loud his vision of the trinity of
heavenly lights, _merite_, _vertu_, _gloire_, Vauvenargues pursued his
painful life in the Street of the Peacock. He knew his feebleness, but
he refused to let it depress him; "labour to get _gloire_ is not
lost," he said, "if it tends to make us worthy of it." In his curious
mixture of simplicity and acuteness, in his gravity and ardour, he was
morally just like the best types which this great war has produced, he
is like Paul Lintier in France, like Julian Grenfell among ourselves,
meeting the worst blows of fate with serenity and almost with ecstasy,
with no shadow of indignation or rebellion. Some posthumous
reflections have let us into the secret that, as the shadows darkened
around him, he occasionally gave way, if not to despair, yet to
depression, and permitted himself to wonder whether all his effort in
the cause of manliness and virtue had been useless. He had not
awakened the sleepers in France; he doubted that his voice would ever
reach them; he asked himself whether all his effort had not been in
vain. This was the natural inner weakness consequent on his physical
state; he gave no outward sign of it. Marmontel, who watched his last
hours with enthusiastic affection, says that, "In his company we
learned how to live,--and how to die." He lay like Socrates,
surrounded by his friends, talking and listening to the last; he
astonished them by the eloquence and gravity of his discourse. His
latest recorded utterance was, "Fortune may sport with the wisdom of
those who are courageous, but it has no power to bend their courage."
Gently but firmly refusing the importunities of the Church,
Vauvenargues was released from his life-in-death on May 28, 1747, in
his thirty-second year.

You will not find in the pages of Vauvenargues a distinct revival of
that passion for the very soil of France, "la terre sainte, la douce
France," which inspired the noble "Chanson de Roland" and has been so
strongly accentuated in the recent struggle for Alsace-Lorraine. But
he recalled to the memory of a generation which had grown densely
material the forgotten ideal of France as the champion of chivalry. We
must not forget that we possess in the writings of Vauvenargues merely
the commencements of reflection, the first fruit of a life which was
broken before its summer was complete. But we find in his teaching,
and in that of no other moralist of the early eighteenth century, the
insistence on spiritu