"
"Dispositions to indulgence"--we linger on this phrase, which has an
engaging beauty of its own. It distinguishes Vauvenargues at once from
all the great French moralists who preceded him, from La Rochefoucauld
with his savage cynicism, from Pascal with his contempt of the natural
man. Vauvenargues rejected the idea which had so tormented the great
spirits of the seventeenth century, that the noblest life was a life
of mortification, and he made no demand on the soul to divorce itself
from all human interests as being things naturally vile and
ignominious. He was to come down to us waving an olive-branch, the
most amiable of all idealists, an apostle of tolerance. He says that
he "hated scorn of human things." To this we must presently return,
but we may pause to note it here, as a faint light thrown over the
obscurity of his adolescence.
The Marquis of Mirabeau was the cousin of Vauvenargues and almost
exactly his coeval. The discovery of a packet of letters which passed
between the young men from the summer of 1737 to that of 1740 has
dissipated in some measure the otherwise total darkness which had
gathered around the youth of our philosopher.
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