History of the Girondists, Volume I | Page 5

the prisons of
the state; his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his
intellect being rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his
dungeon, where his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the

infamy of precocious punishments.
Released from gaol, in order, by his father's command, to attempt to
form a marriage beset with difficulties with Mademoiselle De
Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he
displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of
policy in the small theatre of Aix. Cunning, seduction, courage, he used
every resource of his nature to succeed, and he succeeded; but he was
hardly married, before fresh persecutions beset him, and the stronghold
of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him. A love, which his Lettres à Sophie
has rendered immortal, opened its gates and freed him. He carried off
Madame de Monier from her aged husband. The lovers, happy for some
months, took refuge in Holland; they were seized there, separated and
shut up, the one in a convent and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes.
Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in
some crevice of man's destiny, lighted up in a single and ardent blaze
all Mirabeau's passions. In his vengeance it was outraged love that he
appeased; in liberty, it was love which he sought and which delivered
him; in study, it was love which still illustrated his path. Entering
obscure into his cell, he quitted it a writer, orator, statesman, but
perverted--ripe for any thing, even to sell himself, in order to buy
fortune and celebrity. The drama of life was conceived in his head, he
wanted but the stage, and that time was preparing for him. During the
few short years which elapsed for him between his leaving the keep of
Vincennes and the tribune of the National Assembly, he employed
himself with polemic labours, which would have weighed down
another man, but which only kept him in health. The Bank of Saint
Charles, the Institutions of Holland, the books on Prussia, the skirmish
with Beaumarchais, his style and character, his lengthened pleadings on
questions of warfare, the balance of European power, finance, those
biting invectives, that war of words with the ministers or men of the
hour, resembled the Roman forum in the days of Clodius and Cicero.
We discern the men of antiquity in even his most modern controversies.
We may fancy that we hear the first roarings of those popular tumults
which were so soon to burst forth, and which his voice was destined to
control. At the first election of Aix, rejected with contempt by the
noblesse, he cast himself into the arms of the people, certain of making

the balance incline to the side on which he should cast the weight of his
daring and his genius. Marseilles contended with Aix for the great
plebeian; his two elections, the discourses he then delivered, the
addresses he drew up, the energy he employed, commanded the
attention of all France. His sonorous phrases became the proverbs of
the Revolution; comparing himself, in his lofty language, to the men of
antiquity, he placed himself already in the public estimation in the
elevated position he aspired to reach. Men became accustomed to
identify him with the names he cited; he made a loud noise in order to
prepare minds for great commotions; he announced himself proudly to
the nation in that sublime apostrophe in his address to the Marseillais:
"When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust towards heaven,
and from this dust sprung Marius! Marius, less great for having
exterminated the Cimbri than for having prostrated in Rome the
aristocracy of the nobility."
From the moment of his entry into the National Assembly he filled it:
he was the whole people. His gestures were commands; his movements
coups d'état. He placed himself on a level with the throne, and the
nobility felt itself subdued by a power emanating from its own body.
The clergy, which is the people, and desires to reconcile the democracy
with the church, lends him its influence, in order to destroy the double
aristocracy of the nobility and bishops.
All that had been built by antiquity and cemented by ages fell in a few
months. Mirabeau alone preserved his presence of mind in the midst of
this ruin. His character of tribune ceases, that of the statesman begins,
and in this he is even greater than in the other. There, when all else
creep and crawl, he acts with firmness, advancing boldly. The
Revolution in his brain is no longer a momentary idea--it is a settled
plan. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, moderated by the
prudence of policy, flows easily, and modelled from his