Jean de La Bruyère is known as the author of a single masterpiece, Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec Les Caractères ou les mours de ce siècle (The Characters of Theophrastus, Translated from the Greek, with the Characters or the Mores of this Century), published in ever expanding editions from 1688 to 1696, the year of the author's sudden death at the age of fifty. It is a moral-satiric work attacking the vices of contemporary French society and made up primarily of portraits and maxims but accompanied by an extraordinarily diverse set of other types of discourse treating a wide range of subject matters. The whole work was intended, as he writes in the Préface, to describe the mours (meaning mores, customs, and forms of behavior as well as morals) of its original readers. The mirror...