Jean of the Heather

Biography

Youth

One a long time believed that it had been born in a village close to Dourdan, until one had found his act of Baptême, which establishes that it was baptized on August 17th, 1645 with the church Saint Christophe, in the City. He was the oldest son of Louis of the Heather, general inspector of the revenues of the Town hall, middle-class man of Paris, and Elisabeth Hamonyn. Its paternal great-great-grandfather, Jean of the Heather, apothecary in the street Saint-Denis, and his great-grandfather, Mathias of the Heather, civil lieutenant of prévôté and Viscount of Paris, had played, at the 16th century, an active role in the Ligue. It was probably high with the Oratoire of Paris, and, at twenty years, obtained the rank of bachelor of both Droit S to the Université of Orleans. It returned to live in Paris with its family, whose financial circumstances were rather easy, and was registered with the bar, but pled little or not. In 1673, it bought a load of general treasurer of France at the office of finances of the general information of Caen, load which was worth a score of thousand books, brought back approximately 12 350 pounds per annum, and conferred moreover the ennoblement; it made the voyage of Normandy for its installation, then, the formalities filled, it went back to Paris and did not appear any more in Caen. It sold its load in 1686. Since August 15th, 1684, it was one of the tutors of the young duke of Bourbon, grandson of large the Condé. This employment was entrusted with the Heather, according to the abbot of Olivet, on the recommendation of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, “which usually provided the princes, said Fontenelle, people of merit in the letters which they needed”. One is unaware of besides how the Heather knew Bossuet.

Tutor of the duke of Bourbon

The young duke of Bourbon was sixteen years old, and it had just completed its second year of Philosophie to the college of Clermont (Louis-the-Large), which was directed by the Jesuit S. It is with two Jesuits still, the Alleaume fathers and of Rosel, and with the Mathématicien Sauveur, that the Heather divided the care to complete the education of the young duke, to which it was charged to teach, for its part, the Histoire, the Géographie and the institutions of France. Cop followed closely the studies of his grandson, and the Heather, like the other Masters, was to make known to him the program of its lessons and progress of its pupil, who, to tell the truth, was a rather poor pupil. July 24th, 1685, the duke of Bourbon married Miss de Nantes, girl of Louis XIV and Francoise de Montespan, who was eleven years and ten months old; The Heather was invited to share its lessons between the two young husbands. December 11th, 1686, Condé died in Fontainebleau, and the education of the duke of Bourbon was regarded as finished. The Heather remained nevertheless in the house of Cop in the capacity as gentleman of Mister the duke, or “man of letters”, according to the abbot of Olivet, with thousand ecus of pension. These rather vague functions left with the Heather the leisure work according to its tastes, and they enabled him to observe with its ease these large and these courtiers of which it was to make of so corrosive portraits. But it had certainly to suffer from the unbearable character of the “Highnesses with which it was”, and that Saint-Simon depicted us under so black colors. “Wire denatured, cruel father, terrible husband, hateful Master…”, such were, according to the author of the Memories, Henri-Jules de Bourbon, wire of the large Cop; and as for his grandson, the pupil of the Heather, “his ferocity was extreme and showed himself in all. It was a grinding stone always in the air, which made flee in front of it, and whose his/her friends were never in safety, sometimes by extreme insults, sometimes by cruel jokes opposite, and songs which he could make at once, which carried the part and which were never erased… He felt the more intimate plague of sound domesticates…” the Heather, which naturally had sociable mood and the desire to like, suffered from the constraint which the obligation imposed to him to defend its dignity. It avoided persecutions to which in hillock poor the Santeul was, but one feels the bitterness of the self-esteem wounded in the roughest passages of his chapter of Large.

Success

The first edition of the Caractères appeared in March 1688, under this title: the Characters of Théophraste, translated from the Greek, with the characters or manners of this century . In Paris, at Etienne Michallet, first printer of Roy, street Saint-Jacob, with the Saint Paul Image. Mr. cd. LXXXVIII. With privilege of Its Majesty, in °12. - The name of the author was not reproduced on any edition published of alive sound.

Although this first edition contained especially remarks, and almost not of portraits, success was immediately very sharp, and two other editions appeared in the same year 1688, without the Heather having time to increase them notably. On the other hand, the 4th ED. (1689) accepted more than 350 new natures; the fifth (1690), more than 150; the sixth (1691) and the seventh (1692), nearly 80 each one; the eighth (1693), more than 40, for which it is necessary to add the speech to the Academy. Only the 9th edition (1696), which appeared a few days after the death of the Heather, but re-examined and corrected by him, did not contain anything new. The sale of its work does not enrich the Heather, which in advance had intended the product from there to equip the girl with sound Libraire Michallet - this dowry was of 100,000 F approximately according to certain estimates, and by 200.000 to 300.000 F following of others.

The Heather with the Academy

The Heather was presented to the Académie in 1691, and it was Pavillon which was elected. It was represented two years later, and this time was elected, on May 14th, 1693, to replace the abbot of the Room. It had been warmly recommended by the Pontchartrain general inspector. Its speech of reception, which he pronounced on June 15th of the same year, raised storms. It was violently attacked in the Gallant Mercure , which it had formerly placed “immediately below nothing”, and whose principal writers, Thomas Corneille and Fontenelle, did not forgive him to have spoken in praise, in this speech, of the chiefs of the party of Old, Bossuet, Boileau, the Fountain, and especially to have exalté Racine at the expense of Corneille. The Heather retorted with the article Mercury in the foreword of its speech, and he was avenged for Fontenelle while publishing in the 8th ED. of its book character of Cydias, of which everyone recognized the original.

End of its life

The last years of the life of the Heather were devoted to the preparation of a new work, of which it had taken the idea in its frequent discussions with Bossuet: it is with knowing the Dialogs about Quiétisme , that it left unfinished. They were published after its death, in 1699, by the abbot of the Pine, doctor in Sorbonne, which supplemented the seven dialogs found in papers of the Heather, by two dialogs in its way. It is probable that it was not obstructed either to alter the seven first; but, with this reserve, the authenticity of the Dialogs, which was not allowed by Walckenaër, appears certain to the most recent editor of the Heather, Mr. G. Servois. Let us add that one has twenty letters of the Heather, of which seventeen are addressed to the prince of Condé, and we will have completed the enumeration of its complete works.

He died in Versailles, in the night from May 10th to 11th 1696, of an attack of Apoplexie. The account of its end was transmitted to us by a letter of Antoine Bossuet, brother of the bishop of Meaux. “I had soup with him the Tuesday the 8th, writes it; it was very merry and had never gone better. Wednesday and Thursday even, up to nine hours of the evening, occurred in visits and walks, without any presentiment; it soupa with appetite, and very of a blow it lost the word and its mouth was turned. Mr. Felix, Mr. Fagon, all the medicine of the court came to its help. It badly showed its head like the seat of sound. It was informed some. Bleeding, emetic, rectal injection of tobacco, nothing made there… It had read me days before Dialogs which it had made on the quietism, not with the imitation of the Provincial Letters (because it was always original), but dialogs in its way. It is a loss for us all; we regret it appreciably. ” Bossuet itself wrote on its side on May 28th: “All the court regretted it, and Mister Prince more than all the others. ” Lastly, here in which terms Saint-Simon recorded his death: “The public lost soon after (1696) a famous man by his spirit, its style and the knowledge of the men: I want to say the Heather, which died of apoplexy in Versailles, after having exceeded Théophraste while working according to him, and to have painted the men of our time, in its new characters, in an inimitable way. It was an honest fort besides man, of very good company, simple, without anything pedant, and extremely not involved. I had known it enough to regret it, and the works which its age and its health could make hope of him.”

The Heather died unmarried and poor. Its Mort, “if prompt, if surprising”, following the expressions of its successor to the Academy, the Abbot Claude Fleury, gave birth to the suspicion that it would have been poisoned, in the église Saint-Julien, which was demolished in 1797.

Conclusion

One wanted to make Heather a kind of reformer, of democrat, a “precursor of the French revolution”. The passages abound in its book where it is seen that it divides, on the contrary, and that it accepts all the essential ideas of his time, in Politique as in Religion. He criticizes the abuses, but he respects the institutions. He even recognizes that certain evils are inevitable. He had too the love of sound Art to be one revolted, and, like noticed it Nisard, he could not hate what he painted so well. This posed, it remains that the tone of the Characters is almost constantly that of most corrosive the Satire. There were in the Heather a singular mixture of pride and timidity, secret ambition and contempt for the ambitious ones, of scorn of the honors and conscience that it of it was worthy; it felt deeply, in spite of its assignment of stoical indifference , the inequality of its merit and its fortune. And its great objection against the company of the 17th century is precisely not to make its place with the personal merit. “Domestic” of these Condé, of which we indicated according to Saint-Simon the hateful character, it had more than another to complain about the mortuary of large and their injustice with regard to men “which equalize them by the heart and the spirit and which passes them sometimes”. Endowed with a major and delicate sensitivity, which to us is attested by certain its reflections on the love and the friendship, it is not astonishing if the Heather, of which the natural instincts were constantly ruffled, ends up conceiving some bitterness against the injustice of the fate and the épancha in its book.

Its turned sour mood was admirably been useful by a style incisive, rough, nervous, bold until brutality. Its sentence, short, abrupt, jerked, is already that of the 18th century}; the realism of the expression, the crudeness of certain features, the tendency to paint outside, the gestures of the characters, are almost 19th. And it still resembles to us by a feature which distinguishes it from its contemporaries; it is the first writer for which the style had an eigenvalue, independent of the subject. It is the first in date of the designers.

Quotations

Préface
“I took a feature on a side and a feature of another; and of these various features which could be appropriate for the same person, I made probable paintings It is necessary that my paintings express the man well in general, since they resemble so many private individuals”.
“Those finally which make maxims want to be believed: I authorize, on the contrary, that one says ego that I sometimes did not notice, provided that one notices better. ”

Of the heart
“I2 (IV) the love which is born suddenly is longest to cure.”

Of the court
“10 (VI) the court is like a built marble building: I want to say that it is made up extremely hard men, but strong polishes. ”
“22 (VI) One lies down at the court and one rises on the interest (...): which means of remaining motionless where any walk, where all is stirred up; and not to run where the others run? (...) so thorny question, if embarrassed, and of a so painful decision, that an infinite number courtiers age on yes and not, and die in the doubt. ”
“I0I (VI) the city disgusts province; the court undeceives city, and cures court.

(I) A healthy spirit draws at the court the taste of loneliness and the retirement. ”

Of large the
“22 (V) (...) the large ones are odious with small by the evil that they make them, and by all it although they do not make them (...). ”
“29 (I) (...) they think of themselves, (...): that is natural. ”
“36 (IV) You are tall, you are powerful: it is not enough; make that I estimate you (...). ”
“56 (I) One must be keep silent on the powerful ones: there is almost always flattery to say good of it; there is danger to say of it evil while they live, and of cowardice when they died. ”

“That it is difficult to be content somebody. ”

Source

This article has as a source the Biographie of the Heather by Paul Souday.

External bonds

Biographical note of the French Academy
Documents, courses, comments made up on the Heather
the characters

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