In the October of 1787 the King and Queen of Naples commanded him to meet them at Portici. He went, but he was long past receiving pleasure from such honours. The Sovereigns were struck with his altered appearance, and begged him to consult a doctor. Queen Caroline wrote him a letter imploring him to renounce his scepticism and make ready for heaven. He answered with dignity and respect; but no physician for either the soul or the body could aid him now. He kept his gaiety to the last. As he had loved in life to be surrounded by friends, they were about his deathbed. He declared to them that he felt no sorrow in dying, save that he would fain have lived to publish his book on Horace. The night before his death Gatti, his friend and doctor, told him he had refused an invitation to the opera from the Ambassador of France to be near his friend. ‘Ah,’ says Galiani, ‘you still look on me as Harlequin? Well, perhaps I shall prove more amusing than the opera.’ And he did. Two hours before his death General Acton, the Prime Minister, called to see him. ‘Tell his Excellency I cannot receive him. My carriage is at the door. Warn him to prepare his own.’ He died on October 30, 1787, aged nearly fifty-nine. Dagonet, King’s Fool at Arthur’s Court, could not avert his master’s ruin, but, noblest of all Fools, he tried. Galiani, with his laughing bells jingling in those ‘Dialogues,’ spoke his message in jests and could not help starving France, nor even postpone by an hour the raid on the bakers’ shops in the Faubourg St. Antoine. But he, too, did his best. IV _VAUVENARGUES: THE APHORIST_ The proverb is indigenous to Spain, verse to Italy, and the aphorism to France. In that form of speech in which, in Vauvenargues’ own words, La Rochefoucauld had ‘turned men from virtue by persuading them that it is never genuine,’ Vauvenargues vindicated human goodness, showed man that the best way to reform the world is to reform himself, and taught him how to use the freedom Voltaire gave him. In his delicate thoughtfulness, in his conviction that man’s happiness depends upon his character and not upon his circumstances, in his mistrust of the cold god, Reason, and his belief in the soundness of the intuitions of the heart, Vauvenargues stands alone among his compeers. He stands alone, too, among them in his personal nearness to Voltaire’s affections. The noblest testimony to Vauvenargues’ character is that it compelled the reverence of him who reverenced [Illustration: LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES. _From a Print in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris._] nothing; and the finest compliment ever paid to Voltaire was to be loved by a Vauvenargues. Born on August 6, 1715, at Aix in Provence--in a mean house which still stands and is to-day a grocer’s shop--Luc de Vauvenargues came of a poor family of provincial _noblesse_ and was from the first what he remained to the last, delicate in constitution and with limited prospects of worldly success.