Vauvenargues saw death coming slowly while it was yet a great way off, and was not afraid. No saint this, beholding in fervid ecstasy the vision of a world to come; but a strong man who had done his best with the world he had, and had written of that unknown future only in patient hope. ‘My passions and thoughts die but to be born again: every night I die on my bed but to take again new strength and freshness: this experience of death reassures me against the decay and the dissolution of my body.’

He had lived to do his duty and to think of others, and thus he died.

The date was May 28, 1747, and the period one of the least honourable in the life of his friend Voltaire. But from his sycophancy of Pope and King, from a foul and noisy Court, from feverish bickerings with his Madame du Châtelet, and the coarse worldliness of his old Duchesse du Maine, Vauvenargues’ death recalled him to his truer self, and roused him to the real work of his life. No other loss he ever suffered, it is said, affected him more profoundly.

If the fact that Vauvenargues loved him bears high testimony to the character of Voltaire, the virtue of Vauvenargues, like the virtue of Addison, may well give ‘reputation to an age.’

Flippant and false, at once supremely clever and supremely silly, the eighteenth century, to whom Duty was a mockery and Wit was a god, is in some sort redeemed by the brave, silent life, and the high ideals he proved practical and not visionary by fulfilling himself, of this soldier aphorist.

While of all the Brothers of Progress, Vauvenargues alone approached Truth as a suppliant, and thus gained, surely, the nearest vision of her face.

V
D’HOLBACH: THE HOST

In the most sociable city, in the most sociable age in the history of the world, there is one man who stands out as the host par excellence. In the Rue Royale at Paris and in his country house at Grandval, near Charenton, Baron d’Holbach entertained for more than thirty years the wit and the celebrity of all nations. His name runs like a thread through the English memoirs and letters of the mid-eighteenth century. There was not a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman of fame and fashion who had not dined at the Rue Royale on the immortal Thursdays and Sundays, or driven down from Paris to Grandval for a few days of a company and a conversation unequalled and, perhaps, unrivalled.

But it is not only or chiefly as the Host of All the World that d’Holbach is remarkable. He was the ‘maître d’hôtel of philosophy.’ Voltaire, banned and exiled, could only encourage