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 Hyères in the early part of
the fourteenth century.[9] But the only road to employment lay through
the Court. The claims even of birth 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