The ancestors of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of the quarrels of Marius and Sulla, of Cæsar and Pompey. We perceive the great men descending to trifling matters. Mirabeau inspired this domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle. I dwell on these details, which may seem foreign to this history, but they explain it. The source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the prophecy of destiny.
Mirabeau's education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father, who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honor, for by that name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanor which was too frequently only the show of probity and the elegance of vice. Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military habits except a love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father was constantly extended not to aid him in rising, but to depress him still lower under the consequences of his errors. His youth was passed in the prisons of the state, where his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments.
Released from jail, 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 theater of Aix. Not only cunning, seduction, and courage, but every resource of his nature was used 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 the passions of Mirabeau. 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 his cell an obscure man, he quitted it a writer, orator, statesman, but perverted—ripe for anything, even ready to sell himself, in order to buy fortune and celebrity. The drama of life had been conceived in his head; he wanted only the stage, and that was being prepared for him by time. During the few short years which elapsed between his leaving the keep of Vincennes and the tribune of the National Assembly, he employed himself with polemic labors which would have weighed down another man, but which only kept Mirabeau in health. Such topics as the bank of Saint Charles, the institutions of Holland, the books on Prussia, with Beaumarchais (his style and character), with lengthened pleadings on questions of warfare, the balance of European power, finance, leading to biting invectives and wars of words with the ministers of the hour, made scenes that resembled those in the Roman forum of the days of Clodius and Cicero. We discern the men of antiquity even in his most modern controversies. We may hear the first roarings or popular tumults which were so soon to burst forth, and which his voice was destined to control.
At the first election of Aix, when 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 toward heaven, and from this dust sprang Marius!—Marius, who was 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 Mirabeau filled it: he became the whole people. His gestures were commands; his movements coups d'etat. He placed himself on a level with the throne, and the nobility itself felt itself subdued by a power emanating from its own body. The clergy, and the people, with their desires to reconcile democracy with the church, lent him their 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 ruin. His character of tribune then ceased, that of the statesman began, and in this part he was even greater than in the other. There, when all else crept and crawled, he acted with firmness, advancing boldly. The Revolution in his brain was no longer a momentary idea—it became a settled plan. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, moderated by the prudence of policy, flowed easily from his lips. His eloquence, imperative as the law, was now a talent for giving force to reason. His language lighted and inspired everything; and tho almost alone at this moment, he had the courage to remain alone. He braved envy, hatred, murmurs, supported as he was by a strong feeling of his superiority. He dismissed with disdain the passions which had hitherto beset him. He would no longer serve them when his cause no longer needed them. He spoke to men now only in the name of his genius, a title which was enough to cause obedience to him....
The characteristic of his genius, so well defined, so ill understood, was less audacity than justness. Beneath the grandeur of his expression was always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot of the tribune, he was a man devoid of shame or virtue: in the tribune, he was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish expenditures, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of being the great man of an age, Mirabeau was wanting only in honesty. The people were not his devotees, but his instruments. His faith was in posterity. His conscience existed only in his thought. The fanaticism of his ideas was quite human. The chilling materialism of his age had crusht in his heart all expansive force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were: "Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the brand of immortality. If he had believed, in God, he might have died a martyr.