In the last years of the seventeenth century, a contemporary of Bossuet's and Racine's published a little book that became a great success. Its object seemed quite modest: to portray exactly the customs of its time. Jean de La Bruyère's Les Caractères ou mœurs de ce siècle (The Characters, or Manners of the Present Age, 1688) offers more than vivid vignettes of French society; it places these anecdotes and descriptions within the framework of an opposition between the brittle, superficial and artificial world of the royal court and Paris – la cour et la ville – and another world, evoked primarily by implication – the natural world that exists, or that should exist, or that may once have existed, elsewhere. This duality of the artificial and the natural, though it derives in part from the long-standing preference accorded to ‘natural style’ (le naturel) in most critical writings of the seventeenth century, makes La Bruyère a precursor of the early Romantics such as Rousseau, because, like the latter, he sees Parisian society as the enemy of nature. For them the naturel is not simply a matter of style but of ethics, and it is associated with distinct places and groups as well as with an understanding of the causes of things.