Some years afterward Virieu made Lamartine acquainted with several persons of distinction whose good offices indirectly facilitated Lamartine's entry into public life.
Virieu was boisterous, full of jest, and a skeptic in religion. He was through his mother, descended from Montaigne, and he had inherited that author's disposition. He quoted him incessantly.
Lamartine, on the contrary, had inherited from his mother, a melancholic temperament, quiet, serious and religious. He could not bear Montaigne's skepticism, nor his salacious utterances. "Man is born to believe," he declared. "To believe in nothing is the way to accomplish nothing, and impurity in speech is a soiling of the soul."
He spent a summer with Virieu and his family in Dauphiné. Their way of living was a reflection of his boyhood life at home, and brought calm and repose to his mind.
Virieu afterward became serious like his mother and withdrawing from public life on account of his health, died some years later. "In him," says Lamartine, "I lost the living witness of the first half of my own life. I felt that death had torn out the dearest page of my history, and that it was enshrouded with him."
Another fellow-student whom Lamartine repeatedly mentions, was the baron Louis de Vignet, of Chambery, in Savoy. They were often competitors for the prizes. Vignet gave up the profession of law and accepted a life of poverty for the sake of his mother and sister. He had been a skeptic and scoffer in religion and repulsive in temper, but watching with his dying mother, he became changed and was modest, pensive, gentle and melancholy.
He had hesitated to renew his acquaintance with Lamartine during the latter's wild career in Paris, but now, meeting accidentally, the two were drawn together at once. Vignet greeted Lamartine more as a father than as a comrade, and they quickly formed a compact of friendship. As if to seal it they went together to Charmettes to visit the house where Rousseau had lived, and afterward went to Servolex together.
Vignet was a nephew of the Counts de Maistre, two of whom were distinguished in the political arena and world of letters. Lamartine was received by the elders as a son, and the younger members of the family as a brother. He remained with them during the summer. The wholesome influence took his mind away from the philosophy of the guardhouse and the effeminate literature then current in France. It was indeed an important epoch in his history. Time, death, difference of country and opinion afterward separated them, but he always vividly remembered that summer at the house of Colonel de Maistre and Louis de Vignet.
A diversion of the household consisted of recitations of verse. Vignet had collected a large number of effusions which were current among the Savoyards. Lamartine also ventured to recite his own verses before Colonel de Maistre and his daughters. The old man admired his pure French diction and predicted to his nephew that Lamartine would become distinguished.
Another summer found Lamartine at home in Milly. The family had gone away; the father and uncles to a hunting party in Burgundy, the mother on a journey, and the sisters on visits to friends, or to the convent. He was left alone with no companionship but an old servant-woman, his horse and his dog. The silence, the loneliness of the garden, and the empty rooms reminded him of the tomb. It was in keeping with his state of mind. He felt himself, or rather he desired to feel himself dead.