. A great many years afterwards Voltaire was
surprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such a
book as the _Felicite Publique_ of the Marquis de Chastellux. To
Vauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with a
good deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to the
great author of _Cinna_. '_It is the part of a man like you,_' he said
admirably, '_to have preferences, but no exclusions._'[13] The
correspondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth and
mutual respect. 'If you had been born a few years earlier,' Voltaire
wrote to him, 'my works would be worth all the more for it; but at any
rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path that
you pursue.'[14]

The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had been
conveyed by Vauvenargues' letters. Voltaire took every opportunity of
visiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to the
grave. Men of humbler stature were equally attracted. 'It was at this
time,' says the light-hearted Marmontel, 'that I first saw at home the
man who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good,
the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues. Cruelly used by nature in his body,
he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in him
Fenelon weak and suffering. I could make a good book of his
conversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them. You see some
traces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts and
meditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in his
writings, he was even more so still in his conversation.'[15] Marmontel
felt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the _Epistle to
Voltaire_ expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They contain the
happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, '_ce coeur stoique et
tendre_.'[16]

In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his time.
That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion. Accepting no
dogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, very
faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals--God, immortality, and
the like--he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the
best men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book.
At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by and
by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which
identifies God with all the forces and the