s successful, the result shall
be your daughter's dowry," the said daughter being a little child who
was then seated on La Bruyere's knee. The ultimate success of the book
being prodigious, Mlle Michallet must, by the time she was
marriageable, have become a remarkable _parti_, but the story is not
one which commends itself to the Incorporated Society of Authors. "Les
Caracteres" was published in January 1688, and the critics, with the
veteran Bussy-Rabutin at their head, welcomed it with shouts of
applause. Bussy frankly said, "It must be admitted that having proved
the merit of Theophrastus by his translation, he has obscured the fame
of that writer by what he has done next, for he has penetrated, in his
own portraits, deeper into the heart of man than Theophrastus did, and
has penetrated with even greater delicacy and by means of more
exquisite language." This must have been very gratifying from the
survivor of the great school of Malherbe and Balzac.

At the age of forty-three, then, previously unknown in the world of
letters, this shy and obscure gentleman-in-waiting to the Princes of
Conde, rose into fame, and enjoyed the admiration or the envy of
whatever was most prominent in Paris. The public which he addressed
was one which we may pause a moment to contemplate. The authority of
the Academic and noble _salons_ was practically at an end, and
intellectual culture had spread to a somewhat wider circle. Those who
governed taste had thrown off many affectations of a previous
generation, and in particular the curious disease of "preciousness."
They were healthier, soberer and slightly less amusing than their
forerunners. But they formed, in the heart of Paris, the most compact
body of general intelligence to be met with at that time in any part
of the world. They were certain, in their little sphere, of their
aesthetic and logical aims. They were the flower of an intense
civilization, very limited, in a way very simple; so far as the
adoption of outer impulses went, very inactive, and yet within its own
range energetic, elegant and audacious. To this world the "Caracteres"
was now offered, modestly, as though it were a summing up of the
moralizations of the last fifty years. The author begins by
deprecating the idea that he has anything new to impart. His trick is
rather subtle; he concentrates our attention on the sayings of an
ancient Aristotelian philosopher, and then, as if to fill up the time,
he ventures to re