^{Note 1 in page 1106} Œuvres de Vauvenargues, ed. D.-L. Gilbert (Paris, 1857), p. 88. A second volume edited by Gilbert and called Œuvres posthumes et inédiles de Vauvenargues was published the same year. Subsequent references are to this edition.

^{Note 2 in page 1106} See Arthur Lovejoy, “The ‘Love of Praise’ as the Indispensable Substitute for ‘Reason and Virtue’ in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theories of Human Nature,” in Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore, Md., 1961), pp. 153–93.

^{Note 3 in page 1107} Corrado Rosso, in his “Vauvenargues, I'ideale del-l'eloquenza e la morale della gloria,” Filosofia, 15 (July 1964), sees this as an attempt especially to put an end to Pyrrhonistic dilemmas of the preceding generation.

^{Note 4 in page 1109} Vauvenargues's editors, Suard and Gilbert, repeatedly indicate that Vauvenargues's philosophic vocabulary is unsure and confusing. Fernand Vial discusses the problem in Une Philosophie et une morale du sentiment: Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (Geneva: Droz, 1938), pp. 7–8. As so frequently happens, the original thinker finds himself forced to pour new wine into old bottles. Vauvenargues does speak of an ultimate “système,” and this has misled many critics into thinking that they could find one in his work that resembled the systems Vauvenargues himself attacked. In his “Plan d'un livre de philosophie,” Vauvenargues says that “C'est à nous prendre des vues générales, et à nous former un esprit vaste de tant d'esprits particuliers” (ii, 72). The expression “vues générales” is less misleading than “système” for Vauvenargues's purposes. See the following note.

^{Note 6 in page 1109} Vauvenargues's “étendue d'esprit” produces a result analogous to Descartes's lumen naturalis, Locke's “intuition,” and D'Alembert's “seul point de vue,” that is, a certainty and a sense of unity as immediate and as self-evident as the testimony of sight. Vauvenargues's vocabulary varies with the context and the particular aspect of his method he chooses to emphasize. At times he stresses its comprehensiveness, as in the use of “vues générales,” at others its unifying qualities, with his insistence on “une seule perspective,” at still others the instantaneous consciousness of truth, with the adverbial expression “d'un seul coup.”

^{Note 6 in page 1110} See Vauvenargues's letter to Voltaire of 4 April 1743 (ii, 246) in which he praises the “profondeur méthodique de M. Locke” at the expense of “la mémoire féconde et décousue de M. Bayle.”

^{Note 7 in page 1110} See his ambiguous letter to Mirabeau, dated 30 May 1739 (ii, 134–35), in which he first speaks of lacking the genius for brevity but then goes on to explain that even the greatest aphorists create confusions by the very fact that they do not explain or prove. In one of his Causeries du lundi, xiv (Paris: Gamier, n.d.), 39, Sainte-Beuve simplifies the issue and explains unequivocally that Vauvenargues “n'est pas de ceux qui étranglent leur pensée ou qui la gravent et la frappent en quelques mots splendides,” whereas Margot Kruse, in Die Maxime in der franzbsischen Literatur (Hamburg, 1960), pp. 143–48, bewilders the reader by attributing Vauvenargues's failure as an aphorist to the impossibility for any Enlightenment philosopher to recover the seventeenth-century sense of paradox necessary, she believes, for the composition of good maximes.

^{Note 8 in page 1110} For changes between the editions, see, e.g., the earlier versions of Maxims 118, 122, 178, 218, 302, and 316. The question of what Vauvenargues's intentions were in arranging the maxims as he did has never been studied. It is the subject of a forthcoming article by this writer.

^{Note 9 in page 1111} May Wallas speaks of the Introduction as “simply a set of notes analyzing different types of mind,” in Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (Cambridge, Eng., 1928), p. 225. It was Joachim Merlant, in his De Montaigne à Vauvenargues (Paris, 1914), p. 398, who first made the point, and Emile Bréhier who gave it full prominence by making interpersonal incommunicability a basic postulate of Vauvenargues's thought {Histoire de la philosophie, Paris, 1930, ii, 427). Professor Wallas' later article, “Vauvenargues in 1948,” FSt, 3 (Jan. 1949), 19–21, praises Bréhier's interpretation but speaks of it as “in some respects a statement of the logical conclusions which may be drawn from [Vauvenargues's works] rather than a completely accurate account of their content.”

^{Note 10 in page 1112} In the first edition of his works, Vauvenargues stated that a long lifetime would not be sufficient for him to write a fully detailed development of the principles outlined in his Introduction: “Détourné de ses avantages par de vains désirs, et borné à lier mes réflexions, je cours rapidement au but” (i, 47, n. 3). He did, however, have time to write or revise other works before he died. In the second edition, he simply stated that he had “ni la volonté ni le pouvoir de donner plus d'application à cet ouvrage.” Critics, from Gilbert (who frequently uses the expression Pendent opera interrupta) to Roger Mercier (La Réhabilitation de la nature humaine, 1700–1750, Villemomble, 1960, p. 419), for whom Vauvenargues was “enlevé par la mort avant d'avoir pu composer de longs ouvrages,” do not see that Vauvenargues had no desire to continue working within certain literary forms, that he was searching for an expression adequate to a not entirely conscious and evolving view of things. The traditional interpretation assumes a fully formulated philosophy that Vauvenargues did not live to express. It overlooks Vauvenargues's method of working, his repeated rewritings and experimentation with literary genres. In short, it ignores esthetic considerations.

^{Note 11 in page 1113} See Ian Watt, The Rise of The Novel, 4th ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), pp. 11–34. The subtitle of Les Illustres Françaises is “Histoires véritables. Où l'on trouve, dans des Caractères très-particuliers & fort différents, un grand nombre d'exemples rares & extraordinaires.” Describing one of the stories in his Introduction to the recent edition of the novel (Paris, 1959), Frédéric Deloffre notes: “On voit ce qu'une telle histoire apporte de nouveau: essentiellement une psychologie individuelle, fondée sur le tempérament, le milieu, le passé, remplaçant la vérité morale d'un La Bruyère, d'un Le Sage, et même, dans une certaine mesure, d'un Molière” (p. xliv). The remark might apply as well to Vauvenargues's Caractères. Pierre Richard, in La Bruyère et ses caractères (Amiens, 1946), p. 191, did see something of the same operating in Vauvenargues's Caractères in his comment on their “menus traits impressionistes” that, for him, detract from “la portée générale dont la Bruyère avait su prolonger l'actualité des siens.”

^{Note 12 in page 1113} Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism (New York, 1963), p. 34. Vauvenargues himself approved of Crouzas's definition of the beautiful, which matches Sypher's of the rococo esthetic: “Le beau nait de la variété réductible à l'unité, c'est-à-dire d'un composé qui ne fait pourtant qu'un seul tout et qu'on peut saisir d'une vue” (i, 62).

^{Note 13 in page 1113} From a subjective point of view, a chance conflation of character, circumstance, passion, and reason brings about happiness. No one, in Vauvenargues's view, is therefore inevitably or invariably imprisoned in his unhappiness. See “Du Bonheur” in the Reflexions.

^{Note 14 in page 1115} Corrado Rosso (p. 517) disagrees with Georges Poulet's idea that Vauvenargues's thinker “transforme le monde en son être propre” (La Distance intérieure, Paris, 1952, p. 55): “La conclusione piú profondo del pensiero di Vauvenargues sembra invece l'appodo a una pace che non sia quella délia conscienza che ha risolto le altre e tutto il mondo in se, ma sia di tutti, e fra tutti le conscienze.” Neither critic is wrong, I believe. Vauvenargues's thought moves dialectically between the not always complementary needs to bring the self and the external world to salvation. Rosso stresses Vauvenargues's positive faith in social action, though he admits later that Vauvenargues's ideal is “una pace non ancora sociale … ma per lo meno interiore” (p. 517), while Poulet describes the attitudes of the self as it meditates upon social problems.

^{Note 15 in page 1114} iii, 79. La Rochefoucauld's reductio is not unlike Locke's or Condillac's search for origins. Vauvenargues disapproves. Here is what he says of La Rochefoucauld's “La force et la faiblesse de l'esprit sont mal nommées; elles ne sont en effet que la bonne ou la mauvaise disposition des organes du corps”: “On pourrait dire, sur ce fondement: La sagacité et l'imbécillité sont malnommeés, elles ne sont en effet, etc. Mais qui ne voit la fausseté de cette maxime? L'imbécillité et la sagacité, la force et la fabilesse de l'esprit sont-elles moins réelles et moins distinctes, pour être fondées sur la disposition de nos organes?”

^{Note 16 in page 1114} This meaning has invariably been linked by critics with Vauvenargues's own life, beginning with Voltaire's and Marmontel's praise of the nobility of Vauvenargues's life and character, through Gilbert's search for a “biographie morale de Vauvenargues dans son œuvre même” (i, 430, n. 1), to René Le Senne's discovery of Vauvenargues's “polypsychisme” (Traité de caractérologie, 4th ed., Paris, 1952, p. 273), and even beyond. The major change has been a darkening of the image to include Vauvenargues's more turbulent, imaginative responses to inhibitions and mistreatments of many kinds, concentrating on the “véhément” heroes, leading “une existence obscure et violente” (i, 90), and filled with “tentations secrètes” (i, 97). This wholly autobiographical stress leads to such cul-de-sac evaluations of Vauvenargues's works as Bruce A. Morrissette's: “the desire-dreams of a sick introvert” (MLN, 55, 1940, 314).

^{Note 17 in page 1114} Typically, Robert Mauzi, e.g., sees in Vauvenargues “un psychologue et un moraliste de l'action” and believes that “Toute la morale de Vauvenargues se résume en quatre mots: activité, courage, gloire, ambition” (L'Idée du bonheur au XVIII^e siècle, Paris, 1960, p. 489). He earlier makes a case for Vauvenargues as sentimental philosopher, without a “plan philosophique” (pp. 261–63), by referring to Vauvenargues's letters but not to his work itself.

^{Note 18 in page 1114} Histoire de la littérature française, 3rd ed., iv (Paris, 1863), 311.