse humaine et la formation de l’honnête homme,” in Volker Kapp (dir.), Les lieux de mémoire et la fabrique de l’œuvre, Paris- Seattle-Tübingen, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1993, p. 118. On the “digestion” of humanistic learning, see also Bury, Littérature et politesse, op. cit. 12 On the assimilation of the commonplace and the humanist compilation in the seventeenth century, see Marc Escola, “Du florilège au recueil : excerpta et ratio docendi,” in La Bruyère : II. Rhétorique du discontinu, Paris, Champion, 2001, pp. 173-222. 13 I will refer to all early modern compilations of ancient excerpts as commonplace books, following the contemporary sense: “L IEU , se dit aussi des sentences & edits Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 352 relation to this humanistic foundation that La Bruyère’s portrait of his public, this new literary public, can be fully understood. Sometimes called florilegia, these compilations preserved the flowers of ancient literature in several forms. One especially persistent example, still in print while La Bruyère was compiling his Caractères, arranged reflections and examples, aphorisms, comparisons, hieroglyphics, emblems and symbols. 14 This book of fragments coincides with the rhetorical practices of an entire culture of humanistic learning; whether in the schoolroom or the cabinet, excerpts were habitually taken out of sacred and profane texts from antiquity, and organized by topic in alphabetical order, prepared for reuse. 15 The neutralized words of the ancient quotation, generalized as the commonplace, waited to make new meaning in modern context. 16 An extensive tradition of commentary conformed the use of this res litteraria to conven- [sic] notables des Anciens, & des choses les plus remarquables qu’on extrait des Livres: & c’est en ce sens qu’on appelle lieux communs, les recueils qu’on fait des plus beaux passages des Auteurs.” Antoine Furetière, “Lieu” in Dictionnaire universel, La Haye, Leers, 1690, Gallica. 14 An inventory of forms within one compilation reprinted in 1674 may read as follows, in the original Latin: sententiae patrum et philosophorum, biblica et philosophicae et poeticae; exempla sacra et profana; apophthegmata; similitudines; hieroglyphica; emblemata; symbola. Joseph Lang, Anthologia sive florilegium rerum et materiarum selectarum praecipue sententiarum, apophthegmatum, similitudinem, exemplorum, hieroglyphicorum: ex sacris literis, patribus item, aliisq probatis linguae graecae & latinae scriptoribus collectum: studio & opera Josephi Langii, Strasbourg, J. Staedel, 1674, Google Books. At the end of the century, Pierre Bayle will define and generalize the florilegium as “un Recueil alphabétique de Sentences, d’Apophthegmes, de Comparaisons, d’Exemples, & d’Hiéroglyphes.” Pierre Bayle, “LANGIUS (Joseph)” in Dictionnaire historique et critique, Amsterdam, Leers, 1697, ARTFL. According to P. J. Brillon, La Bruyère started writing his Caractères around 1670. Georges Mongrédien, La Bruyère : Recueil des textes et des documents contemporains, Paris, CNRS, 1979, p. 37. 15 See Bernard Beugnot, “Florilèges et Polyanthea: diffusion et statut du lieu commun à l’époque classique,” Études françaises, XIII, n o 1-2, avril 1977, pp. 119-141. Reprinted in La Mémoire du texte. Essais de poétique classique, Paris, Champion, 1994. 16 “Leur trait le plus frappant, du point de vue naïf d’un lecteur de textes anciens, est de déchirer la continuité initiale des textes, d’ôter les lieux du contexte particulier où ils apparaissent, conduisant ainsi à leur donner une valeur générale, réapplicable à une situation actuelle.” Bury, “Les ‘lieux’” in op. cit., p. 118. Cf. Robert Morrissey, Glenn Roe, & Clovis Gladstone, “La Littérature à l’âge des algorithmes” in Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 116 e année, n o 3, juillet-septembre 2016, p. 597 et sq. La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 353 tional discourses, and constituted readers as the virtual community known as the Republic of Letters. Commentators have increasingly reconsidered the novelty of Les Caractères in relation to contemporary literary forms, such as the commonplace book, and have divergently interpreted the function of this substratum with respect to the public. 17 Louis van Delft perceived the relation from the lieu commun to the caractère, and thus from the humanistic compilation of excerpts to La Bruyère’s collection of maxims and portraits, to insist on the profound continuation of Aristotelian anthropology in the early modern period. 18 Thus, readers of La Bruyère’s variations on ancient material would have seen themselves, still, in that res publica literaria. However, as the rhetorical demands and commentaries of the humanistic tradition declined in the seventeenth century, it would seem that readers could use modern maxims to liberate their own discourse from the limits of this humanistic tradition. In Les Caractères Françoise Jaouën interprets the emancipation of the reader from scholastic commentary towards autonomous interpretation. 19 Marc Escola argues, furthermore, that the discontinuous form of Les Caractères, in constantly shifting the point of view around a single object, should have liberated readers not only from prevailing metadiscourse but also from the pressures of their subjectively and historically conditioned moment. 20 In his confrontation with the res litteraria, like Montaigne, La Bruyère seems to have performed an inversion between the public and the particular, nevertheless without constituting the public mirror where the individual sees himself or herself among fellow readers. 21 Contrary to this liberating interpretation, I will investigate how La Bruyère develops a new notion of the public with his readers in direct 17 See especially Escola, “Discontinuité et pratiques de lecture” in Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., pp. 171-243. Yohann Deguin, “Les Caractères de La Bruyère : la possibilité des memorabilia? ,” PFSCL XLVII, 93, 2020, p. 231-242. Christophe Schuwey, “L’organe des Anciens? Retour sur les rééditions des Caractères de La Bruyère,” French Studies, 2020, pp. 1-17. 18 Louis van Delft, “Caractère et lieu commun” in Littérature et anthropologie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. 19 Françoise Jaouën, “Le contrat de lecture. État des lieux” in De l’art de plaire en petits morceaux : Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Saint-Denis, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1996, pp. 155-175. 20 La Bruyère’s rhétorique du discontinu “peut trouver le lieu d’une critique du jugement et s’affranchir des contraintes sociales, passionnelles ou idéologiques qui conditionnent généralement toute évaluation.” Escola, Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., pp. 99-100. 21 Montaigne offers a miroir public du moi, where readers first formed a virtual community of individuals. Merlin, op. cit., pp. 129-131. Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 354 contrast to the declining humanistic ideal, through an ironic inversion of the commonplace book. What happens to the rhetoric of the compilation of excerpts when those examples are taken not from ancient texts but derived from modern society? What effect could such an inversion have on first readers? In taking and generalizing fragments from contemporary life and in assimilating them to this totalizing form, La Bruyère suggested the universality of his readers’ limited experiences. La Bruyère’s compilation of modern examples thus inherits the rhetoric of the commonplace book only to inscribe courtly readers into a modern French public. Indeed, in this inverted commonplace book—and in collaboration with his modern readers, despite his own Ancient professions—La Bruyère operates a rhetoric of presentism that is effectively consistent with contemporary apologies for a century of Louis XIV during the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. 22 From commonplace to remarque La Bruyère calls the separate textual units that fill his book not fragments (but for one memorable exception 23 ), not maximes, sentences, or réflexions like La Rochefoucauld, nor pensées like Pascal’s compilers. In the conclusive passage of his Preface, which survived several variations for new editions, the author designates the pieces of text that fill his book as remarques. 24 La Bruyère characterizes his protean remarques by a formal diversity that immediately recalls our inventory of the forms that the ancient excerpt assumed in the humanistic compilation: sentence, raisonnement, métaphore, figure, parallèle, comparaison, trait, and preferring the description or peinture, that is, the portrait, to the allegorical hieroglyph, emblem, or symbol. 25 In 22 “[...] the equation of contemporary standards with timeless ideals”, characteristic of all classicisms. See Norman, op. cit., p. 29 et passim.] 23 “Des Jugements,” ¶ 28 VIII. This “Fragment” implies the virtual integrity and autonomy of all other remarques. See Marc Escola, “Ce que peut un fragment” in La Bruyère : I. Brèves questions d’herméneutique, Paris, Champion, 2001, pp. 409- 436. 24 On La Bruyère’s presentation of the remarque, see Escola, “Introduction” in Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., pp. 7-20. 25 The original Preface introduces one more form, the definition, at the expense of the fait, and proposes not explique, but exprime. Les Caractères, Préface in op. cit., p. 65. A survey of the chapter “De l’homme” confirms this range of remarques with respect to generality and extent, from the briefest and most general judgment to the generously painted portrait, from aphorisms on human nature to the famously long Ménalque (“De l’homme,” ¶102 I & ¶7 VII). Marc Escola places La Bruyère’s caractères between two limits, intensive and extensive, the sentence and the “petit La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 355 Les Caractères we are thus faced with an assimilation of the formal variation that made up the humanistic book of excerpts, from apophtegmes and exemples to maximes and peintures, to the aesthetic demands of late seventeenth century. 26 La Bruyère’s remarque emerges out of the formal imitation and stylistic elaboration of the commonplace, as well as a pedagogical practice of decontextualization that ultimately subverts the cultural functions of the humanistic compilation. The moralist ultimately distinguishes the remarque from the commonplace as the personal stylization of a universal truth. In the first, liminal chapter, “Des ouvrages de l’esprit,” La Bruyère seems at first to resign his own remarques to the impersonal domain of citation that commonplaces occupied. The first and famous remarque, beginning “Tout est dit” (¶1), inscribes Les Caractères in a preconceived humanistic discourse composed of the res literaria, and seems to invite readers into this literary community. However, in the final words of the chapter, La Bruyère reclaims his part in this literary practice, that is, the manner. The writer stages himself and his reader: “Horace ou Despréaux l’a dit avant vous.―Je le crois sur votre parole; mais je l’ai dit comme mien. Ne puis-je pas penser après eux une chose vraie, et que d’autres encore penseront après moi? ” (¶69). Always vacillating between citation and particular expression, La Bruyère’s remarque both appropriates and sheds the commonplace. 27 Following a singular rhetoric that characterizes a declining humanist tradition, La Bruyère’s remarques simulate the application of neutral commonplaces, personally developed and historically determined expressions that pose as generalized judgments taken from ancient works. It is upon this irony, presenting the particular as the universal, that the rhetoric of Les Caractères and their effect of projection depend. The very act, remarquer, relating the humanistic practice of compilation and reorganization to the moralist’s art of representation, further suggests this inversion. 28 In the last line of this preface, La Bruyère renounces the moral maxim, preferring a form without pretention: “Ceux enfin qui font roman” which Beugnot also traces from the general to the particular, from the sententia to the exemplum. Beugnot, op. cit. pp. 132-133. See Escola, “Exemplum et caractère: ‘voir le semblable’” in Brèves questions d’herméneutique, op. cit., pp. 277- 293. 26 See Karine Abiven, “Avatars de l’apophtegme au XVII e siècle : bons mots et liberté de parole dans la culture mondaine”, Littératures classiques, n o 84, 2014, pp. 143- 159. 27 Jaouën, op. cit., p. 122. Beugnot, op. cit., pp. 126-127. 28 See François Xavier-Cuche, “Les marques de la remarque” in Le métier du moraliste, dir. Marc Escola, Paris, Champion, 2001, p. 125 et sq. Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 356 des maximes veulent être crus : je consens, au contraire, que l’on dise de moi que je n’ai pas quelquefois bien remarqué, pourvu que l’on remarque mieux. 29 ” In claiming only to have remarked well and by inviting readers faced with the same object to remark better, La Bruyère engages the pedagogical relationship of humanistic learning that promised a community of readers. Remarquer, or faire des remarques, denotes the exercise of following a previous reader in cutting passages out of a text for reuse. 30 Through this expression remarquer, by this term remarque, La Bruyère presents his Caractères in the image of the humanistic compilation, as decontextualized excerpts taken from common sources. This rhetoric of the remarque can more generally be considered according to the rhetoric of example. As an excerpt taken from some whole, the example refers readers outside the discourse towards a shared notion of reality. 31 This virtual community thus emerges from a repertory of shared examples, commonplaces in a more literal sense. Les Caractères, however, did not primarily project the Republic of Letters that the commonplace postulated, but rather the “livre du monde” that the author remarked with his readers thanks in part to thoughts digested in the humanistic “mémoire livresque. 32 ” La Bruyère’s book is composed not of excerpts taken directly from ancient books, but of diversely expressed remarques passing for ancient thoughts, and presented in modern topics. 33 This ironic inversion of the declining humanistic form operating in 29 La Bruyère, Préface in op. cit., p. 65. 30 Escola locates, but does not pursue, this intersection of rhetoric in a guidebook for making and using commonplace books from the middle of the century, Mémoire sur le règlement des études dans les lettres humaines. Escola, Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., p. 179. Cf. Furetière’s definition: “Pour profiter de la lecture d’un livre, il en faut remarquer les plus beaux endroits, les plus beaux passages, en faire des extraits.” Antoine Furetière, “Remarque” in Dictionnaire universel, op. cit. 31 “Example is the figure that most clearly and explicitly attempts to shore up the ‘inside’ of dicourse by gesturing toward its ‘outside,’ toward some commonly recognized basis in a reality shared by speaker and listener.” John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy, Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 3-4. 32 Emmanuel Bury, Introduction to Les Caractères, ed. Emmanuel Bury, Librairie Générale Française, 1995, p. 40. 33 La Bruyère consolidates the themes that characterized the articles of the commonplace books, in topics that appealed to his reader’s nearest concerns: affective and moral realities (“Des femmes”, “Du cœur”), social topics (for example, the central diptych “De la ville” & “De la cour”), religious issues (“De la chaire”, “Des esprits forts”), and, most generally, human nature (“De l’homme”). Beugnot, op. cit., p. 138. According to Escola, La Bruyère follows the evolution of the commonplace book in assimilating the alphabetical scheme to encyclopedic modern topics: “ni La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 357 the remarque is the rhetorical means whereby La Bruyère’s book constitutes its own public. From the Commonplace Book to Les Caractères If La Bruyère inherited and subverted the commonplace as the remarque, it follows that the Caractères should have, on a larger scale, modulated the functions of the humanistic compilation and the notion of public they constituted. In his classic article, Bernard Beugnot suggested a series of cultural functions of the commonplace book that rise from its pedagogical design: a sum of knowledge, the representation of a culture through that inventory, and a tool for reading the world out of this projection. 34 All of these functions have been found operating variously in La Bruyère’s book: this totalizing repertory of remarques has been suggestively resituated between the commonplace book and the Encyclopédie of the Enlightenment; 35 Yohann Deguin has recently suggested reading La Bruyère’s book as a memoria for the manners of his century; 36 Les Caractères have also been conceived as a sort of moral microcosm of the author’s reality. 37 But as Beugnot observes, as our analysis of the remarque has suggested, the assimilation of the commonplace in the seventeenth century as the courtly maxim interfered with these usual moral and epistemological functions. 38 An examination of La Bruyère’s inversion of the rhetoric of the commonplace book on a larger scale will suggest how La Bruyère modulated the commonplace’s function of projection to constitute his own reading public. Out of the elementary pedagogical design of the humanistic compilation emerges the potential of the commonplace book to represent a culture as perennial, to project a public as universal. In presenting an abundant and yet limited field of universally applicable examples, the commonplace book served to assimilate the particular to the general, to integrate the particular within the literary conception of universal human experience known as fourre-tout ni essais systématiques, ils opèrent simplement le regroupement local d’un faisceau de réflexions.” Escola, Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., p. 184. 34 Beugnot describes the commonplace book diversely as “un outil de réflexion et d’intelligibilité” and “un vaste dessein encyclopédique,” while “[l]’espace du livre devient analogique de l’espace qu’organisait la memoria.” Beugnot, op. cit., pp. 138 & 127 & 129. Cf. Morrissey et al., op. cit. 35 See Van Delft, op. cit. 36 See Deguin, op. cit. 37 See for example Van Delft, op. cit. 38 Beugnot, op. cit., p. 127. Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 358 humanitas. 39 This projection depended on the contemplation of particular experience not as singular but perennial, as all times were conceived within a unified notion of history. In this book of excerpts taken from ancient literature, according to Beugnot, “la durée culturelle se réfracte et se rétracte dans les limites des pages imprimées, que la mémoire à son tour peut embrasser dans une synchronie qui lui est propre. 40 ” In the space of the commonplace book was summarized the memory of a certain class of European people versed in the same ancient excerpts, known as the Republic of Letters. In Les Caractères, we are faced with the concentration of another culture in time. From the commonplace to the courtly maxim, Beugnot has suggested that this function was disrupted: “la maxime moderne . . . interfère avec les recueils pour en accaparer la fonction morale, substituant aux sentences qu’ils glanaient dans le passé un lieu commun moral qui exprime le milieu mondain où il s’engendre. 41 ” Indeed, in Les Caractères there operates a sort of short-circuit of the act of compilation. In this book of remarques readers found not ancient excerpts but maxims related to court society accompanied with portraits that were often perceived as only moderately generalized descriptions of contemporary individuals. 42 Similarly, Louis van Delft discerns two concurrent aspirations of La Bruyère’s book in his title, universal and historical. Les Caractères may represent a summary of human nature not far from the aspiration of the commonplace book, but the Moeurs de ce siècle represent “le produit, le reflet, mieux : la projection de la culture, du milieu et de l’époque qui l’ont suscité, qui l’ont, littéralement, enfanté.” 43 Something problematic occurs to the public of the commonplace book when ancient excerpts are replaced, in this same open and totalizing form, by modern remarques. 39 This supposition is said to have prevailed until a certain crisis, or at least renegotiation, of exemplarity before the seventeenth century, notably in Montaigne. See especially the Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 59, n o 4, 1998. Beugnot, op. cit., p. 138. 40 Beugnot, op. cit., p. 129. Beugnot, op. cit., p. 127. Beyond its polemical charge, François Charpentier’s critique of La Bruyère’s naturalistic portraits against the verisimilar creations of Theophrastus still holds some truth. François Charpentier, “Discours prononcé à la réception de La Bruyère,” 1693, pp. 36-38. Mongrédien, op. cit., pp. 59-60. Van Delft, op. cit. La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 359 Projecting the Public onto a Common Place Both the humanist compilation and La Bruyère’s book of remarques offered repertories of decontextualized excerpts, prepared for an act of application necessary to make new meaning. The question remains as to how these remarques, in the place of ancient citations, were recontextualized, how the public emerges in the place of the res litteraria from this collaboration. Faced with these remarques, were first readers of Les Caractères inclined to develop a novel and autonomous discourse, or were these remarques resituated in their former context? What, finally, was this whole that writer and reader projected: an ancient literary culture, or a shared conception of contemporary experience? On the one hand, La Bruyère’s maxims should have stimulated singular instances of critical reflection. Escola observes that by the late seventeenth century, the weakening of rhetorical demands for composition and the decline of learned interpretive supports emancipated the way men and women read discontinuous discourse. If the maxim was now perceived as an utterance cut off from its original context and traditional interpretation, reading Les Caractères should proceed as an autonomous practice of interpretation. 44 For readers of discontinuous texts, Escola discerns two tendencies: les lecteurs contemporains considèrent les maximes, sentences, réflexions ou remarques soit comme des énoncés décontextualisés, détachés (excerpta) d’un ensemble systématique, soit comme des énoncés autonomes, indépendants de toute logique d’ensemble. 45 Following this last proposition, but allowing for the recontextualization of excerpts within the text, Escola analyzes the interactions between remarques in La Bruyère’s serially published compilation. 46 Through an autonomous act of interpretation, the reader could have achieved his or her own singular moral reflection beyond the patterns of thought that the predetermined disposition of continuous discourses maintained. Through this perspective, Les Caractères seem to emancipate readers from the res litteraria without reinsicribing them into a new public. However, to read Les Caractères as isolated excerpts often stands against the evidence of their first reception, where remarques were regularly per- 44 Escola, Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., p. 243. 45 Escola, Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., p. 137. 46 “[...] les énoncés originaux sont récontextualisés au profit de la production d’un nouveau texte qui reconditionne leur lisibilité originale.” Escola, Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., p. 81. Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 360 ceived in context, whether in ancient books or modern life. For certain contemporary readers, La Bruyère’s remarques were not so much extracts liberated from discourse as fragments failing to make up a new texte, or excerpts taken from old books. 47 We know, furthermore, that countless keys matched historical individual with portrait, despite the moralist’s apparent disdain. 48 In an effort to contain the problem of reference, one might take care to exclude portraits from this argument, to separate aphoristic and descriptive sides of the text. 49 But given the continuous range of La Bruyère’s remarques, it is not always certain where the maxim ends and where the portrait begins. Furthermore, the increasing number of portraits in every edition, the superabundance of descriptive examples from contemporary life, likely grounded the general reflection that the maxims should have provoked. An extratextual element must therefore be acknowledged, allowing us to observe the referential effects of Les Caractères and the notion of the public they suggested to readers. A close reading of one series of remarques through successive editions will finally suggest how Les Caractères projected this reading public. 50 If through constantly shifting impersonal maxims readers could break out of the universalist schema that the commonplace book cultivated, readers were increasingly led to project their community through the historical reality they shared. From the fourth to the sixth edition, from 1689 to 1691, in the chapter entitled “Des Jugements,” readers of Les Caractères were addressed by two 47 The famous critique printed in the Mercure Galant tore apart La Bruyère’s “amas de pièces détachées.” Despite the extremely polemical context for this article protesting La Bruyère’s election to the Académie Française, Schuwey has recently argued that this reaction agrees with contemporary expectations for books from one author. Jean Donneau de Visé (ed.), Mercure galant, Paris, De Luyne, Girard, Brunet, June 1693, p. 271. Cf. Bury, Introduction to Les Caractères, op. cit., pp. 20- 21. Christophe Schuwey, Jean Donneau de Visé, op. cit., p. 204. Vigneul-Marville saw in Les Caractères a stylized book of excerpts, and only appreciated the remarques as ancient maxims in new clothes. La Bruyère’s similar attack against dried up plagiarists, translators, and compilers in his fifth edition could respond to this derisive reception, in order to distinguish his book of remarques further from late commonplace books such as Lang’s anthology. La Bruyère, “Des ouvrages de l’esprit,” ¶62 V. See “Ceci n’est pas un livre. Réception du discontinu” in Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., pp. 116-136. 48 See the preface to his reception speech in La Bruyère, op. cit. 49 Escola interrogates the referential problem of the portrait in Brèves questions d’herméneutique, op. cit. 50 In this approach I follow Escola, “Du bon usage du pied de mouche” in Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., pp. 25-47. La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 361 reflections interrogating honor in battle. The first reflection accuses the false valor of the reader directly (“Des Jugements,” ¶96 IV): ¶ Vous vous agitez, vous vous donnez un grand mouvement, surtout lorsque les ennemis commencent à fuir et que la victoire n’est plus douteuse, ou devant une ville après qu’elle a capitulé ; vous aimez, dans un combat ou pendant un siège, à paraître en cent endroits pour n’être nulle part, à prévenir les ordres du général de peur de les suivre, et à chercher les occasions plutôt que de les attendre et les recevoir : votre valeur serait-elle fausse ? And the next reflection, just beneath it, seems to issue an order to that same general to maintain the false but valorizing scheme that is war (“Des Jugements,” ¶97 IV): ¶ Faites garder aux hommes quelque poste où ils puissent être tués, et ou néanmoins ils ne soient pas tués : ils aiment l’honneur et la vie. These two remarques could indeed be modern stylizations of excerpts from ancient texts posed to speak at the universal register of the commonplace book. In this way, the humanistic aspect of Les Caractères seems to work with, rather than against, their referential quality, assimilating readers in the seventeenth century once more into the community that the commonplace book still implied. On the other hand, La Bruyère’s two varied takes of the object he sets before readers could even provoke readers to reflect diversely on the notion of honor, beyond immediate cultural pressures. Although the model of siege and capitulation restricts their application to ancient and early modern historical context, these remarques together could liberate readers in an independent discourse on false honor in any warring culture, or into an essayistic reflection in this contested French tradition through complementary perspectives. In the seventh edition, after these two remarques La Bruyère inserted two more reflections on war―or, rather, on watching war. Passing over one further generalized interrogation, we may concentrate on the more suggestive, and enticing, narrative example (“Des Jugements,” ¶99 VII): ¶ Ceux qui, ni guerriers ni courtisans, vont à la guerre et suivent la cour, qui ne font pas un siège, mais qui y assistent, ont bientôt épuisé leur curiosité sur une place de guerre, quelque surprenante qu’elle soit, sur la tranchée, sur l’effet des bombes et du canon, sur les coups de main, comme sur l’ordre et le succès d’une attaque qu’ils entrevoient. [...] At last, now having seen war itself, the men and women who called for it are not so sure. Such a remark could join any number of ancient commonplaces on the disproportion between doing and celebrating battle, or stand for an ironic inversion of ancient praise for valor at war. Within the Peadar Kavanagh PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 362 pages of Les Caractères, this example could serve as yet another perspective on our contrary tendencies towards glory, or curiosity, and survival. Here again, Les Caractères prove susceptible to intratextual reading that works to emancipate, or at least critically shift, the reader’s perspective. At this point, neither the ancient res litteraria nor a new public seems to be preferred. However, this last remark on watching war appeared in 1692, just months after the Siege of Namur, which became a spectacle attended by magistrates and courtiers following army and monarch, and a media event sustained in print. 51 La Bruyère carefully generalizes the current event, all in the present tense, speaking of warriors and courtiers, a siege, another general and the State. But the specificity of the vocabulary, and most of all the plain topicality of the remark ensure that this excerpt from contemporary life is recontextualized in 1692. 52 Far from stimulating a generalized moral reflection on curiosity—itself, moreover, an affection characteristic of this early modern culture—the remark appears as a satirical representation of those who followed La Bruyère’s readers up to Namur, strangers to the military custom of the aristocracy, who had expected a game and found a frightening siege in miserable conditions. By negation, La Bruyère seems to invite readers to see themselves at the Siege of Namur, courtiers with a real interest in war, watching these merely curious spectators. This study of successive editions of Les Caractères—not as an integral preconceived text, but in response to changing circumstances 53 —suggests that La Bruyère’s rhetoric led readers not from the particular to the general, but from the general back towards their own historical moment and social surroundings, projecting that shared virtual experience which constituted the reading public. The ironic consequence of this rhetorical inversion is that the general now tends to speak only of the particular, that the particular suffices for the general. In other words, Les Caractères imply that a limited field of modern experience can represent the full extent of human experience. When a generalized example of a siege appeared in 1692, it immediately referred readers to the Siege of Namur of that same year. This referential effect is by 51 See Chloé Hogg, Absolutist Attachments: Emotion, Media, and Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 2019. 52 Bury notes La Bruyère’s lexical precision in describing the historically specific fortifications. Bury, op. cit., p. 487. La Bruyère almost seems to deride the didactic military relations of the Mercure galant. 53 For a recent critique of the genetic reading of Les Caractères, see Schuwey, “L’organe des Anciens? ,” op. cit. La Bruyère’s Caractères and their Public PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0025 363 no means limited to this short series in the long run of Les Caractères. 54 Stylized maxims that innovated humanistic discourse for court society were supplied and restricted by generalized descriptions of real events and individuals. With some irony, readers in search of universal reflections in this Ancient’s modern commonplace book were returned to their own century and readers. Christophe Schuwey’s recent comparison is illuminating here: positively, in the Mercure Galant Donneau de Visé never stopped naming, soliciting, and generally implicating readers within his periodical book; 55 negatively, in Les Caractères, La Bruyère never stopped dissimulating the names of individuals, places, things, and even events, enticing readers to reconfigure the little world they shared in successive editions. Through suggestion, by the rhetoric of example, this unlikely modern commonplace book made readers reconstitute their collective experience, and conformed those who should share it as the public. Like the commonplace book, Les Caractères seem to account for the totality of things, in an eternal present tense. The totality, however, was determined by the compiler’s remarques on the reading public itself, and readers likely followed this reflexive movement. Through decontextualized excerpts from ancient literature, the commonplace book seemed to speak of all history. By representing modern society in generalized maxims and character types, Les Caractères appears to aspire to this same universal register. The feat of the compiler of the commonplace book was to assure the reader that ancient literature could account for all experience. Perhaps unintentionally, La Bruyère’s own achievement consists in making readers see their own century in a representation of the universal. The moralist’s professed moral aim against national prévention and particular amourpropre, 56 to allow readers to see themselves and their people and their faults as in a relativizing mirror, ultimately stands in contrast to this reflexive universalizing effect of Les Caractères. In this unexpected way, La Bruyère’s satirical Moeurs de ce siècle contributed to forming the presentist notion of a century of Louis XIV and its reading public. 57 54 Turning to the portraits, the generalization from Pamphile to “un Pamphile” and finally to “les Pamphiles” (“Des Grands,” ¶50 IV-VII), from proper name to common noun, actually seems to encourage readers to account for every false grand in a single, historically determined type. Cf. Escola, “Grandeur de Pamphile, misère de l’interprétation” in Rhétorique du discontinu, op. cit., pp. 350-351. 55 See Schuwey, “L’organe des Anciens? ,” op. cit. See Merlin on the quarrel of La Princesse de Clèves. Merlin, op. cit. 56 See La Bruyère, Discours sur Théophraste in Les Caractères, op cit. 57 Cf. Charles Perrault, Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, Paris, Coignard, 1687.