It appears certain to me that it was the study expended on the character of Hippolyte de Seyres and the shock received by his dreadful death which gave the earliest expansion to the genius of Vauvenargues and left their definite mark on his writings. I do not know why this all-important episode seems to have attracted so little of the attention of those who have written about him. The "Conseils à un Jeune Homme," which was evidently finished in 1743, is the earliest complete work of Vauvenargues which we possess; it contains in embryo the whole of his teaching as a moralist, and it was written for the guidance of young De Seyres. On the other hand, I think that Gilbert and other editors are mistaken in attributing the "Discours sur la Gloire" to the same date and occasion; it seems to me much later in style, and addressed to a very different person. The note of the address to De Seyres is accurately given in the exquisite essay entitled "Love of the Noble Passions." But it appears that the edifice built up by the tender 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 "Éloge" 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 "Éloge" 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 disastrous campaigns in Austria, and by the hardships of garrison life; and he was feeling more and more sharply that pinch of genteel poverty which is the hardest of all to bear. But if he never laughed, this martyr of the soul never ceased to smile. His perpetual sufferings did not affect his gentle sobriety of conversation. Those whose privilege it was to see Vauvenargues during these last years of his brief existence are united in their report of his magnanimity. Voltaire wrote, "I have always found him the most unfortunate of human beings and the most tranquil." He was notable for his "indulgent goodness," his "constant peace," his "justice of heart," his "rectitude of soul." His conversation, so Marmontel reports to us, had something more animated, more delicate, than even his divine writings. The same acute observer noted that in the heart of Vauvenargues, when he reflected upon the misery of mankind, pity took the place of indignation and hatred. Sensitive, serene, compassionate, affable, he tried to conceal from his friends as much as possible his own pain, and even when it was evident that he suffered most, no one dared to be melancholy in his presence.
In the fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friendships were the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is too frequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name of Voltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform energy of this giant of literature did not take some unseemly directions and several unlovely shapes. But the qualities of Voltaire must, in the eyes of any unbiassed observer, vastly overtop his defects. If, however, we wish to see Voltaire at his best, we must contemplate him in relation to our soldier-philosopher. As soon as his health had recovered a little from the horror of the Bohemian campaign, Vauvenargues took the step of writing to Voltaire, then a stranger, for his opinion on that crying question, the relative greatness of Corneille and of Racine, a question to all Frenchmen like that between predestination and free-will to Milton's rebel angels. This was towards the end of 1743, when Voltaire, who had reached his fiftieth year, was recognised as the first living historian and critic in France, and had been recalled to court through the good offices of Mme du Châtelet. It was, no doubt, at a happy moment that Vauvenargues' random letter arrived, Voltaire responded with ardour; Vauvenargues quickly became to him, as Marmontel says, what Plato was to Socrates, and nothing in the long life of Voltaire shows him in a more charming light than does his devotion to the young friend whom he called "the sweet hope of the remainder of my days." After the death of the philosopher, Voltaire wrote a brief, but invaluable, account of their relations, which had lasted, without a cloud, until the death of Vauvenargues.
He reminded Voltaire of Pascal, whose "incurable disease was consoled by study," but the elder friend noted a striking distinction; the eloquence of Pascal was fiery and imperious, that of Vauvenargues was "insinuating." The powerful physical force of Voltaire was softened by the suffering of his young companion, for whom "nature had poured out large draughts of hemlock," and who, "while all his body sank into dissolution, preserved in spirit that perfect tranquillity which the pure alone enjoy." Although Vauvenargues was twenty years younger than his friend, Voltaire succumbed to the gravity of his demeanour; like the fellow-officers at Arras or at Metz, we smile to find him addressing Vauvenargues as mon père. One of the philosopher's maxims is, "Great thoughts proceed from the heart," and Voltaire in a note has added, "In writing this, though he knew it not, he painted his own portrait." He found in Vauvenargues "the simplicity of a timid child," and it seems that he had a difficulty in overcoming his modesty so far as to make him write down those Reflections which are now placed for ever among the masterpieces of French literature. It is to Voltaire that we owe the fact that Vauvenargues found resolution enough to become an author.
A typical instance of the mixture of courage and tact in the young author is to be found in the attitude which he took up towards Voltaire with regard to the Marquise de Pompadour, without in the least offending his tempestuous friend. That remarkable young lady, then still known as la petite Étoile, had succeeded in catching the King's eye, and was soaring into the political heavens like a rocket, carrying, among other incongruous objects, the genius of Voltaire in her glittering train. Voltaire must have boasted to his young friend that his fortune was made. Vauvenargues surprisingly expresses in his reply the evil which must be done by great authors who flatter vice and think to conceal its corruption by heaping flowers over a lie. The incident is important for us, because it led Vauvenargues, thus disappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, to examine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. He attributed it to "le mépris de la gloire," and he set himself to define this quality and to impress it, with all the force of repetition, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries.
It is extremely difficult, it is well-nigh impossible, to find an equivalent in English for the word "gloire." It is a French conception, and one to which our language does not readily, or gracefully, lend itself. In the mind of Vauvenargues the idea of "gloire" took the central place, and we may form an intelligent conception of the meaning he stamped upon the word, by repeating some of his axioms.
He says: "The flush of dawn is not so lovely as the earliest experiences of gloire. Gloire makes heroes beautiful." Again: "Nothing is so essential as renown, and nothing so surely gives renown as merit; these are things that reason itself has united, and why should we distinguish true gloire from merit, which is the source of it, and of which it is the proof?" This moral union of merit, glory and renown, in triple splendour revolving round each other, was the main object of Vauvenargues' contemplation, and he admits that the central passion of his life was "l'amour de la gloire." What, then, is the exact meaning of "la Gloire," which the dictionaries superficially translate by "glory,"—a very different thing?