il l’admire; Dieu et la nature sont en tout cela ce qu’il n’admire point! il ne va pas plus loin que l’oignon de sa tulipe, qu’il ne livrerait pas pour mille ecus, et qu’il donnera pour rien quand les tulipes seront neligees et que les oeillets auront prevalu.  Cet homme raisonnable qui a une ame, qui a un culte et une religion, revient chez soi fatigue affame, mais fort content de sa journee:  il a vu des tulipes.

Les Caracteres is the title of La Bruyere’s book; but its sub-title—­’Les Moeurs de ce Siecle’—­gives a juster notion of its contents.  The whole of society, as it appeared to the subtle and penetrating gaze of La Bruyere, flows through its pages.  In them, Versailles rises before us, less in its outward form than in its spiritual content—­its secret, essential self.  And the judgement which La Bruyere passes on this vision is one of withering scorn.  His criticism is more convincing than La Rochefoucauld’s because it is based upon a wider and a deeper foundation.  The vanity which he saw around him was indeed the vanity of the Preacher—­the emptiness, the insignificance, the unprofitableness, of worldly things.  There was nothing too small to escape his terrible attention, and nothing too large.  His arraignment passes from the use of rouge to the use of torture, from the hypocrisies of false devotion to the silly absurdities of eccentrics, from the inhumanity of princes to the little habits of fools.  The passage in which he describes the celebration of Mass in the Chapel of Versailles, where all the courtiers were to be seen turning their faces to the king’s throne and their backs to the altar of God, shows a spirit different indeed from that of Bossuet—­a spirit not far removed from the undermining criticism of the eighteenth century itself.  Yet La Bruyere was not a social reformer nor a political theorist:  he was simply a moralist and an observer.  He saw in a flash the condition of the French peasants—­

Certains animaux farouches, des males et des femelles, repandus par la campagne, noirs, livides, et tout brules du soleil, attaches a la terre qu’ils fouillent et qu’ils remuent avec une opiniatrete invincible; ils out comme une voix articulee, et, quand ils se levent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine:  et en effet ils sont des hommes—­

saw the dreadful fact, noted it with all the intensity of his genius, and then passed on.  He was not concerned with finding remedies for the evils of a particular society, but with exposing the underlying evils of all societies.  He would have written as truthful and as melancholy a book if he had lived to-day.