"Now that I remember, he told me something else, that in the present state of my health a bath, with as little delay as possible, was indispensable. Perhaps he did not mention that to you?"
"I fancy he did say something about it."
"Oh, he did! But the King and the Government have not debated it yet, I suppose? Well, sir, I want a bath and I'm going to have one."
"You have no right to give orders here, sir."
"Nor have you the right to withhold what the doctor prescribes for me."
"M. de Mirabeau, you are insolent. Do you forget that I represent the King?"
"He could not be more grotesquely represented. The distance between you and his Majesty is short, sir."
The governor (to make the joke more apparent) was short and of a full habit. He went out speechless, and Mirabeau would doubtless have felt the effects of his rage had it not been for the interest of Lenoir, Lieutenant-General of Police, who was always ready to stand between the prisoner and the vengeful gaoler. Through Lenoir, who won for him the intercession of the Princesse de Lamballe, Mirabeau got the use of books and pen, and some other small indulgences. He wrote to his father: "Will you not ease me of my chains? Let me have friends to see me; let me have leave to walk. Let me exchange the dungeon for the château. There as here I should be under the King's hand, and close enough to the prison, if I should abuse that measure of liberty." The implacable Friend of Man vouchsafed no response to this entreaty. The prisoner buried himself in the books that were given him, but they were for the most part "de mauvais auteurs," who had nothing to teach him. He flung them from him one by one, and as he paced his cell he began those brilliant improvisations which were soon to electrify France, and which struck absolutism at its root. In this way he worked out the scheme of the lettres de cachet, that work of flaming eloquence in which the genius of liberty approaches, seizes, and strangles the dragon of despotism. Deprived of all but his pen, Mirabeau let fall from the height of his dungeon on the head of royalty that thunderbolt of a treatise. Since De Rougemont would never, for a hundred chiefs of police, have aided him with materials for this purpose, he tore out of all the books he could lay hands on the fly-leaves and blank spaces, and covered them with his fine close writing. Each completed slip he concealed in the lining of his coat, and in this manner did the tribune compose and preserve his work, every page of which was a prophecy of the coming Revolution. When inspiration lacked for a time, he prostrated himself on the flags of his cell and wept for his absent mistress, or he renewed hostilities with De Rougemont. The battle of the trunk was followed by the battle of the looking-glass.
He could not go through his toilet without a looking-glass, he insisted; and in a letter to the governor which must have filled several manuscript pages he exhausted his logic and his sarcasm in enforcing this modest request. He got his mirror in the end, and then renewed his fruitless correspondence with his father, and made an eloquent attempt to move the clemency of the King. "Deign, sire, to save me from my persecutors," he wrote to Louis. "Look with pity on a man twenty-eight years of age, who, buried in full life, sees and feels the slow approach of brutish inertia, despair, and madness, darkening and paralysing the noblest of his years." M. Lenoir himself placed this letter in the King's hands, but nothing came of it for Mirabeau, who continued in the pauses of astonishing literary labours his fight for liberty from behind his prison bars. By clamours and entreaties he succeeded at length in forcing his way through them.