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.

Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue or
the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument