The magistrate’s mind understood and appreciated the great naturalist’s genius. Diderot felt in his own fashion the charm of nature, but, as was said by Chevalier Chastellux, “his ideas got drunk and set to work chasing one another.” The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator. “The general history of the world,” he says, “ought to precede the special history of its productions; and the details of singular facts touching the life and habits of animals, or touching the culture and vegetation of plants, belong perhaps less to natural history than do the general results of the observations which have been made on the different materials which compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and effects of the currents of the sea—this is nature on the grand scale.”
M. Fleurens truly said, “Bufon aggrandizes every subject he touches.” Born at Montbard in Burgundy on the 7th of September, 1707, Buffon belonged to a family of wealth and consideration in his province. In his youth he travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733, adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences. In 1739, he received the superintendence of the Jardin du Roi, not long since enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his successor. He had shifted from mechanics to botany, “not,” he said, “that he was very fond of that science, which he had learned and forgotten three times,” but he was aspiring just then to the Jardin du Roi; his genius was yet seeking its proper direction. “There are some things for me,” he wrote to President De Brosses, “but there are some against, and especially my age; however, if people would but reflect, they would see that the superintendence of the Jardin du Roi requires an active young man, who can stand the sun, who is conversant with plants and knows the way to make them multiply, who is a bit of a connoisseur in all the sorts used in demonstration there, and above all who understands buildings, in such sort that, in my own heart, it appears to me that I should be exactly made for them: but I have not as yet any great hope.”
In Buffon’s hands the Jardin du Roi was transformed; in proportion as his mind developed, the requirements of the study appeared to him greater and greater; he satisfied them fearlessly, getting together collections at his own expense, opening new galleries, constructing hot-houses, being constantly seconded by the good-will of Louis XV., who never shrank from expenses demanded by Buffon’s projects. The great naturalist died at eighty years of age, without having completed his work; but he had imprinted upon it that indisputable stamp of greatness which was the distinctive feature of his genius. The Jardin du Roi, which became the Jardin des Plantes, has remained unique in Europe.
Fully engaged as he was in those useful labors, from the age of thirty, Buffon gave up living at Paris for the greater part of the year. He had bought the ruins of the castle of Montbard, the ancient residence of the Dukes of Burgundy, overlooking his native town. He had built a house there which soon became dear to him, and which he scarcely ever left for eight months in the year. There it was, in a pavilion which overhung the garden planted in terraces, and from which he had a view of the rich plains of La Brenne, that the great naturalist, carefully dressed by five o’clock in the morning, meditated the vast plan of his works as he walked from end to end and side to side. “I passed delightful hours there,” he used to say. When he summoned his secretary, the work of composition was completed. “M. de Buffon gives reasons for the preference he shows as to every word in his discourses, without excluding from the discussion even the smallest particles, the most insignificant conjunctions,” says Madame Necker; “he never forgot that he had written ‘the style is the man.’ The language could not be allowed to derogate from the majesty of the subject. ‘I made it a rule,’ he used to say, ‘to always fix upon the noblest expressions.’”
It was in this dignified and studious retirement that Buffon quietly passed his long life. “I dedicated,” he says, “twelve, nay, fourteen, hours to study; it was my whole pleasure. In truth, I devoted myself to it far more than I troubled myself about fame; fame comes afterwards, if it may, and it nearly always does.”
Buffon did not lack fame; on the appearance of the first three volumes of his “Histoire naturelle,” published in 1749, the breadth of his views, the beauty of his language, and the strength of his mind excited general curiosity and admiration. The Sorbonne was in a flutter at certain bold propositions; Buffon, without being disconcerted, took pains to avoid condemnation. “I took the liberty,” he says in a letter to M. Leblant, “of writing to the Duke of Nivernais (then ambassador at Rome), who has replied to me in the most polite and most obliging way in the world; I hope, therefore, that my book will not be put in the Index, and, in truth, I have done all I could not to deserve it and to avoid theological squabbles, which I fear far more than I do the criticisms of physicists and geometricians.” “Out of a hundred and twenty assembled doctors,” he adds before long, “I had a hundred and fifteen, and their resolution even contains eulogies which I did not expect.” Despite certain boldnesses which had caused anxiety, the Sorbonne had reason to compliment the great naturalist. The unity of the human race as well as its superior dignity were already vindicated in these first efforts of Buffon’s genius, and his mind never lost sight of this great verity. “In the human species,” he says, “the influence of climate shows itself only by slight varieties, because this species is one, and is very distinctly separated from all other species; man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America, is only the same man tinged with the hue of climate; as he is made to reign over the earth, as the whole globe is his domain, it seems as if his nature were ready prepared for all situations; beneath the fires of the south, amidst the frosts of the north, he lives, he multiplies, he is found to be so spread about everywhere from time immemorial that he appears to affect no climate in particular. . . . Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey, the interval which separates them is immense, since internally he is garnished with mind and externally with speech.”
Buffon continued his work, adroitly availing himself of the talent and researches of the numerous co-operators whom he had managed to gather about him, directing them all with indefatigable vigilance in their labors and their observations. “Genius is but a greater aptitude for perseverance,” he used to say, himself justifying his definition by the assiduity of his studies. “I had come to the sixteenth volume of my work on natural history,” he writes with bitter regret, “when a serious and long illness interrupted for nearly two years the course of my labors. This shortening of my life, already far advanced, caused one in my works. I might, in the two years I have lost, have produced two or three volumes of the history of birds, without abandoning for that my plan of a history of minerals, on which I have been engaged for several years.”
In 1753 Buffon had been nominated a member of the French Academy. He had begged his friends to vote for his compatriot, Piron, author of the celebrated comedy Metromanie, at that time an old man and still poor. “I can wait,” said Buffon. “Two days before that fixed for the election,” writes Grimm, “the king sent for President Montesquieu, to whose lot it had fallen to be director of the Academy on that occasion, and told him that, understanding that the Academy had cast their eyes upon M. Piron, and knowing that he was the author of several licentious works, he desired the Academy to choose some one else to fill the vacant place. His Majesty at the same time told him that he would not have any member belonging to the order of advocates.”