effort would place me at
least on a level with those who depend for all their fortune upon
their intrigues and upon their pleasures. It overwhelms me,
Monseigneur, to discover that the confidence which I had based mainly
on the love of my duty, should be so disappointed. My health no longer
permitting me to continue my services in the war, I have written to M.
the Duke de Biron to beg him to appoint my successor. I could not, in
a situation so piteous, refrain from informing you of my despair.
Pardon me, Monseigneur, if it has led me into any extravagance of
expression.

"I am, etc."

To this last appeal the Minister for Foreign Affairs did respond in a
brief and perfunctory note, promising to find an occasion of bringing
the talents of Vauvenargues to the notice of the King, but nothing
resulted. Vauvenargues had been living in a dream of military glory,
and had been thirsting to serve his country in the loftiest and most
responsible capacities. His very physical appearance now completed the
bankruptcy of his wishes, for he was attacked with the smallpox, which
disfigured him so badly that, to use his own expression, "it prevented
his soul from appearing in his features." Thus without fortune, or
profession, without hope for the future, half-blind, with gangrened
limbs that tottered under his feeble body, Vauvenargues started on the
steadily downward path which was to lead in less than four years to
his grave. History presents to us no more dolorous figure of physical
and social failure, nor a more radiant example of moral success.

The alternative now presented itself of a wretched solitude in the
castle of his Provencal ancestors, or a garret, perhaps even more
wretched, but certainly far less solitary, in Paris. In either case it
would be necessary to relinquish all the luxuries, all the comforts of
life. He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humble
furnished rooms in the street of the Peacock, where he was consoled by
the visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May
1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymous
volume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literary
world of France. We do not appreciate to the full the Calvary which
Vauvenargues so meekly mounted, unless we realize that to all his
other failures was added a complete disregard of his ideas by the
literary public of his own day. He died unknown, save by two or three
fri