tics,"
he has given quite a full account of this friendship, of its
circumstances and its effects. Comte was a man of an extraordinary
original genius; of profound effusiveness; but excessively proud, and
sensitive to affronts. Full of noble thoughts and sentiments,
heroically devoted to the pursuit of truth and the good of his race,
his outward life was unfortunate. He was poor and lonely. He had many
severe quarrels, disappointments, and vexations. No one appreciated
him with admiring love. His wife was utterly unsuited to his tastes,
and finally deserted him. Meantime he toiled, with a martyr-like
pertinacity, at his great task of philosophical construction.
Believing his work destined to be of incalculable service to mankind,
he rewarded himself, for his vast achievements and his unmerited
sufferings, with an exceptional valuation and esteem of himself.

Just at this time, sad, weary, solitary, and teeming with suppressed
tenderness, he met with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a young woman of a
fine feminine genius and character, made virtually a widow by the
crime and imprisonment of her unworthy husband. She seems at once to
have fully appreciated the best side of the genius of Comte, entered
into his disinterested sentiments, pitied his misfortunes, and
ministered to his highest wants like an angel. As his disciple and
friend, she lavished on him an enthusiastic admiration and affection.
She reflected him, in her esteem and treatment, at a height, and in a
glory, harmonizing with his own estimation of his mission. It was a
celestial luxury; and it wrought miracles in him. He was transformed
into apparently another person. His scientific and philosophical
career became a poetic and religious one. He reproduced the most
glowing and delicate emotions of Dante and Petrarch and Thomas a
Kempis. The relation between Comte and Madame de Vaux was one of
absolute blamelessness and purity. For one year only was he allowed
to enjoy this divine delight. He was about to adopt her legally as
his daughter, when she died, leaving him inconsolable, save for the
melancholy satisfaction of beatifying her memory with his pen, and of
worshipping her in his heart.

"An unalterable purity," he says, "confirmed her tenderness, and was
the cause of a moral resurrection to me during the incomparable year
of our external union. My present adoration of her is more assiduous
and profound, but less vivid, than when she was alive. It daily makes