The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials.  Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with the sordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means.  His letters to Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits to which he was driven.  The nature of these straits is an old story all over the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things that young men in want of money have generally done.  It cannot be said, I fear, that he passed along those miry ways without some defilement.  He bethinks him on one occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters.  ’Why should I not undertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should not have repaid it by the time fixed?’[6] We must make allowance for the youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its significance from our own.  Even then there remains something to regret.  Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can elevate low souls.[7] That depends.  If poverty means pinching and fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense, but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of delicacy in a man’s estimate of human relations and their import.

Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp.  Luxurious and indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after the delights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolent contempt for merit; these were the characteristics of the men in high military place.  The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an expenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced and encouraged; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder of their affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men of spirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, and because those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a condition where there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation.[8]

To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence of every chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenargues the still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health.  The winter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed.  His legs had been frost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken by small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind.  So after a service of nine years, he quitted military life (1744).  He vainly solicited employment as a diplomatist.  The career was not yet open to the talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dwelt less on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he had an authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyeres in the early part of the fourteenth century.[9] But the only road to employment lay through the Court.  The claims even of birth