s friends,
Voltaire was displeased with his sojourn at Paris, and weary of the court
and the men of letters. The king had always exhibited towards him a
coldness which the poet's adulation had not been able to overcome; he had
offended Madame de Pompadour, who had but lately been well disposed
towards him; the religious circle, ranged around the queen and the
dauphin, was of course hostile to him. "The place of historiographer to
the king was but an empty title," he says himself; "I wanted to make it a
reality by working at the history of the war of 1741; but, in spite of my
work, Moncrif had admittance to his Majesty, and I had not."

In tracing the tragic episodes of the war, Voltaire, set as his mind was
on the royal favor, had wanted in the first place to pay homage to the
friends he had lost. It was in the "eulogium of the officers who fell in
the campaign of 1741" that he touchingly called attention to the memory
of Vauvenargues. He, born at Aix on the 6th of August, 1715, died of his
wounds, at Paris, in 1747. Poor and proud, resigning himself with a sigh
to idleness and obscurity, the young officer had written merely to
relieve his mind. His friends had constrained him to publish a little
book, one only, the _Introduction de la connaissance de l'esprit humain,
suivie de reflexions et de maximes_. Its success justified their
affectionate hopes; delicate minds took keen delight in the first essays
of Vauvenargues. Hesitating between religion and philosophy, with a
palpable leaning towards the latter, ill and yet bravely bearing the
disappointments and sufferings of his life, Vauvenargues was already
expiring at thirty years of age, when Provence was invaded by the enemy.
The humiliation of his country and the peril of his native province
roused him from his tranquil melancholy. "All Provence is in arms," he
wrote to his friend Fauris de St. Vincent, "and here am I quite quietly
in my chimney-corner; the bad state of my eyes and of my health is not
sufficient excuse for me, and I ought to be where all the gentlemen of
the province are. Send me word then, I beg, immediately whether there is
still any employment to be had in our newly raised, levies, and whether I
should be sure to be employed if I were to go to Provence." Before his
friend's answer had reached Vauvenargues, the Austrians and the
Piedmontese had been forced to evacuate Provence; the dying man remained
in his chimney-corner, where he soon exp