that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17] It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who already possesses it.  Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period.  The one fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other from scoffing and harsh unspirituality.  He saw that apart from the question of the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance to be struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith.[18] Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to pass by on the other side.  Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion.  One of these few is worth quoting, where he says:  ’The strength or weakness of our belief depends more on our courage than our light; not all those who mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe in them.’[19]

The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more than thirty-two.  Perhaps, in spite of his physical miseries, these two years in Paris were the least unhappy time in his life.  He was in the great centre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberally awarded.  A year of intercourse with so full and alert and brilliant a mind as Voltaire’s, must have been more to one so appreciative of mental greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse with subalterns in the Regiment of the King.  With death, now known to be very near at hand, he had made his account before.  ‘To execute great things,’ he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, ’a man must live as though he had never to die.’[20] This mood was common among the Greeks and Romans; but the religion which Europe accepted in the time of its deepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark of its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominence which it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of the body.  It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason that the dreary memento mori and its hateful emblems should be deliberately effaced.  ‘The thought of death,’ said Vauvenargues, ’leads us astray, because it makes us forget to live.’  He did not understand living in the sense which the dissolute attach to it.  The libertinism of his regiment called no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him away from it even in his youth.  It is not impossible that if his days had not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society with ideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness, and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it.  Turgot, the only other conspicuous man who could have withstood the license of the time, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre of so many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might have given widely effective.