He shut himself up on his country estates, consoling himself with the thought that he was an injured man.[10] But he was not of the men who can sit down and nurse their disappointments. Though cruelly broken, he set to work to repair his fortune and to repair his life. In the provinces of France, on the slopes of Touraine, there was plenty of work for a willing hand, as events too clearly proved. In that work d'Argenson found refuge from his manifold chagrins. The rest of his life--he was still but thirty-two[11]--was devoted to the development of his estates and to the welfare of his dependents. "Interested in the improvement of education and manners in the country, he gathered the peasantry together for lectures, instructing them himself, and exhorting them to the practice of their duties."[12] So he died, a failure, of a kind; one of those rich-souled men who are never successful until they fail. He bequeathed to posterity a number of devotional works, a "Paraphrase of the Prophet Jeremiah," an "Exposition of the Book of Job," and others of a like character. Yet, though entrenched behind numerous theological quartos, his orthodoxy was sadly open to attack. Having built a church, he dedicates it to the "Eternal Father," in scandalous disregard of the company of the saints. Already it is apparent that we have to deal with men of singular force of character and fulness of soul. Evidently it was no mere freak of fortune which made the grandson of this luckless ambassador the greatest political moralist of his time.[13] Practical vigour, moral depth, they are in the blood of the d'Argensons. They look down upon us from the last canvas before which it is necessary to linger, the portrait of "Mon Père."