there remains something to regret.
Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of
commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can
elevate low souls.[7] That depends. If poverty means pinching and
fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense,
but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of
delicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import.

Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp. Luxurious
and indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after the
delights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolent
contempt for merit; these were the characteristics of the men in high
military place. The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an
expenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced and
encouraged; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder of
their affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men of
spirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, and
because those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a condition
where there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation.[8]

To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence of
every chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenargues
the still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health. The
winter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed. His legs had been
frost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken by
small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind. So after a
service of nine years, he quitted military life (1744). He vainly
solicited employment as a diplomatist. The career was not yet open to
the talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dwelt
less on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he had
an authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyeres in the early part of
the fourteenth century.[9] But the only road to employment lay through
the Court. The claims even of birth counted for nothing, unless they
were backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who haunted
Versailles. For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but a
parasite as well. 'Permit me to assure you, sir,' Vauvenargues wrote
courageously to Amelot, then the minister, 'that it is this moral
impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of ever
reaching the King his master,