alamities that befell Oedipus and the Atrides are regarded by us
as improbable and fabulous; and yet we find in contemporary history
that fatality clings with no less persistence to families such as the
Stuarts, the Colignys,[2] &c., and hounds to their death, with what
almost seems personal vindictiveness, pitiable and innocent victims
like Henrietta of England, daughter of Henry IV., Louise de Bourbon,
Joseph II., and Marie-Antoinette.

And again in another category, what shall we say of the
injustice--unintelligent but apparently almost conscious, almost
systematic and premeditated--of games of chance, duels, battles,
storms, shipwrecks, and fires? Or of the inconceivable luck of a
Chastenet de Puysegur who, after forty years' service, in the course of
which he took part in thirty battles and a hundred and twenty sieges,
always in the front rank and displaying the most romantic courage, was
never once touched by shot or steel, while Marshal Oudinot was wounded
thirty-five times, and General Trezel was struck by a bullet in every
encounter? What shall we say of the extraordinary fortune of Lauzun,
Chamillart, Casanova, Chesterfield, &c., or of the inconceivable,
unvarying prosperity that attended the crimes of Sylla, Marius, or
Dionysius the Elder, who, in his extreme old age, after an odious but
fantastically successful life, died of joy on learning that the
Athenians had just crowned one of his tragedies? Or, finally, of
Herod, surnamed the Great or the Ascalonite, who swam in blood,
murdered one of his wives and five of his children, put to death every
upright man who might chance to offend him, and yet was fortunate in
all his undertakings?

6

These famous examples, which might be indefinitely multiplied, are in
truth no more than the abnormal and historic presentments of what is
shown to us every day, in a humbler but not less emphatic fashion, by
the thousand and one caprices of propitious or contrary fortune at work
on the small and ill-lit stage of ordinary life.

Doubtless, we must, first of all, when closely examining such insolent
prosperity or unvarying disaster, attribute a royal share to the
physical or moral causes which are capable of explaining them. Had we
ourselves known Vauvenargues, we should probably have detected a
certain timidity, irresolution or misplaced pride in his character
whereby he was disabled from allowing the opportunity to mature or from
seizing it with sufficient vigou