'Hardly the Most Fashionable of Writers'

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-47), died at the age of thirty-one after a life spent mostly as a soldier, though he lived for some time in Paris and was befriended by Voltaire. His health was never good. No longer in the army, Vauvenargues died of complications from the frostbite he suffered during the War of the Austrian Succession. Not as well-known as fellow French moralist-aphorists La Bruyère, Chamfort and La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues’ thinking is informed by a soldier’s experience and is rooted in a commonsensical view of life: 

“It is not bringing hunger and misery to foreigners that is glorious in a hero’s eyes, but enduring them for his country’s sake; not inflicting death, but courting it.”

 

The Reflections and Maxims of Vauvenargues (Oxford University Press, 1940) is translated from the French by F.G. Stevens. I’m using the copy borrowed from the Fondren Library. It is yet another volume previously owned by Edgar Odell Lovett, president of Rice University from 1908 to 1946. Again, one can hardly imagine an American university president today buying and reading such a book. In 1746, Vauvenargues anonymously published his only book, Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain, which included Reflexions and Maximes. Here is a sampler:

  

“People don't say much that is sensible when they are trying to be unusual.”

“We condemn strongly the least offences of the unfortunate, and show little sympathy for their greatest troubles.”

 

“There would be few happy people if others could determine our occupations and amusements.”

 

“We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.”

 

“Those whose only asset is cleverness never occupy the first rank in any walk of life.”

 

“We have no right to make unhappy those whom we cannot make good.”

 

“War is not so heavy a burden as slavery.”

 

Vauvenargues is often gentler, less cynical than La Rochefoucauld. One tends to think of him as a boy. C.H. Sisson published an essay on him in the Winter 1987 issue of The American Scholar (collected in In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers, Carcanet Press, 1990) that begins: “Vauvenargues is hardly the most fashionable of writers. He has a further distinction, that there never was a time when his work was fashionable, yet for some two hundred and fifty years there has never been a time when he might not have been said to have friends and admirers.” Sisson places him among the “observers who lived in the world and recorded their findings in more or less summary fashion.”

 

Sisson makes a useful comparison: “Vauvenargues is one of those writers, like George Herbert, whose life--and indeed death--cannot be satisfactorily separated from their works.” He adds: “A profound and vulnerable diffidence marks the thought of Vauvenargues as it marks his life,” and we recall how young and “unsuccessful” he was in life. Never married, no children, always fending off poverty. Sisson also wrote a forty-six-line poem titled “Vauvenargues” (Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1998), in which he says the aphorist “found no resting place on this earth.” He writes:

 

“They say the boy did not learn much Latin

But got drunk on Plutarch—perhaps Amyot?

How many years of barracks after that,

Inspecting guards, collecting up the drunks,

Trailing his pike in the muddy streets,

Garrisoned at Besançon, Arras, Reims?

There were campaigns, though nothing much perhaps

Historians would really care much about . . .”