Just at this time, sad, weary, solitary, and teeming with suppressed tenderness, he met with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a young woman of a fine feminine genius and character, made virtually a widow by the crime and imprisonment of her unworthy husband. She seems at once to have fully appreciated the best side of the genius of Comte, entered into his disinterested sentiments, pitied his misfortunes, and ministered to his highest wants like an angel. As his disciple and friend, she lavished on him an enthusiastic admiration and affection. She reflected him, in her esteem and treatment, at a height, and in a glory, harmonizing with his own estimation of his mission. It was a celestial luxury; and it wrought miracles in him. He was transformed into apparently another person. His scientific and philosophical career became a poetic and religious one. He reproduced the most glowing and delicate emotions of Dante and Petrarch and Thomas a Kempis. The relation between Comte and Madame de Vaux was one of absolute blamelessness and purity. For one year only was he allowed to enjoy this divine delight. He was about to adopt her legally as his daughter, when she died, leaving him inconsolable, save for the melancholy satisfaction of beatifying her memory with his pen, and of worshipping her in his heart.
"An unalterable purity," he says, "confirmed her tenderness, and was the cause of a moral resurrection to me during the incomparable year of our external union. My present adoration of her is more assiduous and profound, but less vivid, than when she was alive. It daily makes me feel the truth of a sentence which once dropped from her pen: There is nothing in life irrevocable, except death.'"
The deep and stern solitude of Comte, the wearisome toils he underwent, the austere pre-occupations of his mind, the harassments and lacerations he had known, seemed to make him doubly susceptible to the action of the sympathetic instincts, to those pleasures of praise and tenderness which aggrandize and sweeten our existence, and constitute our keenest happiness. No one was purer than he in his life; no one severer in his condemnation of every form of corrupt indulgence. Therefore, no one has had a higher idea of the value of feminine friendship, and no one been more loyal to it in his own experience. It is truly touching to read, in the light of his life and character, what he has written on this topic. The three guardian angels, for devout and effusive communion with whom he set apart a sacred period every day, were, Rosalie Boyer, Clotilde de Vaux, and Sophie Eliot, his mother, his friend, and his servant. By prayer and meditation on these three beloved memories, he cultivated the three chief sympathies, veneration for superiors, attachment to equals, goodness to inferiors. He expresses the deepest gratitude for the privilege of that friendship, "the tardy felicity reserved for a solitary life, devoted, from the first, to the fundamental service of humanity." Even its removal by death, he said, did not restore his former isolation; for the inward treasure of affection it had bestowed, constantly contemplated afresh in memory, remained the permanent and principal resource of his life. "She has, now for more than six years since her death, been associated with all my thoughts, and with all my feelings."