the French, save to make additionally insupportable a character which, even on the smallest scale, is, of all others, the most odious and repulsive. The stern unity and perfection of order in which he was enabled to present political power – that necessary evil of human existence – but added intensity to the hate, as it added grandeur to the idea of his despotism. In the eyes of his suffering subjects it brought him face to face with the catastrophes no less than with the glories of his reign, and without the merit of the avowal —adsum qui feci! gave him all its dread responsibilities. An old despot surviving his greatness while retaining the stinging irony of its title – a saint amid the standing reminiscences of his adulteries, expiating his pleasures by annihilating those of others, and tormenting consciences to save his own – his suffering and downcast people became at length disabused but too utterly of the base apotheosis of his person and character, so long maintained by him in the name of a false glory and debased religion. They even publicly rejoiced at a death-bed made pitiable by the absence of his mistress, confessor, and family; and meeting in mobs that, encountering his corpse on its way through by-lanes to hugger-mugger interment at St. Denis, they might tear it into shreds, gave early and portentous evidence that the germ of an envenomed and bloody democracy had been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to complete the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his throne, surrounded by a dissolute clergy, an overbearing aristocracy, and a discontented and impoverished people, the robed Louis the Sixteenth seemed but the calf of atonement of the Scriptures decked for sacrifice, and doomed to expiate a century of court gayeties and crimes in which he had had no part!
Mirabeau began the revolution with a thousand vague hopes and expectations, and the conviction, communicated to his friend Mauvillon, that "it was not given to human sagacity to devise where all this would end." A living conflict of passions and principles, of low needs and high ambitions, of lofty genius and infamous repute, a demagogue by policy, an aristocrat by vanity, a constitutionalist by conviction, his public conduct anxiously and perpetually brought in evidence one or other of these conflicting agencies; but beyond the personal aim of recovering his rank, and winning some sort of greatness at any price, he was without one pervading or dominant public purpose, save that of extinguishing the despotism that had injured him. Above all policies, abstractedly considered, this was the one dear to his heart. "I come here to grant, not to ask pardon," was his reply, in a voice of angry defiance, to some oratorical assurance that a life of usefulness might secure the pardon of his earlier delinquencies. A horrid, but too natural vindictiveness had interwoven the hate of arbitrary power into every fibre of his brain. It was a passion or sentiment that he never abandoned: it may be even doubted if he could have been purchased out of it. Despite all the evils and mischances of life, there stood erect in his soul this one small altar to virtue, or something that resembled it, which he would have thrown down but under the direst necessity.
But of all the circumstances glanced at as furnishing the key to many of the paradoxes of his public conduct, one of the most important, though perhaps the least appreciated, is the dishonor of his repute. It is difficult, with his present position in history, especially when taken in relation to the now well-certified worthlessness of his contemporaries, to realize to the imagination the full extent of his infamy. "You dare," said his former friend Rulhiere, in a pamphlet that had a wide circulation, "You dare to speak of a country, Count Mirabeau! If your brow were not trebly bronzed, how must you have blushed at its very name! Have you one quality of father, friend, brother, husband, or relative? An honorable vocation? Any one attribute that constitutes the citizen? Not one! You are without a refuge, without a relative. I seek your most ordinary domiciles, and I find them but in the prison of Vincennes, the Chateau d'If, the fortress of Ioux, the jail of Pontarlier!"8
Dumont, coming over to Paris, was so moved by the discredit attached, in respectable circles, to his acquaintance, that he visited him with repugnance and as a duty, but records the characteristic incident, that on his first call he was so won by the magic of his host's conversation, as to depart resolved on retaining, at all hazards, so agreeable a friendship. The mention of his name, with the sight of his person, at the opening of the States General, elicited groans and hisses on all sides. The Tiers-Etat– whom he had honored by his aristocratic adoption – were unanimous in refusing him a hearing the two or three occasions on which he first sought to address them. The queen, whose life, family, and regal heritage were at stake, received the assurance, that such a person was willing to assist the views of the court, with "the contempt due to vice;"9 and "assassin!" "robber!" "slanderer!" were the epithets almost daily applied to him in the senate of the nation! Society, expiring under the weight of its own vices, saw in him that well-defined excess that entitled it to the merits of purgation in his extruism, of atonement in his martyrdom, and to place the hand of menace and malediction on his head, as the scape-goat of its redemption!
Thus detested by all parties, his low character keeping him low, Mirabeau, with all his marvelous power, found himself placed, by public contempt, more even than by private need, at the mercy of circumstances. Befoulment had so far eaten into his name, that, with occasionally the best of desires, and always the greatest of energies, there stood a blight over both. He felt that a moral leprosy incrusted him, which repelled the good, and kept aloof the prudent. The contemned inferior, in moral standing, of those that surrounded him, it was difficult to be honest, and impossible to be independent. By a sort of law of nature, too, his tarred repute attracted to it every floating feather of suspicion, no less than of guilt, as to its natural seat; and thus it happened that the lofty genius of Mirabeau, under the "grand hests" of a hateful necessity, like the "too delicate spirit," Ariel, tasked to the "strong biddings" of the "foul witch Sycorax," was condemned for a while to pander rather than teach, to follow rather than lead, to please rather than patronize, and to halloo others' opinions rather than vindicate his own!
No man could appreciate the misfortune more fully or sensitively than himself. Dumont tells us that, taught by events that a good character would have placed France at his feet, "he would have passed seven times through the fiery furnace to purify his name;" and that, "weeping and sobbing, he was accustomed to exclaim, 'Cruelly do I expiate the errors of my youth!'" And, indeed, the more sensible his heart, the more rich and elevated his soul, the more must his torments have been bitter and redoubled; for the very preciousness of the gifts of nature, the charms of society, even the friendship of those that surrounded him, must have turned but to the increase of his wretchedness!
It is easy to understand, then, that the tactics of Mirabeau, in the first days of the revolution, were those of a man outside "a swelling scene,"
"A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold,"
which he could only occupy by rudely breaking through a thousand circumvallations of usage, propriety, and public opinion. As it was the boast of Luther, that he, an obscure monk, stood alone for some time against respectable Europe, so Mirabeau, on the eve of his public greatness, was the most isolated politician of his age. "Mean men, in their rising," says Lord Bacon, "most adhere; but great men, that have strength in themselves, were better to maintain themselves indifferent and neutral." Instinctively feeling that this was the policy of his position, when repelled by both sides, he haughtily repelled them in return, and the more he was despised the more inevitable did he make the establishment of his importance. As, without a party, he became one himself, so without a plan he took that of events, and without a policy was content with that of display. In these early days, indeed, his whole plan, system, and policy was to make his individualism tell, to demonstrate, to all parties, what he was worth in journalism as a writer, in the Assembly as an orator, in every thing as a statesman. As he had nothing but himself, it became his business to make the most of the commodity, which, so valueless in the beginning, ended in outworthing all that was opposed to it.
But if this policy of display,
He had also been confined in two prisons, in the Ile de Rue, and the Castle of Dijon.
Madame Campan's Memoirs.
