e
had gone to sup with certain men of letters, he threatened to banish
him to the country if he persisted in keeping _bad company_. 'Since
you are fond of reading,' he said to him, 'why don't you read the
history of your own family? You will not find any savants there, but
you will find men of the right sort. Do you wish to be the first
pedant of your race?'"

There were but two alternatives for a lad of his class who had to make
a living, the Church and the Army. For Vauvenargues there could be no
question, he was born to be a soldier. At the age of eighteen he
entered the King's Regiment as a second-lieutenant, and he marched
into Lombardy under the orders of that illustrious marshal-general,
the Duke of Villars, now in his eighty-first year, but still the
unquestioned summit of French military genius. The idea of "following
Hannibal over the mountains" filled our young philosopher with an
enthusiasm beyond his years. He took part in the victories of Parma
and Guastalla, and he was probably with Villars at Turin when that
indomitable octogenarian died in June 1734. The War of the Polish
Succession presently sank into a mere armistice, and until 1736 we
dimly perceive Vauvenargues sharing the idle and boring life of the
officer who, too poor to retire to Paris, vegetates in some deplorable
frontier-garrison of Burgundy or Franche Comte. We know that he was
dissipated and idle, for he tells us so, but his confession is marred
by no sort of priggishness, and it is very important to insist that
this greatest of moralists never exaggerated the capacity of ordinary
human virtue. He pretended to no exceptional loftiness in his own
conduct; he demanded no excessive sacrifice on the part of others.
Suard speaks of the "sweet indulgence" which marked his relations with
those with whom he lived, and he tells us that Vauvenargues "gradually
rose above the frivolous occupations of his time of life, without ever
contracting, in the development of serious ideas, that austerity which
commonly accompanies the virtues of youth.... Vauvenargues, thrown
upon the world directly he ceased to be a child, learned to know men
before it occurred to him to judge them. He saw their weaknesses
before he had reflected on their duties; and virtue, when it entered
his heart, found there all possible dispositions to indulgence."

"Dispositions to indulgence"--we linger on this phrase, which has an
engaging beauty of its own. It distinguishes Vauven