taste for glory? It is Vauvenargues
himself, who had seen all classes of officers, who asks that question.
From his "Reflexions" of 1746 a chapter on "Our Armies at the Present
Moment" was omitted, and not published in its proper sequence until
long after his death. No doubt its searching exposure of the rot in
the military state of France was the cause of this suppression.

"Courage," he says in this deleted chapter of his book, "courage,
which our ancestors admired as the first of virtues, is now generally
regarded as a popular error." Those few officers who still desire to
see their country glorious, are forced to retire into civil life
because they cannot endure a condition in which there is no reward but
shame for a man of courage and ambition.

These were prominent among the considerations which filled the mind of
Vauvenargues when, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw himself driven
out of military life by the rapid aggravation of ill-health. His
thoughts turned to diplomacy. He greatly admired the writings of Sir
William Temple, on whom he may have partly modelled his own style as
an essayist; he dreamed of becoming an ambassador of the same class,
known, as Temple was, "by their writings no less than by their
immortal actions." But his inexorable bad luck followed him in this
design. A pathetic letter to the King remained unanswered, and so did
another to Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

After waiting a long time he wrote again to Amelot, and this second
letter is highly characteristic of the temper and condition of
Vauvenargues--

"MONSEIGNEUR.

"I am painfully distressed that the letter which I had the honour of
writing to you, as well as that which I took the liberty of asking you
to forward to the King, have not been able to arrest your attention.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that a minister so fully occupied as
you are should not find time to examine such letters; but,
Monseigneur, will you permit me to point out to you that it is
precisely this moral impossibility for a gentleman, who has no claim
but zeal, to reach his master, which leads to that discouragement that
is noticeable in all the country nobility, and which extinguishes all
emulation?

"I have passed, Monseigneur, my youth far from all worldly
distractions, in order to prepare myself for the species of employment
for which it was my belief that my temperament designed me; and I was
bold enough to think that so concentrated an