"
The rhetorical turn of the sentences I have just read was not habitual
with Vauvenargues; it was in this case the mask worn by the intensity
of his feeling, but he confesses in an early letter, "I like sometimes
to string big words together, and to lose myself in a period; I make a
jest of it." But after this outburst of panic grief in 1743 we see no
more trace of such a tendency to eloquence. He became more and more
completely himself, that is to say, very simple intellectually, in a
pedantic age. He adopted, indeed, a certain gravity at which we may
now smile; he did not approve of fairy-tales and fables, on the ground
that anything which came between direct truth and the receptive mind
of man was a disadvantage. "The disease of our age is to want to make
jokes about everything," he complains.
To poor Vauvenargues life was not a laughing matter. His health had
been completely ruined by the disastrous campaigns in Austria, and by
the hardships of garrison life; and he was feeling more and more
sharply that pinch of genteel poverty which is the hardest of all to
bear. But if he never laughed, this martyr of the soul never ceased to
smile.
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