He left three sons: Victor, the eldest, succeeded to the honours and possessions of the house. This man was a strange mixture of good intention and evil doing;—a general philanthropist, and yet the persecutor and enemy of his own family; against various members of which he obtained, at different times, fifty-seven lettres de cachet, nearly a score of which were levelled against his eldest son. He had more vanity than pride, and his haughtiness was unaccompanied by a spirit of justice, yet joined to a perfect conviction that he was always in the right. Implacable towards others, indulgent with regard to himself: hence spring the contradictions observable in his character; we find displayed a mixture of sternness and softness, rancour and good humour. Had he been as severe with himself as others, his whole character had been rigid, but he would have been more just and virtuous: as it was, we find him plastic to the influence of his own passions or vanity, and become gentle and even playful under their influence: whatever jarred with these found him despotic and unforgiving. Thus he grew into a domestic tyrant, and while he ran after popularity in his own person, he disdained and crushed the talents of his son. His literary reputation did not begin till he had passed mid-life; it was founded on "L'Ami des Hommes," a work in five volumes, which, in the midst of great diffuseness and confusion, is yet remarkable for the knowledge it displays in agriculture and statistics, and for many clear and liberal views. His "Théorie de l'Impôt," published in 1760, caused him, through his attack on the financiers of the day, to be imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes. He wrote many other works on the same species of subjects. It is a curious circumstance that, while he adopted in his publications a bad, inflated, and obscure style, his private letters are witty, gay, and flowing. He had, of course, served in his youth; but disappointment with regard to promotion, combined with his desire to acquire a literary reputation, caused him to quit the army. He married a young widow of good birth and fortune, Marie Geneviève de Vassam, who had been previously married to the marquis de Saulvebeuf. His desire of shining in literature made him approach Paris, and he bought the estate of Bignon, not far from Nemours, and gave himself up to what he considered his vocation. For many years the disturbances of his domestic life were confined under his own roof. He had a family of eleven children: he was passionately attached to his mother, whom he regarded with a filial veneration that belonged to the old school of manners and piety. Fifteen years changed the scene; quarrels and litigations arose between him and his wife. She was violent and indiscreet; he was tyrannical and unjust; and conjugal infidelity rendered their separation final. Madame de Pailly, a young woman of great beauty, to whom he was attached, installed herself at Bignon, and exercised a most powerful and sinister influence over his conduct towards his family. His wife was indignant: he replied to her resentful representations by the most odious acts of despotism, and conceived a violent hatred against the mother of his children. A scandalous lawsuit was the result; the fortunes of both parties were irreparably injured; and the unfortunate offspring were in a worse situation than orphans;—hated by their father,—not daring to see their mother, who was shut up in a convent,—treated with the utmost severity on one hand, and without resource in maternal affection on the other. Added to his matrimonial dissensions were the attacks made on him in his quality of author. "L'Ami des Hommes," as the marquis de Mirabeau was commonly called from his book, carried all the impetuosity, self-sufficiency, and haughtiness of his race into his literary career; and it may be supposed that became as stormy as his father's had been on the field of battle. His confidence in his own talents and powers was unbounded: he never attributed the misfortunes that pursued him to any error or rashness of his own; he looked on them as the dispensation of Providence, or as arising from the folly and injustice of his fellow-creatures. No hesitation, no doubt with regard to himself, ever entered his mind; every thing was sacrificed to his opinions, his convictions, his mistaken sense of his duties. He was blinded, as a French biographer observes, by the most deceptive of all fanaticisms—that of his own infallibility. The passions that in another he would have regarded as crimes, he looked on as virtues in himself: he could never perceive the shadow of right or justice in any cause or views at variance with his own. Such was the father who became the bitter enemy and persecutor of a son, endowed with all the genius, passions, and faults of his race.
Gabriel Honoré was the fifth child of the marquis: through the previous death of a brother in the cradle, he was, at the time of his birth, the only son. He was born at Bignon. He came into the world with teeth, and was an enormously large infant. It was remarked of him, that, destined to become the most turbulent and active of men, he was born with a twisted foot; and, gifted with extraordinary eloquence, he was tongue-tied. At three years of age he had the small-pox, and his mother, who dabbled in medicine, making some experiments on the pustules, the result was that he remained frightfully seared and marked. His father was evidently deeply mortified, and wrote to his brother, "Your nephew is as ugly as if he were Satan's." His other children being remarkably handsome, this circumstance became more disastrous to the sufferer. The boy, however, early showed talent, which was nurtured by an excellent tutor, and less judiciously overlooked by his father, who resolved to give him an education of unequalled excellence—that is, one of perpetual restraint, reprimand, and chastisement. We have interesting details of his infancy and youth, in extracts from a series of letters which passed between the marquis and his brother.[10] The bailli de Mirabeau was entered by his father into the order of knights of Malta in his infancy. He served in the French navy for the space of thirty-one years, when he retired without recompence, except such as he derived from a high reputation. He was a proud, austere, and resolute man, possessing at the same time extreme piety, great goodness, and unblemished integrity of character, together with a foundation of good sense that contrasts with his brother's intemperate sallies. Uncompromising even to roughness, he was ill suited to a court, while his bravery and sound understanding fitted him for public service. Proud of the antiquity of his race; openly disdainful of the new-created noblesse; frank, upright, but somewhat discontented, as he well might be, at the small reward his services received; yet at the same time too haughty to wait obsequiously on the great, or even to take the measures necessary to refresh their memory, he passed the latter part of his life in retirement. He devoted his fortune to his brother's service, whom he respected as the head of the family, and regarded with warm fraternal affection. A correspondence subsisted between the one, living either at Paris or Bignon, and the other, who was serving his country at a distance, or established at Mirabeau, which discloses the secrets of the family, and unveils the motives and passions that swayed the conduct of the marquis. The bailli was deeply interested in the child who was to transmit the family name, and, being at the time of the boy's birth governor of Guadaloupe, wrote earnestly home for information with regard to him. The child early developed quickness of intellect and turbulence of temper, joined to kindness of heart. Poisson, his tutor, was a careful but severe guide, and if ever he was softened, the marquis stepped in to chastise. Soon, too soon, the paternal scoldings and punishments became angry reprimands and constant disapprobation, which verged into hatred. These feelings were increased by the imprudences and vivacity of the boy, the misjudged quarrels of the mother, the artful manœuvres of madame de Pailly, and the bitter hatred conceived by an old servant named Gervin, who, from some unknown cause, exercised extraordinary influence over the marquis. The chief fault particularised by the father was the boy's habitual untruths. A love of or indifference to truth is one of the characteristics with which human beings are born. The former may be cultivated, the latter checked, but the propensities do not the less remain; and it is the most painful discovery that a parent can make, to find that his child is not by natural instinct incapable of falsehood. This innate and unfortunate vice, joined to the boy's wildness and heedlessness, caused the father to write of him in severe terms, scarcely suited to his' childish years. "He seems to me," he writes, "in addition to all the baseness of his natural character, a mere fool, an unconquerable maniac. He attends a number of excellent masters; and as every one, from his confessor to his playmate, are so many watchers, who tell me every thing, I discern the nature of the heart, and do not believe that he can come to any good." The first master, Poisson, set over him, however, took a liking to the boy, and praised his prodigious memory and good heart. The father, instead of being pleased, grew angry. He declared that he would now be utterly spoilt, and took him out of his hands to place him in those of an abbé Choquart, a severe disciplinarian, who was bid not to spare punishment. The severity of the marquis may be judged by this one circumstance, that taking his son from a tutor whom he loved, and placing him in a school to which he was sent as to a prison, he insisted that he should go by another name. "I did not choose," he writes, "that an illustrious name should be disgraced on the benches of a school of correction, and I caused him to be entered as Pierre Buffière. 1764.
Ætat.
15. My gentleman struggled, wept, argued in vain. I bid him win my name, which I would only restore when he deserved it." Had the father been just the youth would soon have regained his affections and name. The abbé Choquart, at first severe with his pupil, soon became attached to and proud of him. His progress was astonishing, his memory prodigious. The dead and living languages, mathematics, drawing, and music, and various manly exercises, occupied him by turns, and he distinguished himself in all. In the midst of the marquis's vituperations we find no absolute facts. He calls his son lying by nature, base, and so vicious that the worst consequences are to be apprehended: this is carried so far that, when he mentions that his masters applaud and his comrades love him, he adds that the boy ought to be smothered, if it were only for his powers of cajolery and fascination.
This severity frightened but did not conquer the youth. He worked hard to obtain his father's approbation; but indiscretions came between to widen the breach. Perpetually in expectation of some degrading or excessive punishment, he lived in a state of excitement, and even terror, ill fitted to inspire the gentleness and repose of spirit which is the best ingredient of honour and virtue. As he grew older his turbulence became more dangerous; and his father, considering it necessary to tame him by increased hardships, placed him in the army. "I am going to send him," he writes, "as volunteer, to the strictest and most laborious military school. A man, a chip of the old times, the marquis de Lambert, has founded one in his regiment. He pretends that the exclusive atmosphere of honour, and a hard and cold moral regimen, can restore beings the most vitiated even by nature. I have requested him to name as Mentor an officer who, not from reason and deduction, but from instinct, should have a disgust and natural scorn for all baseness. I have named Gervin as his other Mentor, and the only servant-master of this young man. Severity will cost me nothing, for with him it is my right and my duty." The perpetual recurrence to the accusation of baseness affords some excuse for the father's inveteracy; yet it was certainly ill judged to set a servant over a proud aspiring youth as master, and this servant, who hated him, was one of the chief engines of perpetuating the marquis's bad opinion. 1767.
Ætat.
18. However, by placing him beyond the paternal control, under the impartial jurisdiction of a regiment, the young man had a chance of being fairly treated, and the consequence was that his good conduct was acknowledged and a brevet rank promised him. He was not allowed to reap any advantage: his father kept him so wholly without money that he incurred a few debts; he lost, also, four louis in play, a vice to which he showed no predilection in after life, and we may therefore judge that this trifling loss was accidental. His father's wrath flamed out. "He is cast," he wrote to his brother, "in the mould of his maternal race, and would devour twenty inheritances and twelve kingdoms if he could lay his hands on them. But I can endure as little as I like of that species of evil, and a close and cool prison will soon moderate his appetite and thin him down."
Added to this error was the unfortunate circumstance of an amour, the first outbreak of his passionate nature on emerging from boyhood, in which he was the successful rival of his superior officer, who thus became his enemy, and joined with the father to crush the young man's spirit. Mirabeau, in after years, always spoke with great bitterness of M. de Lambert's discipline. He escaped from it on this occasion, and took refuge in Paris with his father's intimate friend, the duke de Nivernois. His brother-in-law, husband of his sister, the marquis du Saillant, mediated between him and his father: he defended himself against accumulated accusations. His father speaks of his defence as a mass of falsehood and ingratitude: he meditated, or, rather, was instigated, to send him to the Dutch colonies in India, but milder thoughts prevailed;—he would not kill, but only tame, as with blows, the fiery-spirited boy; so he caused him to be imprisoned in the fortress of the Isle de Rhé; and the youth felt that all the world was his enemy, and the chief his harsh implacable parent. In his eloquent letter to the marquis, written some years after, in the prison of Vincennes, he alludes with bitterness to this period of his existence.
"I may say," he writes, "that from my earliest years, and on my first entrance into life, I enjoyed few marks of your kindness; that you treated me with rigour before I could have merited it; and yet that you might have soon perceived that my natural impetuosity was excited, instead of repressed, by such treatment; that it was as easy to soften as to irritate me; that I yielded to the former, and rebelled against the latter. I was not born to be a slave; and, in a word, that, while Lambert ruined, Vioménil would have preserved me. Allow me also to remind you, that, before you restored me to your favour, you confessed in one of your letters that you had been on the point of sending me to one of the Dutch colonies. This made a profound impression, and influenced prodigiously the rest of my life. What had I done at eighteen to merit a fate the thought of which makes me tremble even now?—I had loved."
In his prison, Mirabeau acquired the friendship of the governor, whose mediation only added to his father's irritation. He was, however, induced to liberate him, and permit him to join an expedition to Corsica. He was entered as sub-lieutenant of foot in the regiment of Lorraine. The same mixture of wild passion, unwearied study, and eager aspiration for distinction, marked this period. He wrote a history of Corsica; he fabricated an itinerary of the island, founded on his personal inquiries and perambulations; the manuscript, the voluminousness of which testified his industry, were deemed of such value by the Corsicans themselves, that they desired its publication; but it was destroyed by the marquis. In addition, he studied his profession—he felt a vocation for a military life—the aspect of danger calmed his fiery spirit, and he was ambitious of glory—he dedicated all his time to the study of tactics, and declares that there was no book in any language, living or dead, that treated of the art of war that he had not read at this period, making, as he went on, voluminous extracts. In after times he wrote to his sister—"I deceive myself greatly, or I was born for a military life; for in war alone I feel cool, calm, gay, and without impetuosity, and I am sensible that my character grows exalted."
On returning from Corsica, he was allowed to visit his uncle, the bailli, at Mirabeau, and soon acquired the favour of this unprejudiced man, who was astonished by his talents, his industry, and his genius. His heart warmed, and the praises that overflowed had some effect on his father, still distrustful, still fearful of showing favour. The first mark of kindness which he gave was to insist that his son should throw aside all his favourite pursuits, and dedicate himself to political and agricultural economy, studying them in the works which he had himself written. Mirabeau, per force, obeyed, and thus somewhat propitiated his parent, so that he consented to see him during a visit he paid to Provence. He put the young man to hard trials, and made him labour indefatigably, preaching to him the while, and forcing political economy down his throat. The marquis was averse to his following the military profession, and by turning him from it plunged him in adversity. The excessive activity of Mirabeau's mind, and his physical vigour, could be satisfied in no other career: his exuberance of spirits and unwearied strength rendered every other vocation tame and trivial; however, he laboured at various occupations devised for him by his father, and was rewarded, at the earnest solicitation of all the relations, by being restored to his name—he having for some years gone by that of Pierre Buffière. His father was so far won by his manifestations of talent as to permit him to visit Paris, and pay his court at Versailles:—"He behaves very well," the marquis writes; "his manners are respectful without servility—easy, but not familiar. 1771.
Ætat.
22. The courtiers look on him as half mad, but say that he is cleverer than any of them, which is not discreet on his part. I do not intend that he shall live there, nor follow, like others, the trade of robbing or cheating the king: he shall neither haunt the dirty paths of intrigue, nor slide on the ice of favour; but he must learn what is going on: and if I am asked why I, who never would frequent Versailles, allow him to go so young, I reply that 'he is made of other clay.' For the rest, as, for 500 years, Mirabeau, who were never like the rest of the world, have been tolerated, he also will be endured, and he will not alter the reputation of the race."
This gleam of paternal favour was soon clouded over. Mirabeau himself accuses those around his father of inspiring him with distrust; but there was something in the young man's character that jarred with the father's, and produced a perpetual state of irritation and dissatisfaction. The self-will, pedantry, economy, and self-sufficiency of the marquis were in perpetual contradiction with the genius, activity, recklessness, the winning frankness and plausible fascinations of his son. In vain the youth transacted some troublesome business for his father with diligence and success—in vain he entered into his agricultural projects—the father writes bitterly, "His infancy was monstrous, his adolescence turbulent, and both seem the worthy exordium of his life, which is now a mixture of indiscretion, misconduct, and garrulity; and at the same time so turbulent, so presumptuous, and so heedless, that the enterprise of saving him from the dangers which his years and his character present, is enough to fatigue and deter thirty Mentors, instead of one." At length, tired of the young man's society, and urged by those about him, he sent him (December, 1771) to Mirabeau, to endeavour to pacify and regulate the dissensions subsisting among the tenants of the marquis, which his usual agents were incapable of rectifying. The young man fulfilled his task with zeal and ability: he became known and liked in Provence, and his success inspired the idea of settling him in marriage—so to calm down his turbulence in domestic life: his father had before entertained this project, believing that a woman of good sense would exercise the happiest influence over his mind.
The young lady pointed out was an heiress. A number of men of higher pretensions than himself on the score of fortune aspired to her hand. This circumstance, and the avarice of his father, who acted with his usual parsimony, at first deterred Mirabeau; but, urged on by the marquis's sarcasms, he exerted himself to overcome all difficulties and succeeded, though the measures he took, which compromised the reputation of the young lady, were highly reprehensible, and naturally excited the disgust and disapprobation of his father. 1772.
Ætat.
23. Marie Emilie de Covet, only daughter of the marquis de Marignane, was then eighteen: she was a lively brunette, scarcely to be called pretty, but agreeable, witty, and superficially clever. Although an heiress, she enjoyed a very slender fortune during the life of her father; and the marquis, while he entailed the family estate on his son, allowed him scarcely any income, and advanced him nothing for the expences of his nuptials. This was the worst sort of marriage that Mirabeau could have made. Marrying in his own province a girl of good family, and surrounded by the éclat that attends an heiress, he was led to desire to make an appearance suitable to his name and his father's fortune. He incurred debts. Madame de Sévigné remarks that there is nothing so expensive as want of money. Debt always begets debt. Mirabeau was constitutionally careless with regard to expense. His father lent him the chateau of Mirabeau to live in: he found the ancestral residence as furnished by his progenitors; and, obliged to make some repairs, he went to the other extreme, and fitted up the apartments destined for his wife with splendour. False pride caused him to load her with presents, and to dress her richly, in spite of her remonstrances. At the same time he had projects for the improvement of the culture of the estate, the proceeds of which, he believed, would cover all his expenses. His father still pursued the degrading plan of employing hirelings as spies over him. These men, to cover their own peculations, represented that he was selling the furniture of the chateau and injuring the property. Every plan Mirabeau formed to pay his debts, as the best foundation of retrenchment, was opposed by his father. Feeling the storm about to break, and resolved to proceed no further on the road to ruin, he commenced a system of rigid economy; but his father, deaf to all explanations, excited by the representations of his servants, and exasperated in the highest degree, obtained a lettre de cachet, and used it to order his son to quit the chateau, and to confine himself in the little town of Manosque. This sort of confinement was ill calculated to appease the spirit of Mirabeau, who ought rather to have been thrown into an arduous career, so to fill and occupy his mind. At Manosque he was reduced to a scanty income of about 50l. a year, to support himself, his wife, and child; his only employment was study, to which he gave himself up with ardour, but it was not sufficient to tame and engross him. He wrote here his "Essay on Despotism," a work full of passion and vigour, into which he poured his own impatience of control. He left behind him no good reputation among the people of Manosque; and, if his wife afterwards refused to join him, she had the excuse that his behaviour as a husband was such as to disgust any young lady of feeling and delicacy. His own conduct did not, however, prevent him from being jealous himself, and this passion, awakened toward his wife, renewed, by the actions it occasioned, the persecutions of his father.
A girlish and innocent correspondence had been carried on by his wife before her marriage with the chevalier de Gassaud. This, and other circumstances, combined to excite jealousy in the mind of the husband; a duel became imminent; till, pacified by the representations of the young man's family, and consideration for the reputation of Madame de Mirabeau, he became willing to listen to an explanation. The previous scandal, however, threatened to break an advantageous marriage, on foot between the chevalier and the daughter of the marquis de Tourette. Mirabeau, resolving not to be generous by halves, left Manosque secretly, and repaired with all possible speed to the town of Grasse: he pleaded the cause of the chevalier with such earnest eloquence that the family dismissed their objections, and he hastened to return to his place of exile.