counted for nothing, unless they were backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who haunted Versailles.  For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but a parasite as well.  ‘Permit me to assure you, sir,’ Vauvenargues wrote courageously to Amelot, then the minister, ’that it is this moral impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of ever reaching the King his master, which causes the discouragement that is observed among the nobility of the provinces, and which extinguishes all ambition.’[10] Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as usual in good offices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote, and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourable opportunity should present itself.[11]

Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fair words of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities that do not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront the disappointment with cheerful fortitude ‘Misfortune itself,’ he had once written, ’has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition of fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forces that before were unemployed:  it is in indolence and littleness that virtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight and forces it to creep along in bonds.’[12] He was true to the counsel which he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness that death was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in the ordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life, he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the fame which he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve.  Neither scantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends and relations—­always the worst foes to superior character on critical occasions—­could detain him in the obscurity of Provence.  In 1745 he took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School of Medicine.  Literature had not yet acquired that importance in France which it was so soon to obtain.  The Encyclopaedia was still unconceived, and the momentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, of organising the philosophers and men of letters into an army with banners, was still unexecuted.  Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not to the full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command the admiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of the new school of literature and thought.  Voltaire had been struck by a letter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticism comparing Corneille disadvantageously with Racine.  Coming from a young officer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as ‘very noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous,’ this criticism was peculiarly striking.  A great many years afterwards Voltaire was surprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such