Читать книгу Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. - Various - Страница 7

The moral is evolved out of the physical, and the extraordinary in animal structure has a kinship to the portentous in human action.

Mirabeau, the infamous, born in an age, of a family, in a rank the most vicious in the annals of vice, of parents whose depravity had contaminated even their blood, was ushered with infinite difficulty into the breathing scene he was so much to trouble, and offered, at the outset of his disorderly career, misfortune and singularity in a twisted fool, a tied tongue, and two molar teeth.

Maltreated by fortune, which, at the age of three, turned him by disease into the ugliest of children – "a tiger marked by the small-pox" – caressed and neglected by his dissolute mother, disowned and persecuted as a spurious graft in his house and home by the celebrated "Economist," his father – his very childhood presaged the disorders of his youth and manhood; and his father, mysteriously reverting to early crimes and calamities as the blight of his life, made it matter of complaint that Honoré Gabriel, as a boy, had more cleverness "than all the devils in h – l," and seemed destined from his childhood "to disturb the monarchy, as a second Cardinal de Retz."

He was indeed born a Revolutionist; and if he had not found the elements of a bouleversement, was competent to have created them. But just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and Thyestes, the child was trained into demoralization, vicissitude, and daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and an absconding wife, bragging of her love for her husband." The Vicomte, his brother, "would have been a roué and a wit," he tells us, "in any family but his own," and was, of a dissolute noblesse, its most dissolute member. His mother, driven with contumely from her home and the bosom of her family, under accusations the most revolting a wife may hear from one who is her husband and a father, addressed the world in public recriminations for her persecutor, not less disgusting or condemnatory. The son himself, the most infamous man of his time, completes the picture in the boast he made to the National Assembly, that among the tragic woes of his family he had been the witness of fifty-four lettres-de-cachet, seventeen of them on his own account!

As in Eastern climates the abundance of degenerate man will, at some spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself in one family, produced the man who was to begin the catastrophe.

At seventeen, leaving a military academy, he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek, but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a fair share of the scattered erudition won by readings more desultory than diligent.

Presented at court, admitted to the rare aristocratic privilege of riding in the king's carriages at Versailles, laughed at as the Princess Elizabeth's living specimen of inoculation, the incipient courtier and embryo revolutionist was awakened from his delightful vision to find himself suddenly transferred from his regal residence and gayeties, to the sombre solitude of a country jail. He had been guilty of a passionate attachment to a young lady of disproportionate expectations.

The young victim of parental wrong, thus severely taught that the splendors of a court were but a veneer under which lay the terrible springs of a wayward tyranny, killed time in brooding over the ideas and studies which subsequently formed his "Essai" no less than his character – "sur le despotisme." But before completing the work, the father's monomania had been temporarily mitigated by the vengeance of a year's imprisonment; and the son, instead of being sent to Surinam, the Dutch Sierra Leone of that day, was graciously permitted, under the bourgeois name of "Buffiere," to enter as a gentleman volunteer the French army that was about to crush the Corsicans in their noble struggle against Genoese oppression.

In this liberticidal war, the liberty-loving Mirabeau performed his first manly act, won his first public distinction, and initiated that series of paradox, and moral revolutionism, that was hence to follow him as lover, litterateur, and politician, to the grave. As his sword was against Corsica and freedom, his pen was for them. He wrote over the ruins of both a boyish philippic, admired by his victims, and burnt by his father!

And while the brain that was to rule France as a tribune-king, was thus evolving its idle progeny, the womb of a Corsican woman near him was travailing with him who was to be Napoleon! At the instant France, by the sword of her future liberator, was mowing down the new-born liberties of Corsica – Corsica was breathing the breath of life into a child, whose sword was to cleave down the fresh-won freedom of France! As a Cæsar and a Marius sprung from the blood of the Gracchi, there would have been no Corsican exterminator for France, had there been no French exterminators for Corsica.7 There are surely times when fate plays with mortals, making of the murder of a generation or the revolution of an empire a nursery game of coincidences!

Of the twenty years that followed, bringing Mirabeau to the footsteps of the revolution, and within two years of his death, it was the odd fate of this gay and gifted noble, guilty of no offense against the state, nor in a legal sense against society, to pass more than the moiety of his time in the sad rôle of a state prisoner; and the main incidents in the unhappy sequence of wrong and suffering, the inevitable but unrecognized logic of Providence, were briefly, and in succession, a profitless marriage with the most distinguished heiress of his province, carried off from twenty more eligible rivals by the superior strategy of seduction and defamation, pecuniary extravagance, dissipation, debts, sequestration of property, marital separation, successive imprisonments by paternal intervention, deadly hate with the father, permanent alienation from his adulterous wife and only child, licentious connection with a friend's wife, with whom he abandoned his country, exile in Switzerland, Holland, and England, successive litigations self-conducted, a ministerial spyship in Prussia, and a career more or less stormy, as a litterateur, in France.

Entombed in one of the horrid dungeons of Vincennes, solitary, hopeless, almost without a sympathy, though in the very spring-tide of his rich youth and activity, the angel of consolation, never far from us in our darkest hour, came down, and in the genial guise of literature, visited in his dungeon this man of infamies and suffering. It must, however, be confessed against him that, maddened by the severity of a despotism without appeal, in the wrong – and from that hand, too, whence he might fairly have hoped a kinder gift, even the wholesomeness of books became poisoned under his diseased digestion, and it became his wretched pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination.

But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those extensive studies of history and its philosophy to which we owe, among much else that is great in literature or in event, the three works on "Despotism," "State Prisons," and "Lettres-de-Cachet."

To our present purpose it would be of little use to indulge in any lengthened analysis or literary estimate of these performances. Gratifying his need of money, his love of fame, and, above all, a vengeance warmly nursed, which even virtue can not censure, their publication formed, probably, the happiest incidents of his life. The first published in his twenty-fifth year, bears all the characteristics of the young man of genius, roughened, no less than strengthened by the asperities of the experience out of whose ireful plenitude he writes. Rough and disorderly in arrangement, it is lofty, striking, eloquent in style – cogent, daring, powerful in matter.

The last, the result of his long, final imprisonment, and published in his thirty-first year, possesses similar attributes, aggrandized, or improved. A great work, involving an inquiry into the first principles of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great, sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general rule, work, rather than literature, in his sentences, and the just, the practical, the statesman-like are the dominating qualities. We must not look for the artist in Mirabeau as a writer: he is above that: nor, whatever the range of thought we may justly concede him, may we, therefore, expect the sublime; he is below that. With the eloquence of an impassioned imagination, united to the unornamented vigor of a ready, versatile, and comprehensive reason, he reminds one of some colossal engine in forceful, though not always in graceful action.

In Holland, occupied in literature and the society of literary men, and subsequently in England, in commerce with Franklin, Dr. Price, Samuel Romilly, and Wilkes – among whom be it said, en passant, he acquired the reputation of an habitual liar – a thousand circumstances must have presented themselves, not more in his own studies than in the freedom, seriousness, and activity he saw around him, to prepare and stimulate his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of popular action for France, in which he is to play a leading part – a faith so early ripened that, in 1782, meeting at Neufchatel certain State Deputies of Geneva, he based on the inevitable meeting of the States General the prediction, or rather the promise, that he would become a deputy, and in that character restore their country to freedom.

Returning to Paris at a moment when the increasing and unmanageable deficit brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance, while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence, willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of the great question of the times.

His ministerial spyship in Prussia, which, subsequently divulged by his own audacious publication of his secret correspondence, won from M. de Montesquieu the remark, that "the infamy of the person might be estimated by the infamy of the thing," was not without its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him – I could wish to say honestly – those historic and statistical data which, published in his elaborate work on the Prussian monarchy, countenanced some serious claims to statesmanship.

Misfortune, passion, solitude, suffering, travel, extraordinary adventures, extensive readings, varied studies, innumerable writings thus admirably endowing his mind, so disposed, too, by nature, for the daring and stormy struggles of the revolution, the only resource that could surely be wanting to so enormous a compound of intellectual strength, I mean the power of oratory, he was fated to acquire in his lengthened trials for the recovery of his wife and legal rights.

Opposed by Alps of difficulties, the moral greater than the legal, for the suits ploughed deeply into all the crimes or errors that had dishonored his career, and would necessarily turn up masses of documentary evidence, which on no less authority than that of his father, must carry the tale of his infamy to every eye; yet his audacity dared, as his genius surmounted, every disadvantage, and after fixing the admiration of a province – to him a sufficient compensation – by the ingenuity, the power, and the extraordinary resources of his eloquence in a path so new to him, he succeeded in re-establishing his civil rights, and but failed in the second, and, perhaps, less important suit, by the accident of a technicality.

Passing by his double election as Deputy, at Aix and Marseilles, marked by excitement, insurrection and all the stirring incidents that, in a moment of great public agitation, might be expected to accompany the début of a daring and accomplished demagogue, we are now brought to the greatest epoch of France, and, therefore, of Mirabeau – the meeting of the States General; and the observation is naturally suggested that, if this extraordinary succession of circumstances, marvelous as incidents, but still more marvelous as coincidents, had not specially moulded the man for his work, it might well be doubted that the French revolution could have happened, or at all events, in such gigantic proportions. Mirabeau's life was, as we have seen, a pupilage, as it is now to become a mastership, in revolution. His Saturn of a father had trained him, from his youth upward, into the executionership of his order; and Heaven itself, as if seconding some such inscrutable design, seems to have stooped to lead by the hand this servant of Nemesis, through paths the most devious and unfrequented, but, of all others, the most fitted to form and conduct him to the emergency.

A change, it is true of some kind in French Government, accompanied by more or less confusion and bloodshed, had been long inevitable. Genius, good sense, suffering, luxury, oppression, contumely, unprincipledness, and folly, each boon of nature, each wrong of man, had concurred, after more than a century of struggle, in necessitating a consummation.

In my opinion, the popular horrors that darkened the end of the eighteenth century, though pointed in their way by the finger of Mirabeau, legitimately trace their pedigree to the royal grandeurs that closed the preceding one. The French Revolution was born of Louis the Fourteenth. His policy – his achievements – his failures, and, still more, his personal character and court deportment, killed monarchy in the hearts of the French people. The prominent ruling characteristic of himself and reign was an all-absorbing egotism. A maelstrom of selfishness, and unconscious of any law of reciprocity to arise from his relations to a common humanity, this chief and example of a numerous aristocracy was the grand centre to which was to be directed every affection and service, from which was to be circulated every volition and ordinance. And need I say that no eminence of intellectual power – no prudence of personal deportment – no brilliancy of external achievement, can or ought to have any effect on spectators so keen-witted and impressionable as 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,"

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, no less than his education, sympathies, and hates, bore him to the opposition, there were in his pecuniary wants, and his ambitious dreams of a statesmanship, à la Richelieu, circumstances that at times resistlessly brought him within the influence of court power. Uncertain how far he could overpower the disadvantages of his personal position, wounded that the movement party were little inclined to value his co-operation, and still less to accept his leadership, he early felt, or feigned alarm at the fermentation in the public mind, and its possible evolution in great national calamities; and before one act of legislation was accomplished, or he had had a month's experience of the fanatical impracticability of one side, I use his own words, and the intolerant spirit of resistance on the other, he personally proposed to his enemy, Necker, and through him to the queen, "the only man," he said, "connected with the court," to concur, at the price of an embassadorship to Constantinople, in supporting the court system of policy.

He appears to have fancied for some days that his proposals were accepted; but before he could enter on any of the Eastern arrangements his active mind had already suggested, he learned that the overture was rejected "with a contempt which," as Madame Campan sagaciously admits, "the court would doubtless have concealed, if they could have foreseen the future." Contenting himself with the angry menace, "They shall soon hear some of my news," within a month he became the author of successive defeats, the most insulting a monarch could receive from his parliament, and which were fated to exercise an active influence in the overturn of that royalty he was afterward to defend.

The king, anxious to arrange the differences which kept the three orders aloof from each other, and from legislation, had sent to the Tiers-Etat a message, wise in its suggestions, and conciliatory in its tone. Under the eloquence of Mirabeau, the house passed to the order of the day.

Irritated by insult, and complaining that the antagonism of the three orders prevented any progress in the public business for which they were convened, the king summoned a general meeting of all the deputies, and after an address, in which he expressed his royal pleasure that the three orders should form separate chambers, he commanded the assembly to disperse, that they might meet under the ordinances his prerogative had prescribed. The clergy, the nobles obey; the commons remain uncertain, hesitating, and almost in consternation. The royal command is again communicated to them, with the intimation, that having heard the king's intentions they had now only to obey. The crisis of the royal prerogative, obedience, hung but on the turn of a feather: the repulsed Mirabeau arose, and turned it against the king. "We have," said he, in a voice of thunder, "we have heard the intentions attributed to the king; and you, sir, who have no place, nor voice, nor right of speech here, are not competent to remind us of them. Go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people, and that we are not to be expelled but by the power of bayonets!"

Cheered and supported by the now reassured Tiers-Etat, he next, in imitation of the English parliament, carried, that the persons of the deputies were inviolate, that any one infringing that right should be pursued as an enemy of the country, and that the payment of taxes, till further legislation, should be obligatory only during the existence of the legislative corps.

Added to the bold title of "National Assembly," newly adopted, these votes were the assumption of a kingship by the Tiers-Etat; and as public opinion enthusiastically backed the innovation, the divided peers and ecclesiastics were compelled at length to join, and be submerged in the mass of popular deputies.

A civil war could alone stand between royal power and its destruction. For some weeks the court prepared for even such an eventuality. "Ministers play high stakes," writes Mirabeau, on the 5th of July; "they are compromising the king, for in menacing Paris and the Assembly they are menacing France. All reaction is equal to action: the more the pressure now, the more terrible do I foresee will be the reaction. Paris will not suffer itself to be muzzled by a bevy of nobles thrown into despair by their own stupidity; but they shall pay the penalty of the attempt… The storm must soon break out. It is arranged that I ask the withdrawal of the troops; but be you ready (at Paris) to help the step!"

The demand was evaded by the king; the soldiery were largely increased and concentrated; the arrests of the more revolutionary deputies, including, of course, Mirabeau, were decided on; Necker was summarily dismissed: but on the other side able and active emissaries roused Paris by statements the most exciting, and taking all characters, with the costumes of either sex, caressed, fêted, and partially won over the soldiery, and before the court could take one step toward its purposes, Paris was in full insurrection, the troops corrupted or overpowered, the Bastile taken, and under the plea of anarchical excuse, the whole bourgeoisie of Paris placed in a few hours under arms as National Guards.

The king, taught that it was not revolt but revolution, preferred, as every body foresaw, submission to civil war, recalled Necker, and visited triumphant Paris, at once the hostage and conquest of a popular triumph.

Mirabeau, more or less connected with the Orleanists, had speculated with them on the chances of confusion; for to him it was a small thing, provided he had bread, that it was baked in an oven warmed with the conflagration of an empire. Looking forward with complacency to every contingency of revolutionary crises, assured that a common danger, flinging aside, as unimportant, questions of personal character, would make power the prey of genius and audacity, he was correspondingly annoyed by a re-arrangement that promised for a time a well-grounded tranquillity.

The destruction of the Bastile securing that of "The Syllas of thought," he now transformed into a full political newspaper, his weekly "Letter to his Constituents," under which title he had evaded, from the first assembly of the States-General, the censorship on the press. Aware, from a knowledge of Wilkes and his history, of the power of journalism to a politician, and above all, to a demagogue in a free country, he was, in the full sense of the term, the first newspaper editor of France, and owed to the vigorous use of this novel agency, not only useful additions to his pecuniary resources, but a great portion of that popular idolatry that followed him to the grave.

The court which, in calling together the States, had no higher aim than to regenerate the finances of the country, and, as one step, to obtain the help of the people in stripping a numerous aristocracy of their baneful exemption from state-burdens, had already found out its own share in the peril of the experiment, and now sought, by a close alliance with the noblesse, to avert the ruin that too evidently menaced both. But the torrent had but accumulated at each irresistible concession, and every day's work added to the democratic elements of a constitution that had already made royalty a cipher, and annihilated, as political institutions, the church and aristocracy.

Of course new schemes of regal antagonism again raised their heads, and again a popular manifestation, bringing Paris into the very boudoir of the queen, at Versailles, demonstrated the impuissance of all that took the name of French royalism. The October insurrection was fomented by Mirabeau and his Orleanist friends, for the same purpose as that of July, to secure personal safety, and obtain a new scene of action, by terrifying the court into exile, or the acceptance of Orleans' protection. Had the duke been raised to the "lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom," Mirabeau counted on a premiership, in which he purposed to become the Chatham or Pitt of France. Had Louis the Sixteenth fled the kingdom after the example of the Comte D'Artois, he purposed to proclaim a republic, and become its "first consul;" and should the doom be that France should be divided by civil war, and cut up into its old kingdoms, he speculated on a sovereignty in his ancestral country, Provence, which had already greeted him with so encouraging an enthusiasm.

Strangeness of event! While the monarchy, so short-lived, still survived the insatiate Mirabeau, two of the extraordinary contingencies he speculated on have already happened, to the profit of other actors, and the existing republic, in its mutinous armies, intolerant factions, and insane dynasties, offers no very improbable portent that, even after half a century of a centralized and well-fixed nationality, the old repartition of kingdoms may again present itself!

The great consummation of the confusion, however, failed for the overmuch of means. "A bottle of brandy was given," said the orator, "instead of a glass!" and the mob's capricious impromptu of carrying the king back with them to Paris, still more than the cowardice of the Duke of Orleans, defeated this deep-laid Machiavelian combination.

Whatever the character, however, of the people's success, it could not but be an additional success for their leader. The revolution, of which he stood recognized the unquestioned head, was now beyond all danger of royal aggression, except by his own treacherous agency. In a campaign of unimaginable brevity, he had not only vindicated the first place as an orator in a senate now omnipotent, and become out of it the most potent demagogue of his time, but as un homme d'état, surrounded by a brilliant staff of the most active spirits and practical thinkers of the day, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Volney, Champfort, Lamourette, Cabanis, Reybaz, Dumont, Duroverai, Claviere, Servan, De Caseaux, Panchaud, Pellenc, Brissot, and others, was understood by every party to hold the future destinies of France in his hand Emerging from two insurrections, possessing, by his power, all their profits, and by his adroitness, none of their responsibility, he found it now worth his while to break terms with the Duke of Orleans, by a public expression of his contempt for him as a scoundrel not worth the trouble that might be taken for him; and excluded from the ministry, that lay open to him, by a self-denying ordonnance of the Assembly, directly leveled at his pretensions, he accepted a large subsidy from the king's brother – the Comte de Provence – and formed with him, for the restoration or upholding a monarchical authority, a mysterious and ineffective conspiracy, the character and extent of which may be conjectured from its involving the assassination of the Marquess de Lafayette.

The hate of Mirabeau for this worthy but feeble nobleman – his diligent colleague in the struggle for liberty – was as intense as, at first sight, it seems incredible. He was his Mordecai at the king's gate, for whom he could neither sleep nor eat. Remembering that Mirabeau's passion for complicated intrigue and daring adventure, even in politics, was extravagant to disease, it seems possible that, as he advanced in his rapid greatness, he secretly nursed projects or hopes as incompatible with a constitutional monarchy, and an organized public force, in respectable hands, as with the despotism with which he had originally battled; and that, in his successive conspiracies, now with the Republicans and Orleanists, now with the Count de Provence and the queen, he had no fixed intention of ultimately benefiting those he professed to serve, but proposed to use them as ladders to that exalted position of a Sylla or a Cæsar, which, as Bonaparte subsequently proved, was no more, perhaps, beyond his grasp than his ambition; influenced by the insidious suggestions and doubts he carefully spread abroad, the queen, as he saw with pleasure, looked on the new commander of the National Guards as a "Grandison-Cromwell" (Mirabeau's damaging epithet), whose concealed ambition aimed at the constableship of France, as a step to that dread of French sovereigns, the "Mayorship of the Palace;" and hence the court systematically declined the aids it might so often have derived from the honesty, the popularity, and sometimes the good sense of the American volunteer. At all events, we know that the assassination of Lafayette – twice it seems plotted – would have left the National Guards in the hands of some less popular and more pliant chief; and that, when the general specifically accused his rival of the horrid project, naming time, place, and means, he won no better defense than the reply, "You were sure of it, and I am alive! How good of you! And you aspire to play a leading part in a revolution!" The compact with the Comte de Provence was of short duration: the queen began to distrust the personal views of her brother-in-law, who threatened to become the Duke D'Orleans of a philosophical party, and Mirabeau, to whom popularity was the only capital, probably found that he could not afford the sacrifices his employers demanded.

To preserve the status quo, and wait events, became now, for some weeks or months, as much his policy as his accessibility to passion and sudden influences would permit. He seemed to feel that he should give time to the molten lava of his volcanic greatness to settle, harden, and assume its individualism among things received. Holding aloof, therefore, from indentification with either party – leaning now on one side, now on the other; his speeches more with the movement, his policy more with the court; forcing both parties into explanations, while keeping himself, however, disengaged – he constituted himself their arbitrator and moderator, overawing both extremes; and while maintaining his pre-eminence of political influence, held himself ready to take advantage, at the least cost of consistency, of any fundamental change in the position of affairs.

In the month of May or June, however, a private interview with the queen, in the Royal Garden of St. Cloud, followed by others, to the renewed scandal of her fame, laid the foundation of a new compact with the court, and a more decided policy. The chivalry of Mirabeau revived under the enthusiasm won by "Earth's loveliest vision" – a queen in distress and a suppliant – and he pledged himself, as the Hungarians to her royal mother, to die in the service of saving her throne. But the highest endeavors of Mirabeau have always at their base, like the monuments of his country, the filthy and the repulsive; and the chivalry of this new saviour of the monarchy received sustentation in a bribe – higgled for through months – of twenty thousand pounds, and a pension of more than that per annum.

About the end of the year, three or four months before his death, he opened systematically his great campaign for what professedly was the restoration of regal authority. He was to out-Herod in patriotism the Herods of the Jacobin club: the court was to dare every thing short of civil war – perhaps even that; and the existing confusion, whatever it might be, was to be cured by another of greater extent, artificially induced by the charlatanism of art political. His scheme, in some points, it must be allowed, successfully imitated in our own days in Prussia, was:

First – To reorganize the party of Order in the Assembly; and while, as far as possible, winning for it the sympathy of the country, to excite, by all available agencies, distrust and discontent with the opposing majority.

Secondly – To inundate the provinces with publications against the Assembly; and by commissioners, sent nominally for other purposes, to obtain remonstrances from the departments against its further continuance.

Thirdly – At a proper opportunity, to dissolve the Assembly, and order fresh elections; at the same time canceling the constitution as illegal, and granting another by royal charter, formed on a popular basis, and on the written instructions which (on a system unknown to England) had originally been drawn up for each deputy by his electors.

I shall not descend to discuss the oft-mooted point, how far the wholesale venality that based the project is justified or palliated by the object it is supposed to have had in view, because I know that with Mirabeau money was not a means to his defense of constitutional monarchy, but his defense of constitutional monarchy a means to money. If we except his relentless hate to French despotism in any hands not his own, the principles, moral or political, of this leader of a nation had no other tenure but the interest of his personal aggrandizement.

On another debate, whether with a longer life he could have carried his counter-revolution to success, I will only remark, that, conceding that in robust health he would have had it at heart as sincerely as in the recorded hours of his sickness and despondency, it may be admitted, that a struggle which, under every imprudence, seemed long to hang in doubt, with the aid of his energetic and masterly polity might, perhaps, have poised for royalty. But it is not to be concealed that the difficulty of arresting and unmaking were even greater than those of creating and consolidating the revolution. The king's aversion to decisive measures, and well-known horror of civil war, made him the worst of colleagues for the only policy his tool could wield with effect; and the great demagogue himself, when obliged to discard the mask of democratic hypocrisy that still partly hid the subtle and venal traitor of his party, would have lost, like Strafford, many of the elements of his potency; and despoiled, especially, of the miraculous resources of his eloquence, must have contented himself with that lucid, common-sense, consecutive daring, and power of strategic combination, which his new friends were so ill-fitted to support.

Fortunately, perhaps, for his future fame, he died ere the structure his arts had undermined tested his powers of reparation, and before that wonderful magic of popularity which had so long survived, as it had, indeed, so long anticipated, his deserts, had time to vanish under the cock-crow of truth. His death was as well-timed as his political advent, and has been praised by French wit as the best evidence of his tact; for the expectations which the unparalleled rapidity, no less than the innate marvelousness of his achievements had raised, no future activity and fortune, scarcely those of a Napoleon, could have realized.

But if the retrospect of his career must convince us that one man in so short a period never accomplished so much before, against such disadvantages, so also must we admit that probably never before did any one rest so wholly for his amazing achievements on the sole power of intrinsic genius. It was intellect that did all with Mirabeau; and made his head, according to his own boast, a power among European states. It united almost every possible capacity and attainment. His rare and penetrating powers of observation were sustained by the equal depth and justness of his discrimination, and the rapidity and accuracy of his judgment. Uniting, to his admirable natural capacity, an activity and habitual power of application, more marvelous almost in their extent than even in their rare combination, he possessed an understanding full, beyond precedent, both of the recorded knowledge of books, and of that priceless experience of men and things, without which all else is naught; and as the complement of these amazing and unparalleled advantages, he had the still rarer advantage of a felicity and power of diction every way worthy of so incomparable a genius.

Looking with contempt at the stiff, ornamental, and childishly antithetical style of his day and nation, he welded the flimsy elements of the French language into instruments of strength akin to his own conceptions, and wrought out of them a style for himself in which a Demosthenic simplicity and severity of language is sustained by an earnest and straightforward power which vivifies and amplifies all that it touches. Startled by an innovation far beyond the conceptions of the French academy, the writer was smiled at and neglected by the critics; and it was not till they heard him launching from the tribune the thunders of justice, disposing at pleasure of the inclinations of the multitude, and subjugating even the captious by the imperious power of his eloquence, that they began to discover that there was a "power of life"10 in his rude and singular language; that "things, commonplace, in his hand became of electric power;"11 and that, standing "like a giant among pigmies,"12 his style, albeit "savage,"13 dominated the assembly, stupefying, and thundering down all opposition.

It is the affliction of history, that, while raising her monuments to gigantic genius, she is compelled so often to record an immorality of parallel proportions. It is right that the infamy of Mirabeau should be as eternal as his greatness. He was a man who, in his political, as in his private life, had no sense of right for its own sake, and from whom conscience never won a sacrifice. With great and glorious aims at times, he never had a disinterested one. His ambition, vanity, or passions, were his only standard of conduct – a standard, be it added, which, despite the wonderful justness of his judgments, the depravity of a sunken nature kept always below even his needs. Policy with him was often but a campaign of vengeance or market of venality, and the glorious exercises of literature but a relaxation of indecency or business of wrong. In the study, in the tribune, or in the council-chamber, glory was the only element that remained to counterpoise, often with a feather's weight, the smallest influence of gold or spleen; and in the most critical epoch of an empire, the poising of his tremendous influence – the influence of so much earnestness and magical power – was the accident of an accident. We admit for him, in palliation, the demoralizing influence of terrific example, and of maddening oppression; but where is the worth of a morality that, in a man of heroic mould, will not stand assay? and what is virtue but a name, if she may be betrayed whenever she demands an effort?

But however much a moral wreck was the heart of Mirabeau, nature, true to the harmony, no less than the magnificence, of her great creations, had essentially formed it of noble and gentle elements. Touched to the core by the contaminating influence of "time and tide," its instincts were yet to the kindly, the generous, and elevated; and those about him who knew him best – attached to him more by his affections than his glory – eagerly attested that in the bosom of this depraved citizen resided most of the qualities which, under happier agencies, would have made him a dutiful son, a devoted husband, an attached friend, and truly noble character!

In fine, with an eye to see at a glance, a mind to devise, a tongue to persuade, a hand to execute, this great man was circumspect in recklessness, poised and vigorous in violence, cool and calculating to a minutia in audacity and passion. As a friend, affectionate and volatile – as an enemy, fierce and placable – as a politician, patriotic and venal. Proud of his patricianship, whose status and manners he has lost, he is humble about a statesmanship that makes the first of his glories. The best of writers, his works are written for him; the greatest of orators, his speeches are made for him! Has he the most unerring of judgments? He prefers another's! Is he a popular tribune? He is also a royalist parasite! Is he earnest? He is then insincere! Does he evidence great principles? He seeks bribes! Does he enforce moderation? He awaits vengeance! Does he cause confusion? He is seeking order! Would he save the nation? He is selling its liberties! Wonderful man! great with enormous weaknesses, bad with many excellencies, immortal by the expedients of an hour, his genius is a combination of almost impossible perfections, as his political life the colossal result of a thousand contradictions. United, they yield a deathless character, whose Titanic proportions shall, age after age, be huger, as the mighty shadows that cover it shall grow darker!

[From Hogg's Instructor.]