Full of ardour for all that is beautiful and good, tortured by disease and pinched by poverty, but never allowing his personal misfortunes to affect his view of life, or to cloud his vision of the trinity of heavenly lights, _merite_, _vertu_, _gloire_, Vauvenargues pursued his painful life in the Street of the Peacock. He knew his feebleness, but he refused to let it depress him; "labour to get _gloire_ is not lost," he said, "if it tends to make us worthy of it." In his curious mixture of simplicity and acuteness, in his gravity and ardour, he was morally just like the best types which this great war has produced, he is like Paul Lintier in France, like Julian Grenfell among ourselves, meeting the worst blows of fate with serenity and almost with ecstasy, with no shadow of indignation or rebellion. Some posthumous reflections have let us into the secret that, as the shadows darkened around him, he occasionally gave way, if not to despair, yet to depression, and permitted himself to wonder whether all his effort in the cause of manliness and virtue had been useless. He had not awakened the sleepers in France; he doubted that his voice would ever reach them; he asked himself whether all his effort had not been in vain. This was the natural inner weakness consequent on his physical state; he gave no outward sign of it. Marmontel, who watched his last hours with enthusiastic affection, says that, "In his company we learned how to live,--and how to die." He lay like Socrates, surrounded by his friends, talking and listening to the last; he astonished them by the eloquence and gravity of his discourse. His latest recorded utterance was, "Fortune may sport with the wisdom of those who are courageous, but it has no power to bend their courage." Gently but firmly refusing the importunities of the Church, Vauvenargues was released from his life-in-death on May 28, 1747, in his thirty-second year.