Or the two following, the Inconstant Man, and Lycas or the Firm Man: 

’Such a man seems really to possess more than one character.  A powerful imagination makes his soul take the shape of all the objects that affect it; he suddenly astonishes the world by acts of generosity and courage which were never expected of him; the image of virtue inflames, elevates, softens, masters his heart; he receives the impression from the loftiest, and he surpasses them.  But when his imagination has grown cold, his courage droops, his generosity sinks; the vices opposed to these virtues take possession of his soul, and after having reigned awhile supreme, they make way for other objects....  We cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light; it is a swift and imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over all their being, which subjugates their genius, and which prescribes for them in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights and those littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of disgust, which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or madness.’[52]

’Lycas unites with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous nature, a spirit of reflection and profundity which moderates the counsels of his passions, which leads him by inpenetrable motives, and makes him advance to his ends by many paths.  He is one of those long-sighted men, who consider the succession of events from afar off, who always finish a design begun; who are capable, I do not say of dissembling either a misfortune or an offence, but of rising above either, instead of letting it depress them; deep natures, independent by their firmness in daring all and suffering all; who, whether they resist their inclinations out of foresight, or whether, out of pride and a secret consciousness of their resources, they defy what is called prudence, always, in good as in evil, cheat the acutest conjectures.’[53]

Let us note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely free from that favourite trick of the aphoristic person, which consists in forming a series of sentences, the predicates being various qualifications of extravagance, vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women.  He resists this besetting temptation of the modern speaker of apophthegms to identify woman and fool.  On the one or two occasions in which he begins the maxim with the fatal words, Les femmes, he is as little profound as other people who persist in thinking of man and woman as two different species.  ‘Women,’ for example, ’have ordinarily more vanity than temperament, and more temperament than virtue’—­which is fairly true of all human beings, and in so far as it is true, describes men just as exactly—­and no more so—­as it describes women.  In truth, Vauvenargues felt too seriously about conduct and character to go far in this direction.  Now and again he is content with a mere smartness, as when he says:  ’There are some thoroughly excellent people who cannot get rid of their ennui except at the expense of society.’  But such a mood is not common.  He is usually grave, and not seldom profoundly weighty, delicate without being weak, and subtle without obscurity; as for example: