His first campaign was in Italy in 1733 with Marshal Villars, who was on his last. Italy! the land of dreams! The boy was filled with splendid visions of following Hannibal across the mountains--with young sanguine hopes of gloriously doing his duty and meeting immediate, glorious rewards. For three years he knew the intoxication--and the horrors--of a victorious campaign. And then of a sudden he found himself condemned at one-and-twenty to the vicious idleness, the low pleasures, and the deadening routine of a garrison life. The rich officers were of course drawn by that magnet, the Court, to keep up their military studies and prepare for the next war by dancing attendance on women and flattering the Minister and the King at Versailles. The poor ones remained on duty--with not enough of it to keep them out of mischief, and with, for the most part, debased tastes, because their intellectual limitations precluded them from higher. The contamination of that useless existence even a Vauvenargues did not wholly escape. For a brief while he was as other men are. But the pleasures of a garrison town could not long hold such a nature as his. Already--he was but twenty-two--he had that love of solitude which, says a great German philosopher, is welcomed or avoided as a man’s personal value is great or small. Already--at an age when other men scarcely realise they have a soul--this man was dominated by the idea of its value and dignity; and deep within him was the passion and resolution to exercise to the full its powers and possibilities. With his companions he was wholly simple, natural, and friendly--without the faintest taint of that conscious superiority which makes many good people at once useless as a moral influence and objectionable as companions. ‘Father,’ his brother officers used to call him. Marmontel said ‘he held all our souls in his hands.’ He soon resumed, by correspondence, his friendship with Victor Mirabeau; and in their discussions on love--the view he takes of this passion is always a sure test of a man’s character--each letter-writer showed the yawning gulf that divided him from the other. If Vauvenargues ever met the woman worthy to hold his heart, to be, in the finest and highest understanding of those words, his companion and completion, is not known. He writes of love as if he had felt it. But to some pure souls--as to a Milton and a St. John the Divine--are revealed in visions the Eden and the New Jerusalem wherein they never walked. Vauvenargues’ letters to Mirabeau treat of the subject with such an exquisite dignity and refinement--with such noble silences--that there is at least no doubt that if he never found the woman who would have realised his ideals, he was spared the bitterness of loving one who broke them.