He remained the man of one book until nearly the close of his life. It is thought that Bossuet, who had always been his great exemplar, urged him to undertake a reply to the heresies of Mme de Guyon and Fénelon, and that so he was dragged into that very painful quarrel. At all events, he started a series of "Dialogues on Quietism," in which all the extreme doctrines of Molinos and his disciples were examined and ridiculed. On May 8, 1696, La Bruyère dined with Antoine Bossuet, the bishop's elder brother; after dinner he took out the MSS. from his pocket, and read extracts to his host. Two days afterwards, after walking in the garden at Versailles, he had a stroke, and two days after that he died. He had had no premonition of illness, and the rumour went round that the Quietists had poisoned him. His body was exhumed, but of course no trace of poison was to be found. The "Dialogues," revised and completed by the Abbé Elliès du Pin, were published the next year. Their authenticity has been obstinately contested, but, as I confess it seems to me, without excuse. Both external and internal evidence go to prove, I think, that they are substantially the work of La Bruyère, and for those who are not alarmed at theological discussions conducted in rather a profane spirit, they make very good reading.
One last word about our amiable author. His great book remains eminently alive, and wields after two centuries and a half a permanent influence. When you refer to it, you must not expect a logical development of philosophical theory. We do not look to find a system in a book of maxims and portraits. La Bruyère was a moralist, pure and simple; he awakened sensibility, he encouraged refinement, and he exposed the vicious difference which existed around him—and which no one else had seemed to notice—that the possession of more or fewer pieces of money made between human beings otherwise equal. He had a democratic philosophy which is sometimes that of Mr. Micawber, "Celui-là est riche qui reçoit plus qu'il ne consume; celui-là est pauvre dont la dépense excède la recette," But he is seldom so prosy as this. Let us think of him as one who wished to turn his talent as a painter of still life to the benefit of his nation, and who succeeded in a degree far beyond his own modest hopes.
VAUVENARGUES
If we had been in Paris on a summer's day in 1744 we might have seen emerge from a modest house in the ungenteel rue du Paon (Peacock Street) a young man of less than twenty-nine years of age. It is improbable that we should have been attracted to him without warning, for though his expression was very pleasant, he was not distinguished-looking, and though he was uncomplaining, his evident air of suffering was painful to witness. He had the gallant bearing of a soldier and a certain noble elegance, but a shade across his forehead testified to the failure of his eyesight, and he shambled along with difficulty on two lame legs. If we followed him he would probably take us slowly to the Garden of the Luxembourg, where it was very unlikely that any one would greet him.
He would presently turn out of the fashionable promenade, to contemplate the poor and the unfortunate. Sometimes he would stop those who seemed most wretched, and would try to share their sorrows, but sympathy on the part of a gentleman was strange, or else there was something in himself which failed to express his tenderness, for he complained that the unfortunate always turned away from him. If, at the moment of such a repulse, we had addressed him, and had respectfully offered him our sympathy, he would have struggled with his painful shyness, and would have told us that he felt no resentment against those who rejected his help. Nothing hardened his heart, and the lack of response merely doubled his pity. He would assure us, with the pale smile which was the charm of his anæmic countenance, that those who were vicious were so by their misfortune, not their fault, and that of the worst criminals he was persuaded that, if they could, they would "end their days in innocence." With an exquisite and simple politeness he would leave us wondering a little who this pathetic young man, with all the stigmata upon him of poverty and sickness bravely borne, might be; and there would be none to explain to us that it was the Marquis de Vauvenargues, come home a broken man from the wars in Bohemia.
This inconspicuous personage, who glided almost like a ghost through less than thirty-two years of pain and adversity, was not merely the greatest moralist that France produced in the course of the eighteenth century, but was of all the world's writers perhaps the one who has lifted highest the banner of hope and joy in heroism and virtue. In La Rochefoucauld we encountered a representative of the dominant class, the prince-dukes. La Bruyère was a typical bourgeois. In our third example of the moral energy of France we meet with a specimen of the petite noblesse, the impoverished country gentlemen who dragged out a provincial existence in obscurity and ignorance, supported by their pride in a long pedigree. Luc de Clapiers, whose father was raised to the marquisate of Vauvenargues in 1722, was born seven years earlier than that, at Aix in Provence, where his father was mayor. It is a pleasant touch to be told that his father was the only magistrate who did not desert his post when Aix was swept by the plague in 1720. There seems a foreshadowing here of his famous son's high courage. But it seems also certain that there was no appreciation of scholarship or literature in the household. No atmosphere less benevolent to learning can be imagined. The future philosopher went to school at Aix for a little while, and then his weak health was made the excuse for cancelling what was perhaps looked upon as a needless expense. He was thrown upon himself, and what education he secured was the result of his own desultory reading.
Vauvenargues never acquired a knowledge of Greek or even Latin,[16] but when he was about sixteen years of age he came across a book which absolutely transfigured his outlook upon the world and decided the course of his aspirations. This was none less than a translation of the "Lives" of Plutarch, a work which has had a very remarkable moral effect on the Frenchmen of four centuries. We know not which this particular translation was, but it would be pleasant to think it was that made by Amyot in 1559. The effect it had on the temperament of Vauvenargues must be told in his own words. He says in a letter to Mirabeau (March 22, 1740)—
[Footnote 16: Suard is definite as to this: "Il est mort sans être en état de lire Horace et Tacite dans leur langue.">[
"I wept for joy while I read these 'Lives' [of Plutarch]. No night went by but I had spent part of it in talking to Alcibiades, to Agesilas, or to others. I walked in the streets of Rome that I might argue with the Gracchi, and when stones were flung at Cato, there was I to defend him. You remember that when Cæsar wished to pass a law which was too much in favour of the populace, Cato tried to prevent his doing so, and put his hand on Cæsar's mouth to prevent his speaking? These modes of action, so unlike our fashions of to-day, made a deep impression on me."
He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the master-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure of his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre âme"; here was exposed before him a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasure without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17]