History of the Girondists, Volume I | Page 4

my country.
II.
HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS.

Mirabeau had just died. The instinct of the people led them to press
around the house of his tribune, as if to demand inspiration even from
his coffin; but had Mirabeau been still living, he could no longer have
given it; his star had paled its fires before that of the Revolution;
hurried to the verge of an unavoidable precipice by the very chariot he
himself had set in motion, it was in vain that he clung to the tribune.
The last memorial he addressed to the king, which the Iron Chest has
surrendered to us, together with the secret of his venality, testify the
failure and dejection of his mind. His counsels are versatile, incoherent,
and almost childish:--now he will arrest the Revolution with a grain of
sand--now he places the salvation of the Monarchy in a proclamation of
the crown and a regal ceremony which shall revive the popularity of the
king,--.and now he is desirous of buying the acclamations of the tribune,
and believes the nation, like him, to be purchasable at a price. The
pettiness of his means of safety are in contrast with the vast increase of
perils; there is a vagueness in every idea; we see that he is impelled by
the very passions he has excited, and that unable any longer to guide or
control them, he betrays, whilst he is yet unable to crush, them. The
prime agitator is now but the alarmed courtier seeking shelter beneath
the throne, and though still stuttering out terrible words in behalf of the
nation and liberty, which are in the part set down for him, has already
in his soul all the paltriness and the thoughts of vanity which are proper
to a court. We pity genius when we behold it struggling with
impossibility. Mirabeau was the most potent man of his time; but the
greatest individual contending with an enraged element appears but a
madman. A fall is only majestic when accompanied by virtue.
Poets say that clouds assume the form of the countries over which they
have passed, and moulding themselves upon the valleys, plains, or
mountains, acquire their shapes and move with them over the skies.
This resembles certain men, whose genius being as it were acquisitive,
models itself upon the epoch in which it lives, and assumes all the
individuality of the nation to which it belongs. Mirabeau was a man of
this class: he did not invent the Revolution, but was its manifestation.
But for him it might perhaps have remained in a state of idea and
tendency. He was born, and it took in him the form, the passion, the
language which make a multitude say when they see a thing--There it

is.
He was born a gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugee and
established in Provence, but of Italian origin: the progenitors were
Tuscan. The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her
bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante
reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and
persecutions. The blood of Machiavel and the earthquake genius of the
Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race.
The proportions of their souls exceed the height of their destiny: vices,
passions, virtues are all in excess. The women are all angelic or
perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as
emphatic and lofty as their aspirations. There is in their most familiar
correspondence the colour and tone of the heroic tongues of Italy.
The ancestors of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of
the quarrels of Marius and Sylla, of Cæsar and Pompey. We perceive
the great men descending to trifling matters. Mirabeau inspired this
domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle. I dwell on these details,
which may seem foreign to this history, but explain it. The source of
genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the
prophecy of destiny.
III.
Mirabeau's education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father,
who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and selfish
vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of all his
family. The only virtue he was taught was honour, for by that name in
those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanour which was too
frequently but the show of probity and the elegance of vice. Entering
the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military habits except a
love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father was constantly
extended not to aid him in rising, but to depress him still lower under
the consequences of his errors: his youth was passed in