In 1685, one hundred and fifteen years after the purchase above mentioned, Honoré Riquetti, lineal descendant of the Marseilles merchant, obtained the title of Marquis de Mirabeau, and there was born to this marquis a son, Jean Antoine Riquetti, who achieved a worthy record as a soldier, but whose prominent place in history is due to the fact that he was the grandfather of the great Mirabeau.
Victor Riquetti, son of this second Marquis de Mirabeau and father of the great, the Count de Mirabeau, was in his early manhood an indifferent soldier, but he afterward became distinguished as a writer and leader in French politics. His wife (the mother of Count de Mirabeau) was Marie Geneviève, daughter of M. de Vassan, a brigadier in the French army, she being, also, the widow of the Marquis de Saulyebœuf. This union, entered into without a previous meeting between the principals to the contract, and at a time when the Marquis de Mirabeau was well started in his career as a politician, was not a happy one. The new husband was more loyal to politics than to his wife, so that, when their son, who was destined to achieve fame, was but thirteen years old, there was a separation between the parents by mutual consent.
Thus, in outline, is indicated the ancestry of Mirabeau through a period of nearly two centuries, and, meagre as the showing is, it is evident that he was the scion of a long line of wealth and nobility, his paternal ancestors having served with credit as soldiers, while his father was eminent as a politician. There is a second group of facts which bear interestingly upon the career under discussion. Mirabeau the great was born at a time when more than two-thirds of France was in the hands of privileged classes—the king, the nobility, and the clergy—and at a time, too, when the structure founded upon years of feudalism and absolutism was about to be shaken to its base by the magic of popular public opinion.
Under such conditions, at such a time, and from such stock, occurred the birth of Mirabeau the great; a coming into the world of a babe "scarce half made up;" a child with a head so large that it was a dire deformity, with one foot sadly twisted, and with a tongue that was tied; in brief, an infant ogre born with teeth. So great was the chagrin of the father that he made no effort to conceal his dislike for the misshapen child. Hence, when at three years of age the little one was left wretchedly pitted by a severe attack of small-pox, its fate was listed. It must not, could not, bear the name of Mirabeau.
Accordingly, when the youngster was fourteen years old—after several years of instruction under the private tutorship of Lachabeaussière, père—he was entered under the fictitious name of "Pierre Buffière," at a private military school in Paris. Here, strong of limb, body, and mind, industrious and aggressive, he remained for four years. Then his father placed him in the Berry regiment of cavalry, which regiment had been commanded, sixty-two years before, by his grandfather.
This event marked the end of a boyhood which had been clouded by an almost entire absence of paternal favor, and wholly free from maternal care—the mother's absence having been secured by the father, by a lettre de cachet. In addition, that boyhood had been irritated and embittered by a continuous and exasperating development of his natural personal disfigurement. His enormous head grew less in harmony with his torso, his lips and nose became thick and heavy, great moles revealed themselves upon his cheeks, and in every way, physically, his growth was a perpetual disappointment.
However, he was now (1767) the eighteen-year old "Pierre Buffière," a lieutenant of cavalry, conscious of his exceptional mental strength and somewhat vain thereof, and full of ambition and determination to win as he wished and in spite of all of his many obstacles. Unfortunately, but most naturally, considering his temperament, the first test of his will, his passion, and his determination, resulted in his victory. He won the affection of a young woman to whom his colonel had long been devoted, and the scandal resulting therefrom caused the father to obtain a lettre de cachet, by authority of which the indiscreet young man was placed in confinement in the Isle of Rhé. Immediately the prisoner began his first illustration of his ability to gain to his own purposes the ability and influence of others—one of his strongest and most useful characteristics. Within two months he had secured the esteem and confidence of his jailer, so that that official soon made a most favorable report, upon the strength of which Mirabeau was accepted as a volunteer to accompany the French expedition sent (in 1769) to conquer Corsica. So well did the young soldier conduct himself during this campaign, that he was not only promoted to a captaincy in the dragoons, but he effected a partial reconciliation with his father, returned to Provence, was permitted to assume his true name and title, and was presented at court. In June, 1772, he married, by his father's advice, Marie Émile de Covet, only daughter of the Marquis de Marignane. She came to him portionless, and he, impetuous, ambitious, and extravagant, became, during the next two years, deeply involved in debt. The marriage was a failure. Again the father utilized the lettre de cachet, and a second time was Mirabeau a prisoner (August 23, 1774), this time in the Château d'If, at Marseilles. Here it was that he wrote his first work of which we have any exact knowledge, its title being: "Essai sur le Despotisme."
In the following year he was transferred from the Château d'If to the Castle of Joux, where he was less strictly confined. He had the freedom of the place and frequent opportunities for visiting the near-by town of Pontarlier. It was in this town that he first met Marie Thérèse, the Marchioness de Monnier, the young and attractive wife of an aged magistrate. A love affair was the result, and it culminated in August, 1776, in an elopement, first to Switzerland and then to Amsterdam. For over nine months the fugitive pair lived together in the Dutch capital, Mirabeau, under the assumed name of St. Mathieu, earning a livelihood as a pamphleteer and by making translations for Holland publishers. Meanwhile the tribunal of Pontarlier had condemned both parties—Mirabeau to be beheaded and his companion (his "Sophie," as she is most widely known) to imprisonment for life. On May 14, 1777, they were arrested at Amsterdam, and Mirabeau was imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the Castle of Vincennes, while Sophie was surrendered to the Pontarlier authorities.
For three and a half years thereafter Mirabeau was in confinement, a term which proved sufficient to temper his passion, and during which he wrote his well-known "Letters to Sophie," the "Erotica Biblion," and "My Conversion." He also wrote, during this time, his first worthy political production, the "Lettres de Cachet." He was released from this imprisonment on December 13, 1780, and at once sought out Sophie, to quarrel with and leave her, and so, fortunately, end the most disgraceful portion of his life.
Mirabeau, now thirty-one years old, and, according to the times, most liberally experienced in the ways of the then turbulent world, undertook, as his first task, the removal of the sentence of death which still confronted him. Not only did he succeed in this, but, by his plausibility and eloquence, he shifted the entire cost of the proceedings to the shoulders of the complainant—the aged magistrate he had so grossly wronged. His next venture was an effort before the tribunal of Aix, to compel his wife to return to him. Here he failed, as also he failed in an effort to compromise a suit pending between his father and mother. Not only that, but by his pleadings his mother became forever alienated from him, and by reason of his bitter attacks upon the rulings of the court he was forced to leave Paris. Locating at Amsterdam, he began his lasting and respectable relations with Madame de Nehra, daughter of Zwier van Haren, a Dutch writer and politician. She was a woman of education and refinement, who exercised a valuable influence over his rapidly growing celebrity, bringing out his good qualities, subduing his undesirable characteristics, and encouraging all of his better ambitions. It was at her suggestion that he went to England, after a brief stay in Holland, while she repaired to Paris. His mission—which he accomplished—was to publish his "Considérations sur l'Ordre de Cincinnatus" and his "Doutes sur la Liberté de l'Escaut;" while her mission, also successful, was to establish peace between Mirabeau and the authorities at the French capital.