ement, and he is most careful never to
recommend violent means or an excessive austerity; nor does he condemn
or scold, even when his own humanity is most affronted, but he tries to
induce every one to make the best of his relations with other men
during the fugitive and frail duration of their common existence. If
he hated anything--in his universal benignity--Vauvenargues hated a
rigid puritanism. In one place he says, "We believe no longer in
witches, and yet there are people who still believe in Calvin!"

Vauvenargues was twenty-six years of age when the war of the Austrian
Succession broke out, and swept him into military action. He was
vegetating in garrison at Metz when the armies of Marshal de
Belle-Isle, the gallant and thrice-unfortunate, streamed eastward into
Germany and carried our philosopher with them. The Regiment of the
King, of which Vauvenargues was an officer, reached Bohemia in July
1741. In a night attack of extraordinary rapidity and audacity Prague
was captured, and Vauvenargues took a personal part in this adventure,
which must have cast fuel on the fire of his rising military ambition.
But the conduct of war is all composed of startling ups and downs, and
at the height of the successes of the French, their luck abandoned
them. Relieved by no reinforcements and pressed hard by famine, the
army of Belle-Isle could no longer hold Prague, and on the night of
December 16-17, 1742, began the retreat from Bohemia which is one of
the most noted disasters of the eighteenth century. Nine days later,
what remained of the French army arrived at Egra, but after a march
through thick fog over frozen ground, without food, without shelter,
in a chaotic frenzy of despair.

Vauvenargues was one of those who never recovered from the agony of
the retreat from Prague. Both his legs were frost-bitten, so that for
the remainder of his life he was lame; his eyesight was permanently
impaired; and he appears to have sown the seeds of the pulmonary
disease which was to carry him off five years later. But his tender
heart endured what were still severer pangs from the sufferings and
death of those of his companions for whom he had the greatest regard.
Among these the first place was held by Hippolyte de Seyres, whose
figure pervades the earliest developments of the genius of
Vauvenargues. De Seyres was a lieutenant in the philosopher's
regiment. He was only eighteen years of age, and Vauvenargues felt for
him the intere