VAUVENARGUES, LUC DE CLAPIERS, signore
di. – French moralist, born on 6 August 1715 at Aix-en-
Provence, died in Paris on 28 May 1747.
He fought in the campaigns in Italy, Bohemia (1741–42),
and on the Rhine (1743); he resigned from the service in
1744 and at Aix was severely afflicted by smallpox, which left
him almost blind. In May 1745 he settled permanently in
Paris, where he devoted himself to writing his most im-
portant work, Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain,
published anonymously at the end of 1746 together with
some Réflexions sur divers sujets, and the Traité sur le libre arbitre,
already written in the form of a Discours at Besançon in 1737.
These are the themes of the moral discourses Sur la gloire, Sur les
plaisirs, and the Conseils, previously addressed to his fellow
soldier Hippolyte de Seytres (who fell at Prague in 1742 and is
remembered in a moving Éloge), reconsidered with an unshak-
able confidence in the value and goodness of elementary human
feelings. The nobility of spirit that emerges from them, despite
the failure of all ambitions and the misery of V.’s life, won him
the friendship and admiration of men such as Voltaire and
Marmontel, who commemorated him in the Mémoires. And in
fact his morality, inspired by a firm faith in virtue and action,
and in a social development respectful of the human person,
separates him from the bitter pessimism of seventeenth-century
thinkers and brings him closer to the movement of ideas at the
end of the century and in the early nineteenth century.
(from II, Van der Mandere, II, V., s. l. III, before the title page)
VAUGHAN, HERBERT - Ritratto.