" La Bruyere summed up his attacks in a preface to the
eighth edition of the "Caracteres" in 1694. He then retired again to
his independence as a crafty old bachelor, and Saint Simon gives us a
pleasant snapshot of him in these latest years, "a very
straightforward man, capital company, simple, with nothing of the
pedant about him, and entirely disinterested."
He remained the man of one book until nearly the close of his life. It
is thought that Bossuet, who had always been his great exemplar, urged
him to undertake a reply to the heresies of Mme de Guyon and Fenelon,
and that so he was dragged into that very painful quarrel. At all
events, he started a series of "Dialogues on Quietism," in which all
the extreme doctrines of Molinos and his disciples were examined and
ridiculed. On May 8, 1696, La Bruyere dined with Antoine Bossuet, the
bishop's elder brother; after dinner he took out the MSS. from his
pocket, and read extracts to his host. Two days afterwards, after
walking in the garden at Versailles, he had a stroke, and two days
after that he died. He had had no premonition of illness, and the
rumour went round that the Quietists had poisoned him.
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