“It is in the skies; you are trying to learn the facts by pretending to know more than the rumors.”
“I see that you are doubt incarnate, or wish not to see what you do not doubt. After telling you of things you do know I must tell of those beyond your ken. Well, you have recommended Mirabeau to the King as the only man who can save the monarchy. He will fail—all will fail, for the monarchy is doomed. You know that I will not have it saved. You have achieved your end; the two rulers will welcome your advocate: and you flatter yourself that the royal conversion is due to your irrefutable logic and irresistible arguments.”
Gilbert could not help biting his lip on hearing this ironical tone.
“Have you invented a stethoscope by which you can read the heart of kings? pass the wonderful instrument on to me, count: only an enemy of mankind would want to keep it to himself alone.”
“I told you I keep nothing back from you, dear doctor. You shall have my telescope and may look as you please through the small end which diminishes or the other which magnifies. The Queen gave way for two reasons: first, she met a great sorrow the night before and she must have some mental distraction; next, she is a woman and having heard Mirabeau spoken of as a tiger, she wants to see him and try to tame him. She thinks: ‘It will be fine revenge to bring him to lick my feet: if some good follows for France and the crown, so much the better.’ But you understand, this idea is quite secondary.”
“You are building on hypothesis and I want facts.”
“I see you refuse my glass and I must come back to material things: such as can be seen with the naked eye, Mirabeau’s debts, for instance.”
“What a chance you have to exhibit your generosity, by paying his debts as you once did Cardinal Rohan’s.”
“Do not reproach me with that speculation, it was one of my greatest successes. The Queen’s Necklace was a pretty affair, I think, and ruined the Queen in the general eye. At the same price I would pay Mirabeau’s debts. But you know that he is not looking to me for that, but to the future Generalissimo, Lafayette, who will make him caper for a beggarly fifty thousand francs, which he will not get any more than the dog gets the cake for which he has danced.
“Poor Mirabeau, how all these fools and conceited dunces make your genius pay for the follies of your youth! Yet all this is providential and heaven is obliged to proceed by human methods. All these politicians and wirepullers blame him for some virtue which is not theirs, and yet, if he dies to-morrow, the masses will award him an apotheosis, and all these pigmies, over whom he stands head and shoulders, will follow as mourners and howl: ‘Woe to France which has lost her greatest orator—woe to royalty which has lost its supporter!'”