Buffon was elected, and on the 25th of August, 1754, St. Louis’ day, he was formally received by the Academy; Grimm describes the session. “M. de Buffon did not confine himself to reminding us that Chancellor Seguier was a great man, that Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man, that Kings Louis XIV. and Louis XV. were very great men too, that the Archbishop of Sens (whom he succeeds) was also a great man, and finally that all the forty were great men; this celebrated man, disdaining the stale and heavy eulogies which are generally the substance of this sort of speech, thought proper to treat of a subject worthy of his pen and worthy of the Academy. He gave us his ideas on style, and it was said, in consequence, that the Academy had engaged a writing-master.”
“Well-written works are the only ones which will go down to posterity,” said Buffon in his speech; “quantity of knowledge, singularity of facts, even novelty in discoveries, are not certain guaranties of immortality; knowledge, facts, discoveries, are easily abstracted and transferred. Those things are outside the man; the style is the man himself; the style, then, cannot be abstracted, or transferred, or tampered with; if it be elevated, noble, sublime, the author will be equally admired at all times, for it is only truth that is durable and even eternal.”
Never did the great scholar who has been called “the painter of nature” relax his zeal for painstaking as a writer. “I am every day learning to write,” he would still say at seventy years of age.
To the Theorie de la Terre, the Idees generales sur les Animaux, and the Histoire de l’Homme, already published when Buffon was elected by the French Academy, succeeded the twelve volumes of the Histoire des Quadrupedes, a masterpiece of luminous classifications and incomparable descriptions; eight volumes on Oiseaux appeared subsequently, a short time before the Histoire des Mineraux; lastly, a few years before his death, Buffon gave to the world the Epoques de la Nature. “As in civil history one consults titles, hunts up medals, deciphers antique inscriptions to determine the epochs of revolutions amongst mankind, and to fix the date of events in the moral world, so, in natural history, we must ransack the archives of the universe, drag from the entrails of the earth the olden monuments, gather together their ruins and collect into a body of proofs all the indications of physical changes that can guide us back to the different ages of nature. It is the only way of fixing certain points in the immensity of space, and of placing a certain number of memorial-stones on the endless road of time.”
“This is what I perceive with my mind’s eye,” Buffon would say, “thus forming a chain which, from the summit of Time’s ladder, descends right down to us.” “This man,” exclaimed Hume, with an admiration which surprised him out of his scepticism, “this man gives to things which no human eye has seen a probability almost equal to evidence.”
Some of Buffon’s theories have been disputed by his successors’ science; as D’Alembert said of Descartes: “If he was mistaken about the laws of motion, he was the first to divine that there must be some.” Buffon divined the epochs of nature, and by the intuition of his genius, absolutely unshackled by any religious prejudice, he involuntarily reverted to the account given in Genesis. “We are persuaded,” he says, “independently of the authority of the sacred books, that man was created last, and that he only came to wield the sceptre of the earth when that earth was found worthy of his sway.”
It has often been repeated, on the strength of some expressions let fall by Buffon amongst intimates, that the panorama of nature had shut out from his eyes the omnipotent God, creator and preserver of the physical world as well as of the moral law. Wrong has been done the great naturalist; he had answered beforehand these incorrect opinions as to his fundamental ideas. “Nature is not a being,” he said; “for that being would be God;” and he adds, “Nature is the system of the laws established by the Creator.” The supreme notion of Providence appears to his eyes in all its grandeur, when he writes, “The verities of nature were destined to appear only in course of time, and the Supreme Being kept them to Himself as the surest means of recalling man to Him when his faith, declining in the lapse of ages, should become weak; when, remote from his origin, he might begin to forget it; when, in fine, having become too familiar with the spectacle of nature, he would no longer be moved by it, and would come to ignore the Author. It was necessary to confirm from time to time, and even to enlarge, the idea of God in the mind and heart of man. Now every new discovery produces this grand effect, every new step that we make in nature brings us nearer to the Creator. A new verity is a species of miracle; its effect is the same, and it only differs from the real miracle in that the latter is a startling stroke which God strikes instantaneously and rarely, instead of making use of man to discover and exhibit the marvels which He has hidden in the womb of Nature, and in that, as these marvels are operating every instant, as they are open at all times and for all time to his contemplation, God is constantly recalling him to Himself, not only by the spectacle of the moment, but, further, by the successive development of His works.”
Buffon was still working at eighty years of age; he had undertaken a dissertation on style, a development of his reception speech at the French Academy. Great sorrows had crossed his life. Married late to a young wife whom he loved, he lost her early; she left him a son, brought up under his wing, and the object of his constant solicitude. Just at the time of sending him to school, he wrote to Madame Daubenton, wife of his able and learned co-operator: “I expect Buffonet on Sunday. I have arranged all his little matters he will have a private room, with a closet for his man-servant; I have got him a tutor in the school-house itself, and a little companion of his own age. I do not think that he will be at all unhappy.” And, at a later date, when he is expecting this son who has reached man’s estate, and has been travelling in Europe: “My son has just arrived; the empress and the grand-duke have treated him very well, and we shall have some fine minerals, the collection of which is being at this moment completed. I confess that anxiety about his return has taken away my sleep and the power of thinking.”
When the young Count de Buffon, an officer in the artillery, and at first warmly favorable to the noble professions of the French Revolution, had, like his peers, to mount the scaffold of the Terror, he damned with one word the judges who profaned in his person his father’s glory. “Citizens,” he exclaimed from the fatal car, “my name is Buffon.” With less respect for the rights of genius than was shown by the Algerian pirates who let pass, without opening them, the chests directed to the great naturalist, the executioner of the Committee of public safety cut off his son’s head.
This last drop of bitterness, and the cruel spectacle of social disorder, Buffon had been spared; he had died at the Jardin du Roi on the 14th of April, 1788, preserving at eighty years of age, and even in the feebleness of ill health, all the powers of his intelligence and the calm serenity of ‘his soul. His last lines dictated to his son were addressed to Madame Necker, who had been for a long time past on the most intimate terms with him. Faithful in death to the instincts of order and regularity which had always controlled his mind even in his boldest flight, he requested that all the ceremonies of religion should be fulfilled around his body. His son had it removed to Montbard, where it lies between his father and his wife.