teen thousand men away from Prague. The
King's Regiment took part in the Bohemian campaign, and in this
frightful march which closed it; Vauvenargues with the rest.

To physical sufferings during two winters was added the distress of
losing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached; he perished in the
spring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The _Eloge_ in which
Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of his
friend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style of
youth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste.[5] He complained that
nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, not remembering
that even the most tender feeling fails to touch us, when it has found
stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were
prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been
passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have
become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a
certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the
faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those
other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their
own personality, which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in the
way of an even and humane life. His nature had such depth and quality
that the perpetual untowardness of circumstances left no evil print upon
him; hardship made him not sour, but patient and wise, and there is no
surer sign of noble temper.

The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials.
Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with the
sordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His letters to
Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits to
which he was driven. The nature of these straits is an old story all
over the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things that young men in
want of money have generally done. It cannot be said, I fear, that he
passed along those miry ways without some defilement. He bethinks him on
one occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters. 'Why should I not
undertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable
dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should not
have repaid it by the time fixed?'[6] We must make allowance for the
youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its
significance from our own. Even then