breathing scene he was so much to trouble, and offered, at the outset of his disorderly career, misfortune and singularity in a twisted fool, a tied tongue, and two molar teeth.
Maltreated by fortune, which, at the age of three, turned him by disease into the ugliest of children – "a tiger marked by the small-pox" – caressed and neglected by his dissolute mother, disowned and persecuted as a spurious graft in his house and home by the celebrated "Economist," his father – his very childhood presaged the disorders of his youth and manhood; and his father, mysteriously reverting to early crimes and calamities as the blight of his life, made it matter of complaint that Honoré Gabriel, as a boy, had more cleverness "than all the devils in h – l," and seemed destined from his childhood "to disturb the monarchy, as a second Cardinal de Retz."
He was indeed born a Revolutionist; and if he had not found the elements of a bouleversement, was competent to have created them. But just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and Thyestes, the child was trained into demoralization, vicissitude, and daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and an absconding wife, bragging of her love for her husband." The Vicomte, his brother, "would have been a roué and a wit," he tells us, "in any family but his own," and was, of a dissolute noblesse, its most dissolute member. His mother, driven with contumely from her home and the bosom of her family, under accusations the most revolting a wife may hear from one who is her husband and a father, addressed the world in public recriminations for her persecutor, not less disgusting or condemnatory. The son himself, the most infamous man of his time, completes the picture in the boast he made to the National Assembly, that among the tragic woes of his family he had been the witness of fifty-four lettres-de-cachet, seventeen of them on his own account!
As in Eastern climates the abundance of degenerate man will, at some spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself in one family, produced the man who was to begin the catastrophe.
At seventeen, leaving a military academy, he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek, but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a fair share of the scattered erudition won by readings more desultory than diligent.
Presented at court, admitted to the rare aristocratic privilege of riding in the king's carriages at Versailles, laughed at as the Princess Elizabeth's living specimen of inoculation, the incipient courtier and embryo revolutionist was awakened from his delightful vision to find himself suddenly transferred from his regal residence and gayeties, to the sombre solitude of a country jail. He had been guilty of a passionate attachment to a young lady of disproportionate expectations.
The young victim of parental wrong, thus severely taught that the splendors of a court were but a veneer under which lay the terrible springs of a wayward tyranny, killed time in brooding over the ideas and studies which subsequently formed his "Essai" no less than his character – "sur le despotisme." But before completing the work, the father's monomania had been temporarily mitigated by the vengeance of a year's imprisonment; and the son, instead of being sent to Surinam, the Dutch Sierra Leone of that day, was graciously permitted, under the bourgeois name of "Buffiere," to enter as a gentleman volunteer the French army that was about to crush the Corsicans in their noble struggle against Genoese oppression.
In this liberticidal war, the liberty-loving Mirabeau performed his first manly act, won his first public distinction, and initiated that series of paradox, and moral revolutionism, that was hence to follow him as lover, litterateur, and politician, to the grave. As his sword was against Corsica and freedom, his pen was for them. He wrote over the ruins of both a boyish philippic, admired by his victims, and burnt by his father!
And while the brain that was to rule France as a tribune-king, was thus evolving its idle progeny, the womb of a Corsican woman near him was travailing with him who was to be Napoleon! At the instant France, by the sword of her future liberator, was mowing down the new-born liberties of Corsica – Corsica was breathing the breath of life into a child, whose sword was to cleave down the fresh-won freedom of France! As a Cæsar and a Marius sprung from the blood of the Gracchi, there would have been no Corsican exterminator for France, had there been no French exterminators for Corsica.7 There are surely times when fate plays with mortals, making of the murder of a generation or the revolution of an empire a nursery game of coincidences!
Of the twenty years that followed, bringing Mirabeau to the footsteps of the revolution, and within two years of his death, it was the odd fate of this gay and gifted noble, guilty of no offense against the state, nor in a legal sense against society, to pass more than the moiety of his time in the sad rôle of a state prisoner; and the main incidents in the unhappy sequence of wrong and suffering, the inevitable but unrecognized logic of Providence, were briefly, and in succession, a profitless marriage with the most distinguished heiress of his province, carried off from twenty more eligible rivals by the superior strategy of seduction and defamation, pecuniary extravagance, dissipation, debts, sequestration of property, marital separation, successive imprisonments by paternal intervention, deadly hate with the father, permanent alienation from his adulterous wife and only child, licentious connection with a friend's wife, with whom he abandoned his country, exile in Switzerland, Holland, and England, successive litigations self-conducted, a ministerial spyship in Prussia, and a career more or less stormy, as a litterateur, in France.
Entombed in one of the horrid dungeons of Vincennes, solitary, hopeless, almost without a sympathy, though in the very spring-tide of his rich youth and activity, the angel of consolation, never far from us in our darkest hour, came down, and in the genial guise of literature, visited in his dungeon this man of infamies and suffering. It must, however, be confessed against him that, maddened by the severity of a despotism without appeal, in the wrong – and from that hand, too, whence he might fairly have hoped a kinder gift, even the wholesomeness of books became poisoned under his diseased digestion, and it became his wretched pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination.
But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those extensive studies of history and its philosophy to which we owe, among much else that is great in literature or in event, the three works on "Despotism," "State Prisons," and "Lettres-de-Cachet."
To our present purpose it would be of little use to indulge in any lengthened analysis or literary estimate of these performances. Gratifying his need of money, his love of fame, and, above all, a vengeance warmly nursed, which even virtue can not censure, their publication formed, probably, the happiest incidents of his life. The first published in his twenty-fifth year, bears all the characteristics of the young man of genius, roughened, no less than strengthened by the asperities of the experience out of whose ireful plenitude he writes. Rough and disorderly in arrangement, it is lofty, striking, eloquent in style – cogent, daring, powerful in matter.
The last, the result of his long, final imprisonment, and published in his thirty-first year, possesses similar attributes, aggrandized, or improved. A great work, involving an inquiry into the first principles of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great, sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general rule, work, rather than literature, in his sentences, and the just, the practical, the statesman-like