Hesitating between religion and philosophy, with a palpable leaning towards the latter, ill and yet bravely bearing the disappointments and sufferings of his life, Vauvenargues was already expiring at thirty years of age, when Provence was invaded by the enemy.
The humiliation of his country and the peril of his native province roused him from his tranquil melancholy.

"All Provence is in arms," he wrote to his friend Fauris de St.Vincent, "and here am I quite quietly in my chimney-corner; the bad state of my eyes and of my health is not sufficient excuse for me, and I ought to be where all the gentlemen of the province are.

Send me word then, I beg, immediately whether there is still any employment to be had in our newly raised, levies, and whether I should be sure to be employed if I were to go to Provence." Before his friend's answer had reached Vauvenargues, the Austrians and the Piedmontese had been forced to evacuate Provence; the dying man remained in his chimney-corner, where he soon expired, leaving amongst the public, and still more amongst those who had known him personally, the impression of great promise sadly extinguished.

"It was his fate," says his faithful biographer, M.Gilbert, "to be always opening his wings and to be unable to take flight." Voltaire, quite on the contrary, was about to take a fresh flight.

After several rebuffs and long opposition on the part of the eighteen ecclesiastics who at that time had seats in the French Academy, he had been elected to it in 1746.