“Nulle lecture n’est plus propice à la rêverie, nulle ne suscite mieux la méditation, l’interrogation sur les êtres” [No other reading is more favourable to the reverie, no other reading arouses meditation, the interrogation on beings in a better manner], wrote Louis Van Delft in his 1993 study Littérature et Anthropologie: Nature humaine et caractère à l’âge classique. Contemporary readers can reflect on this statement by discovering several texts by La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), La Bruyère (1645-1696), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pierre Nicole (1625-1695), the canonical French moralists on whom dictionaries and histories of literature generally focus when referring to a particular type of seeing and examining the world during the
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Citation: Ciocoiu, Elena. "17th-century French Moralists". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 May 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19498, accessed 31 October 2024.]
