The nearer we approach great men, the clearer we see that they are men. Barely do they appear great before their valets.
[Rarement ils sont grands vis-à-vis de leurs valets-de-chambre.]
Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696) French essayist, moralist
(Spurious)
This passage, both English and French, is attributed to La Bruyere (and, more specifically, to his Characters [Les Caractères] (1688). It does not, however, appear in that work (in any translation or the native French) nor does it seem to appear in any other work of La Bruyere that I could find.
Both English and French show up in a passage in Samuel Arthur Bent, Short Sayings of Great Men (1882), about Mme. de Cornuel (d. 1694). Bent is discussing a quotation attributed to her, with parallels amongst Montaigne (1586) and Goethe (1805). (The passage is quoted at Bartleby.com, which may account for modern familiarity with it.) Bent cites the above from La Bruyere's Caractères.
Other versions, of each sentence, show up in quotations collections over the following decades, and today the French has a number of hits on Russian/Slavic websites, but nothing (not even on French search engines) that pins it to any source aside from the same pages in English language searches.
Quotations about:
great person
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor great scholars great men.
