which causes the discouragement that is
observed among the nobility of the provinces, and which extinguishes all
ambition.'[10] Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as usual in good
offices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote,
and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourable
opportunity should present itself.[11]

Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fair
words of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities that
do not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront the
disappointment with cheerful fortitude 'Misfortune itself,' he had once
written, 'has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition of
fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forces
that before were unemployed: it is in indolence and littleness that
virtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight
and forces it to creep along in bonds.'[12] He was true to the counsel
which he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness that
death was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in the
ordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life,
he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the fame
which he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve. Neither
scantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends and
relations--always the worst foes to superior character on critical
occasions--could detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745 he
took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School of
Medicine. Literature had not yet acquired that importance in France
which it was so soon to obtain. The Encyclopaedia was still unconceived,
and the momentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, of
organising the philosophers and men of letters into an army with
banners, was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not to
the full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command the
admiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of the
new school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been struck by a
letter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticism
comparing Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Coming from a young
officer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as
'very noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous,' this criticism was
peculiarly striking