He studied at Dijon with much éclat, and shortly after leaving became accidentally acquainted with the Duke of Kingston, a young Englishman of his own age, who was travelling abroad with a tutor. The three travelled together in France and Italy, and Buffon then passed some months in England.
Returning to France, he translated Hales’s Vegetable Statics and Newton’s Treatise on Fluxions. He refers to several English writers on natural history in the course of his work, but I see he repeated spells the English name Willoughby, “Willulghby.” He was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Roi in 1739, and from thenceforth devoted himself to science.
In 1752 Buffon married Mdlle de Saint Bélin, whose beauty and charm of manner were extolled by all her contemporaries. One son was born to him, who entered the army, became a colonel, and I grieve to say, was
guillotined at the age of twenty-nine, a few days only before the extinction of the Reign of Terror.
Of this youth, who inherited the personal comeliness and ability of his father, little is recorded except the following story. Having fallen into the water and been nearly drowned when he was about twelve years old, he was afterwards accused of having been afraid: “I was so little afraid,” he answered, “that though I had been offered the hundred years which my grandfather lived, I would have died then and there, if I could have added one year to the life of my father;” then thinking for a minute, a flush suffused his face and he added, “but I should petition for one quarter of an hour in which to exult over the thought of what I was about to do.”
On the scaffold he showed much composure, smiling half proudly, half reproachfully, yet wholly kindly upon the crowd in front of him. “Citoyens,” he said, “Je me nomine Buffon,” and laid his head upon the block.
The noblest outcome of the old and decaying order, overwhelmed in the most hateful birth frenzy of the new. So in those cataclysms and revolutions which take place in our own bodies during their development, when we seem studying in order to become fishes and suddenly make, as it were, different arrangements and resolve on becoming men—so, doubtless, many good cells must go, and their united death cry comes up, it may be, in the pain which an infant feels on teething. But to return. The man who could be father of such a son, and who could retain that son’s affection, as it is well known that Buffon retained it, may not perhaps always be strictly accurate, but it will be as well to pay attention to whatever he may think fit to
tell us. These are the only people whom it is worth while to look to and study from.
“Glory,” said Buffon, after speaking of the hours during which he had laboured, “glory comes always after labour if she can—and she generally can.” But in his case she could not well help herself. “He was conspicuous,” says M. Flourens, “for elevation and force of character, for a love of greatness and true magnificence in all he did. His great wealth, his handsome person, and graceful manners seemed in correspondence with the splendour of his genius, so that of all the gifts which Fortune has in it her power to bestow she had denied him nothing.”
Many of his epigrammatic sayings have passed into proverbs: for example, that “genius is but a supreme capacity for taking pains.” Another and still more celebrated passage shall be given in its entirety and with its original setting.