As yet he had excited no great hopes. His father saw but little of him, and was inclined to regard him as rather a fool; the paternal hopes were centred upon his brother, the pleasing, popular and imposing Marc Pierre, then a young man of twenty. This unhappy partiality left a fatal mark upon the character of the elder son; and though d'Argenson never speaks of his father but with affection and respect,[67] he cannot disguise how deeply he felt it. And yet, it is curious to remember, he was before all things else his father's son. He inherited from him his passion for work;[68] to him he owed that instinctive regard for "le bien public,"[69] which afterwards ripened into absolute devotion; from him he drew that soundness of heart and incisiveness of mind which are d'Argenson's prime distinction as a thinker and a man. But there was another strand in the stout complexity of the father's nature, something which had led him, when he came to Paris, to shun the companionship of the great, and to seek his pleasure in a self-chosen society of the baser sort,[70] which had surrounded his life with the infernal obscurity of a magician's cell,[71] something of self-sufficience, of self-contentment, self-concentration. That too, for his own confusion, d'Argenson had inherited. It might have remained harmless; but nourished by his father's indifference and neglect, it grew with the rankness of a noxious weed. He came to find comfort in his own society. As his own company became dearer to him, so did the distance widen between himself and his fellows. Alone, he could be natural, forceful, even great at times; in society, he was pursued by a haunting self-distrust, which attracted disparagement and very often ridicule. As yet, it is true, beyond a touch of depreciation here and there,[72] we see very little of it; the energy of youth and his own strength of will enabled him to fight with his misfortune. But it had afflicted him with one disability which no effort, however determined, could overcome. It had rendered him for ever incapable of coping with the blatancy, the loud insistence, the insensate, trumpet-tongued vulgarity, with which every man of affairs is called upon to deal; and he relates an incident in his present experience as Director of the Press which shows that he was as helpless in the face of it now as he afterwards proved in the more august circle of the Council of State. He was arranging some matter with Machault,[73] who was then in charge of the police; his colleague was for carrying things off with a high hand; d'Argenson laid down his pen, looked at the man, rose, and retired from the business.[74] It was an act of weakness, but the weakness was invincible.