LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES.
From a Print in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
nothing; and the finest compliment ever paid to Voltaire was to be loved by a Vauvenargues.
Born on August 6, 1715, at Aix in Provence—in a mean house which still stands and is to-day a grocer’s shop—Luc de Vauvenargues came of a poor family of provincial noblesse and was from the first what he remained to the last, delicate in constitution and with limited prospects of worldly success.
His very imperfect education he received at the College of Aix, where his small Latin and less Greek were frequently interrupted by ill health. But he had a possession which is in itself an education—a good father.
Joseph de Clapiers had been created Marquis de Vauvenargues in 1722, when Luc was seven years old, for having been the only magistrate in Aix who did not run away from the place and his duty when a pestilence devastated the countryside in 1720.
For companions, Luc had two younger brothers and a cousin of his own age, a coarse, clever, selfish, undisciplined boy, named Victor Riquetti Mirabeau, who was to become the ‘crabbed old Friend of Men’ and the great father of a greater son. The boys had little in common but genius, and were attracted to each other by their very unlikeness. At sixteen, Luc was reading with passionate transport that ‘splendid painting of virtue’ ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ (in a translation) and then the letters of Brutus to Caesar, ‘so filled with dignity, loftiness, passion, and courage,’ said he, ‘that I never could read them calmly.’ Victor had already plunged into that blusterous, incontinent life which was to bring ruin to his own family and quite spoil the effect of his loud-voiced schemes for the good of mankind.