Part 7

Disappointed, disfigured, a failure; useless for the career he had loved, incapable of the career he had tried; cast off by his own people; solitary in a great city; often in pain of body, and because the work he had chosen was not the work Nature had originally chosen for him, often in pain of mind too--if ever man had an excuse for cursing God and fate, it was surely Luc de Vauvenargues.

La Rochefoucauld, rich and prosperous, with friends, position, and honour, had denied human virtue, and assailed it with cold malignities which still strike despair into the soul; and Voltaire himself, the most successful man of letters in history, turned upon life with gibes, and sneered at faith and happiness as alike chimæras.

But Vauvenargues looked out on the world which had given him nothing, with serene and patient eyes, and in a single book, as direct, strong, and simple as his own nature, evolved one of the most wise and comforting, one of the most sane, serene, and practical schemes of life, given to our race.

The great questions, Why am I? Whither go I? Whence came I? he asked himself as a thoughtful man must, but being a doer long before he was a thinker, he wasted little time in vainly seeking to answer them. Among his papers are a Prayer as well as the ‘Meditation.’ For simple faith he had ever reverence and envy--for all solemn questions a deep respect; and though he had no formulated religion, was yet deeply religious. But with him to be religious meant to Do Well. Live this life aright, and the next will take care of itself. ‘The thought of death deceives us, it makes us forget to live: one must live as if one would never die.’ To waste time and energy in idle discussion and speculation on another world when there is so much to do to set this one straight, found no countenance from this man of Deeds. Do, not dream, was his motto for ever.

There is not a page in his book--there is scarcely a line--which does not bear witness to his strong faith in men’s honour and goodness, to his passionate conviction that out of worst evil one can get good, that the cruellest misfortunes ennoble and purify if one will let them, and our griefs may be for ever our gains. The hand that wrote was fevered with disease. No rich man, this, announcing glibly how comfortable it is to be poor. In the most vicious of all ages--and in not the least vicious of that age’s environments--Vauvenargues had preserved his high ideals and his lofty character, and in sickness, sorrow, and disappointment he practised daily the courage he preached.

Instead of mockery--the besetting sin of his generation--this man, and this man alone, had for men’s follies and absurdities only infinite compassion. Of him has been aptly quoted Bacon’s beautiful phrase, ‘he had an aspect as though he pitied men.’ His philosophy remains for ever to the unquiet heart at once balm and tonic--the cool hand of compassion on the burning forehead--the touch of a friend, who knows--the strong grasp of help to raise the feeble from his weakness and despair, and to make him do what he can.

Some of the axioms have become part of men’s speech, if not part of their soul.

‘Great thoughts come from the heart.’

‘We should comfort ourselves for not having fine talents, as we comfort ourselves for not having fine positions; we can be above both by the heart.’

‘Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools because they think them easy.’

‘Would you say great things? Then first accustom yourself never to say false ones.’

‘Who can bear all, can dare all.’

‘Envy is confessed inferiority.’

‘Few sorrows are without remedy: despair is more deceptive than hope.’

‘Who gives his word lightly, breaks it.’

‘He who has great feeling, knows much.’

‘To the passions one owes the best things of the mind.’

Into that mad devotion to wit which was the snare of all his compeers, Vauvenargues never fell. He worshipped at the shrine of a diviner goddess called Truth. There is not a single example--even in his maxims, when the temptation would naturally be strongest--of his sacrificing fidelity to smartness.

In February 1746, after he had been less than a year in Paris, he published anonymously that book by which he has gone down the ages and up to the gods, and which contains only the ‘Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind,’ some ‘Reflections,’ the ‘Counsels to a Young Man,’ a few critical articles, the ‘Meditation on Faith,’ and the ‘Maxims.’

Clear, clean, and vigorous in style, as sharp and brief as a military order--it was well said by a friend that its author ‘wanted first of all to get along quickly and drag little baggage after him;’ and better said by himself that, ‘when an idea will not bear a simple form of expression, it is the sign for rejecting it.’

It was not the sort of work likely to bring him present fame, or money. He did not expect them. As he worked in his miserable lodgings, ill lit and ill warmed, already a prey to consumption, and suffering often acutely from the old frost-bites--no such hopes had buoyed him. But he did what he had told other men to do--worked for the work’s sake--and he found what he had told them they would find, joy in the working and satisfaction in a noble aim, be it unrewarded for ever.

The book dropped from the press perfectly stillborn. Reflections and moralities in the Paris of 1746! No, thank you. No one even troubled to abuse it. No one, except Marmontel, who was Vauvenargues’ personal friend, reviewed it. But Voltaire loudly pronounced it one of the best books in the language: ‘The age ... is not worthy of you, but it has you, and I bless Nature. A year ago I said you were a great man, and you have betrayed my secret.’ After Vauvenargues’ death he wrote of him, ‘How did you soar so high in this age of littleness?’ and spoke of the ‘Maxims’ as characteristic of a profoundly sincere and thoughtful mind, wholly above all jealousies and party spirit. For sixty years the book lay germinating in a hard and barren soil, unworthy of it; and then rose fresh and strong from oblivion to the just and growing fame it enjoys to-day. It has been well said ‘to give the soul of man an impetus towards truth.’

Though his tastes, his poverty, and his health alike precluded Vauvenargues from joining in the socialities of the cafés and the salons during his brief life in Paris, he saw sometimes Marmontel and d’Argental, and often Voltaire. Marmontel was still only a boy who had just started literary life on a capital of six louis and the patronage of Voltaire; and d’Argental, Voltaire’s dear ‘guardian angel,’ was the nephew of Madame de Tencin, and, perhaps, the author of her novels. Marmontel was on a very different plane of intellect and character from Vauvenargues--while the one was a lusty boy beginning the world, the other was a patient thinker who was leaving it. But in those bare and dreary surroundings, in the disfigured invalid of whom men had never heard, even the commonplace cleverness of a Marmontel worshipped a hero. Long years after, he speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘unalterable serenity’--of his brave and tender heart. ‘With him one learnt to live and learnt to die.’

As for Voltaire, one can picture him just elected to the French Academy, the protégé of Madame de Pompadour, the dearest friend of young Frederick the Great, and fast becoming the most astonishing man in Europe, entering into the dull room, full of liveliness and animation, ay, and full too of real kindness and sympathy, while the invalid sat by the fireside listening silently awhile, and then striking across the Master’s brilliant volubility with some quiet truth which he had long proved and pondered. That he found Voltaire’s conversation a powerful stimulus to his own mind, and a very real delight, is not doubtful. There are few Voltaires in the world, and it was one of Vauvenargues’ misfortunes that, save Victor Mirabeau, he had known scarcely anyone who was his intellectual equal.

But if Voltaire roused the mind, Vauvenargues strengthened the soul. After his death, Voltaire wrote of him that he had always seen him ‘the most unfortunate and the most tranquil of men.’ It was this lucky genius of an Arouet who brought his fumings and his impatience, his irritableness over this, his chagrins about that, for the consolation of the man to whose sufferings his own had been as a drop in the ocean. Vauvenargues always seems the elder of the two, as it were. He was as certainly the wiser, as he was certainly the far inferior genius.

What were his thoughts when those few friends had left him? It is on their testimony that he never uttered a complaining or a bitter word. His writings contain not an angry line--not one rebellion against God and Fate. It was the happy people who grumbled--perhaps it always is. Once, only once, there is a striving against destiny. In a moment of relaxation from bodily pain he wrote to an intimate friend, ‘I have need of all your affection, my dear Saint-Vincens: all Provence is in arms, and I am here at my fireside.’ He went on to offer his feeble help to the service he had loved, and to beg for the smallest post in his old active career.

But in a second came realisation. He was too ill to be of any use. Only thirty-two, he saw life slipping from him, and leaving him at that fireside a wreck, only fit for the hulks. But he bore ‘his dark hour unseen,’ and troubled no man with his troubles.

His disease gained on him daily now. For the last year he was too ill to write. How far harder to die bravely by inches, unable even to do one’s work, than to rush a smiling hero upon the swords in a glorious moment of exaltation, unweakened by disease, and uplifted by the applause of just men and of one’s own heart!

Vauvenargues saw death coming slowly while it was yet a great way off, and was not afraid. No saint this, beholding in fervid ecstasy the vision of a world to come; but a strong man who had done his best with the world he had, and had written of that unknown future only in patient hope. ‘My passions and thoughts die but to be born again: every night I die on my bed but to take again new strength and freshness: this experience of death reassures me against the decay and the dissolution of my body.’

He had lived to do his duty and to think of others, and thus he died.

The date was May 28, 1747, and the period one of the least honourable in the life of his friend Voltaire. But from his sycophancy of Pope and King, from a foul and noisy Court, from feverish bickerings with his Madame du Châtelet, and the coarse worldliness of his old Duchesse du Maine, Vauvenargues’ death recalled him to his truer self, and roused him to the real work of his life. No other loss he ever suffered, it is said, affected him more profoundly.

If the fact that Vauvenargues loved him bears high testimony to the character of Voltaire, the virtue of Vauvenargues, like the virtue of Addison, may well give ‘reputation to an age.’

Flippant and false, at once supremely clever and supremely silly, the eighteenth century, to whom Duty was a mockery and Wit was a god, is in some sort redeemed by the brave, silent life, and the high ideals he proved practical and not visionary by fulfilling himself, of this soldier aphorist.

While of all the Brothers of Progress, Vauvenargues alone approached Truth as a suppliant, and thus gained, surely, the nearest vision of her face.

V

_D’HOLBACH: THE HOST_

In the most sociable city, in the most sociable age in the history of the world, there is one man who stands out as the host _par excellence_. In the Rue Royale at Paris and in his country house at Grandval, near Charenton, Baron d’Holbach entertained for more than thirty years the wit and the celebrity of all nations. His name runs like a thread through the English memoirs and letters of the mid-eighteenth century. There was not a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman of fame and fashion who had not dined at the Rue Royale on the immortal Thursdays and Sundays, or driven down from Paris to Grandval for a few days of a company and a conversation unequalled and, perhaps, unrivalled.

But it is not only or chiefly as the Host of All the World that d’Holbach is remarkable. He was the ‘_maître d’hôtel_ of philosophy.’ Voltaire, banned and exiled, could only encourage

his children from lonely Cirey or far Geneva. D’Holbach was here, in the midst of them.

Comfortable, cultured, liberal, the freest of all free thinkers, and yet always in the smiling good favour of the authorities, not shy and retiring like d’Alembert, not wild and imprudent like Diderot, without a profession to distract him from his appointed _métier_, with a well-stocked mind, an enormous income, a fine library, a pretty wife, a first-rate cook, and an admirable cellar--why, here was the man intended by Fate to be the link to bind us together and to make for us a meeting-place, a common ground, where, in words to be first applied only to the Head of our Party,

In very wantonness of childish mirth _We_ puffed Bastilles, and thrones, and shrines away, Insulted Heaven, and liberated earth. Was it for good or evil? Who shall say?

Paul-Henri-Thiry d’Holbach was born in 1723 at Heidelsheim, in the Palatinate. His father, said Jean Jacques Rousseau when he had quarrelled with the son, was a _parvenu_. Another of Paul-Henri’s guests announced that his host was called Baron because he was ‘of German origin, had a small estate in Westphalia, and an income of sixty thousand livres.’ Very little is known with certainty of his family. He was brought up in Paris, and was from the first French of the French, Parisian of the Parisians. He seems to have visited Germany as a very young man, and to have studied natural science there. He made his bow to the literary world by translating German scientific works into French. At his death Grimm wrote in the ‘Literary Correspondence’ that the rapid progress natural history and chemistry had made for thirty years in France was largely owing to the Baron d’Holbach.

As a young man the Baron was what he remained all his life--a compiler, an annotator, a transcriber, rather than the possessor of any great original talent of his own. Boy and man he had in perfection that gift which surely makes for human happiness more than any other single quality--a devoted love of learning. He was always rich enough to buy the books and the leisure to gratify that love. He lived in an age and in the midst of brilliantly accomplished men and women. He should have found life delightful. He did. A serene, easy, generous nature, troubled by no agitating ambitions, everything seems to have fallen out from the first according to his modest desires. For him, and for him alone among Voltaire’s co-operators, the path to light and knowledge flowered pleasantly all the way. The others look out eagerly from their portraits--furrowed foreheads and burning eyes--or with faces noble and sad, like d’Alembert or Condorcet. Only the good Baron is seated at his ease in his pleasant, sumptuous garden, surveying life calmly and leisurely. Which things are a parable.

In 1752 or 1753, when he was about thirty years old, he began writing articles for that Encyclopædia which set on almost all its other contributors the ban of Government ill-favour. Only Paul-Henri--writing always judiciously under a pseudonym--gained nothing but pleasure and approbation from his excellent papers on mineralogy and chemistry. He formed the happiest life-long friendships with his fellow-writers in that immortal book. He married a pretty and charming wife, Mademoiselle d’Aine. She died, in August 1754, after a very brief married life. D’Holbach travelled abroad with Grimm for a while.

In 1755, he obtained a special dispensation from the Pope, and married his deceased wife’s sister, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Suzanne d’Aine, and began to live with her a life which presented the very rare combination of perfect domestic contentment and the most brilliant social success.

In the very heart and core of Paris, Rue Royale _butte_ Saint-Roch, the Baron held in his town house what Rousseau calls the ‘club holbachique,’ Diderot ‘the synagogue of the Rue Royale,’ and Garat ‘the Institute of France before there was one.’ Here, at two o’clock every Sunday and Thursday, unless the d’Holbachs were in the country, their friends were certain to find a free and affluent hospitality, the most intellectual society of the capital, the most distinguished foreigners who visited it, a host as liberal in idea as in the very good cheer to which he made his guests welcome, and the most daring speculative conversation of the eighteenth century.

But, after all, it was not in the Rue Royale that d’Holbach and his friends found their most characteristic setting. Grandval, near Charenton, remains not only the most influential _salon_ of the age, the great headquarters of a great party and the arsenal in which were forged the armaments which destroyed a king, a dynasty, and a state religion, but also _the_ country house of the period.

When Talleyrand, in that much quoted phrase, declared that no one knew how delightful a thing life could be unless he had belonged to the upper classes before the Revolution, he might have been thinking of the life at Grandval in particular.

There was a fine and charming _château_, and the most delightful of gardens. Grandval was just near enough to Paris, and just far enough away--which is to say, it was absolute country, within easy reach of town, in an age when the suburb was not, or, at least, when the social drawbacks comprehended in the word ‘suburban’ had no existence. The estate actually belonged to Madame d’Aine, d’Holbach’s mother-in-law, who was as ‘lively as any romp of fifteen,’ always thoroughly enjoying herself, determined her guests should do the same, and with the rare wisdom to leave them to do it in their own way.

Madame d’Holbach was pretty, gay, and charming. She played on the lute, adored her husband and children, and hated philosophy. If her guests like to talk it--and they are always talking it--well, by all means, so they shall! Live and let live, do as you like come what may--these would have been the Grandval rules, if it had ever bothered itself to have anything so tiresome as rules.

The d’Holbach children were adorable--or despatched to governesses and servants if they even threatened to become less than adorable. There were two little boys and a couple of little girls, the elder ‘as pretty as a cherub,’ said Diderot, and the younger ‘a ball of fat, all pink and white.’

Then there was an _ami de la maison_, a household fixture, a chimney-corner _habitué_--a Scotchman named Hope, and nicknamed Père Hoop--a shrivelled, withered, pessimistic person, who suffered, or said he suffered, from ‘life-weariness’ and bad health, who was an excellent foil to what Sterne called the ‘joyous sett’ in which he found himself, and the perpetual and dismally good-natured butt of Madame d’Aine’s rippling jokes.

The Baron had all the virtues of the host. He was not only rich and generous--with that cook and cellar beyond reproach. In those days to be a perfect entertainer something more even than this was required. An agreeable talker, and a still more agreeable listener, really learned, but with the most pleasing human weakness for a little scandal, as easy-going as his mother-in-law and his wife, entirely simple in manner, with no faintest touch of pretension or affectation, a _bon vivant_ in the pleasantest and most harmless sense of the phrase--who would not delight to have been among his guests?

There were generally three or four of them staying in the house, and sometimes very many more. Diderot was here often for weeks together, and sometimes for months. He had a special bedroom always reserved for him. In d’Holbach’s most intimate confidence, his abundance, fecundity, and inspiration were in piquant contrast to the Baron’s calm learning and well-regulated sense. Here too came, but not very often, Diderot’s partner in the Encyclopædia, d’Alembert. Too shy and retiring to enjoy Grandval’s freedom and liveliness as a recreation, d’Alembert’s work for his party was not to be advanced, as his brethren certainly advanced their work, by speculative talk in clever company--but always in solitude, in silence, and in simplicity.

Turgot, like d’Alembert, was from time to time a guest, but a rare one. Turgot was beginning to Do, what most of his friends were still discussing How to do.

Little Galiani skipped down very often from the Italian Embassy, and the Paris he worshipped, to amuse the Baron’s house-party by telling it those stories, ‘like dramas,’ which no one ever found too long. ‘That man is a pantomime from his head to his feet,’ said admiring Diderot, watching him. After 1761, the heavy Abbé Morellet, the would-be refuter of Galiani’s wit on the Corn Laws, was constantly at the Baron’s ‘developing my theories on public economy’ to his own great satisfaction. His audience have not left _their_ feelings on record.

Grimm, Diderot’s dear Damon, was here very often, with that slightly nauseous affection for his Pythias, which, said the frankly vain Denis, made d’Holbach jealous. For jealous, one may be allowed to read ‘disgusted.’

Grimm’s _chère amie_, Madame d’Épinay, sometimes accompanied him. Her sister-in-law, Madame d’Houdetot, often drove down to Grandval with her superb Marquis de Saint-Lambert in her train. Pitted deeply with the smallpox, with a cast in her eye, and a little given to too much wine, the secret of Madame d’Houdetot’s charm is hard to be found by this generation. But in that one, it was not only Rousseau who discovered it to his cost. Saint-Lambert’s ‘faith unfaithful kept him falsely true’ to her for so many years that it came to be considered quite praiseworthy, and he would have been admitted to Grandval as Madame d’Houdetot’s constant lover, if his passion for Madame du Châtelet and his poem on the ‘Seasons’ had not given him the _entrée_ as a literary character as well.

His rival, Jean Jacques Rousseau, was also an _habitué_ at d’Holbach’s. The peaceful Baron could agree even with that fretful child of genius, until one unlucky day, when, Grandval having suffered gladly and politely a curé’s reading of his own stupid tragedy, Jean Jacques bounces furiously out of his armchair, seizes the manuscript from its author, and throws it to the ground--‘Do you not see these people are laughing at you? Go back to your curacy.’ The kindliest and politest of hosts tries to smooth the ruffled plumage of both playwright and Rousseau. If the curé was appeased is not a matter of moment. Jean Jacques burst out of the house in a rage, and despite all the efforts of Grimm and of Diderot, as well as of d’Holbach himself, never returned to it. ‘He imagined all his misfortunes our doing ... and thought we had incited ... all Europe against him,’ says Grimm. He did try, however, to make some amends to his good host by portraying him in the ‘New Éloïsa’ in the character of Wolmar--‘benevolent, active, patient, tranquil, friendly, and trustful.’

Marmontel came here very often: and that dreadful, garrulous old bore, the Abbé Raynal, was constantly to be found seeking ideas among the Baron’s guests for his ‘History of the Two Indies,’ which received, and did not deserve, the advertisement of burning.