He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the master-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure of his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre ame"; here was exposed before him a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasure without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17] [Footnote 17: We know, at least, that he taught himself to write on the "sedulous ape" system, by imitating Bossuet and Fenelon. He must have been in several respects very much like Robert Louis Stevenson. His modesty led him to distrust his own taste, and it is worthy of notice that the corrections he made to please Voltaire often reduce the vigour of his thought in its original expression. Voltaire-- it is beyond conjecture why--cancelled the famous maxim, "Les feux de l'aurore".] How harshly his tastes were condemned at home may be judged by an anecdote about his father which occurs in the "Essai sur quelques caracteres":-- "Anselme was shocked that his son should show a taste for science. He burnt the young man's papers and books, and when he learned that he had gone to sup with certain men of letters, he threatened to banish him to the country if he persisted in keeping _bad company_. 'Since you are fond of reading,' he said to him, 'why don't you read the history of your own family? You will not find any savants there, but you will find men of the right sort. Do you wish to be the first pedant of your race?'"