der affection of Vauvenargues was rased to the
ground in December 1742. The young friend so passionately guarded, so
anxiously watched, died under his eyes in the course of the terrible
retreat over the icy passes of Bohemia, a victim to the united agony
of famine, cold and fatigue. Vauvenargues wrote an "Eloge" on his
young friend, which betrays something of the hysterical agitation of
his own soul. Here is a fragment of this strange document--

"Open, ye formidable sepulchres! Solitary phantoms, speak, speak! What
unconquerable silence! O sad abandonment! O terror! What hand is it
which holds all nature paralyzed beneath its pressure? O thou hidden
and eternal Being, deign to dissipate the alarm in which my feeble
soul is plunged. The secret of Thy judgments turns my timid heart to
ice. Veiled in the recesses of Thy being, Thou dost forge fate and
time, and life and death, and fear and joy, and deceitful and
credulous hope. Thou dost reign over the elements and over hell in
revolt. The smitten air shudders at Thy voice. Redoubtable judge of
the dead, take pity upon my despair."

This is a voice we hear, so far as I remember, nowhere else in the
French literature of the eighteenth century. There is a certain accent
of Bossuet in it; it is still more like the note which a group of
English poets were striking. It may really seem to us an extraordinary
coincidence that the "Eloge" on Hippolyte de Seyres should belong to
the very same year, 1743, which saw the publication of Blair's "Grave"
and Young's "Night Thoughts."

The rhetorical turn of the sentences I have just read was not habitual
with Vauvenargues; it was in this case the mask worn by the intensity
of his feeling, but he confesses in an early letter, "I like sometimes
to string big words together, and to lose myself in a period; I make a
jest of it." But after this outburst of panic grief in 1743 we see no
more trace of such a tendency to eloquence. He became more and more
completely himself, that is to say, very simple intellectually, in a
pedantic age. He adopted, indeed, a certain gravity at which we may
now smile; he did not approve of fairy-tales and fables, on the ground
that anything which came between direct truth and the receptive mind
of man was a disadvantage. "The disease of our age is to want to make
jokes about everything," he complains.

To poor Vauvenargues life was not a laughing matter. His health had
been completely ruined by the disastrou