On being released frqm his first imprisonment, the young count, who had always intended to continue his military career, obtained leave to accompany as a volunteer the French expedition which was to effect the reduction of Corsica. The conquest was one of sheer numerical strength, for the whole population was on the side of Paoli, and Mirabeau, perceiving the value of public opinion, is said to have written a treatise on the oppression the Genoese had formerly exercised over the island, which the Government was ready to publish had not the Marquis de Mirabeau thought fit to destroy it because of its divergence from his own philosophical and economical views. For his services in Corsica Mirabeau was made a captain of dragoons, though not in any particular regiment, and on his return his father endeavoured to make use of the literary ability he had shown for the advancement of his own economical theories. He tried to keep on good terms with his father, though he could not advocate all his ideas, and even went so far in 1772 as to marry a rich heiress, a daughter of the Marquis de Marignane, whose alliance his father had procured for him. He did not live happily with her, and in 1774 was ordered into semi-exile in the country, at his father’s request, where he wrote his earliest extant work, the Essai sur le Despotisme. His violent disposition now led him to quarrel with a country gentleman who had insulted his sister, and his semi-exile was changed by lettre de cachet into imprisonment in the Chateau d’lf. In 1775 he was removed to the castle of Joux, to which, however, he was not very closely confined, having full leave to visit in the town of Pontarlier. Here he met Marie Thérèse de Monnier, his Sophie as he called her, a married woman, for whom he conceived a violent passion. Of his behaviour nothing too strong can be said: he was introduced into the house as a friend, and betrayed his trust by inducing Madame de Monnier to fall in love with him, and all his excuses about overwhelming passion only make his conduct more despicable. The affair ended by his escaping to Switzerland, where Sophie joined him; they then went to Holland, where he lived by hack-work for the booksellers; meanwhile Mirabeau had been condemned to death at Pontarlier for rapt et vol, of which he was certainly not guilty, as Sophie had followed him of her own accord, and in May 1777 he was seized by the French police, and imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the castle of Vincennes. There he remained three years and a half, and with his release ends the first and most disgraceful period of his life. During his imprisonment he seems to have learnt to control his passions from their very exhaustion, for the early part of his confinement is marked by the indecent letters to Sophie (first published in 1793), and the obscene Erotica Biblion and Ma Conversion, while to the later months belongs his first political work of any value, the Lettres de Cachet. The Essai sur le Despotisme was an ordinary but at times eloquent declamation, showing in its illustrations a wide miscellaneous knowledge of history, but the Lettres de Cachet exhibits a more accurate knowledge of French constitutional history skilfully applied to an attempt to show that an existing actual grievance was not only philosophically unjust but constitutionally illegal. It shows, though still in rather a diffuse and declamatory form, that application of wide historical knowledge, keen philosophical perception, and genuine eloquence to a practical purpose which was the great characteristic of Mirabeau, both as a political thinker and as a statesman.

With his release from Vincennes begins the second period of Mirabeau’s life. He found that his Sophie was an idealized version of a rather common and ill-educated woman, and she speedily consoled herself with the affection of a young officer, after whose death she committed suicide. Mirabeau first set to work to get the sentence of death still hanging over him reversed, and by his eloquence not only succeeded but got Μ. de Monnier condemned in the costs of the whole law proceedings. From Pontarlier he went to Aix, where he claimed the court’s order that his wife should return to him. She naturally objected, but his eloquence would have won his case, even against Portalis, the leader of the Aix bar, had he not in his excitement accused his wife of infidelity, on which the court pronounced a decree of separation. He then with his usual impetuosity intervened in the suit pending between his father and mother before the parlement of Paris, and so violently attacked the ruling powers that he had to leave France and again go to Holland, and try to live by literary work. About this time began his connexion with Madame de Nehra, which sweetened the ensuing years of toil and brought out the better points of his character. She was the daughter of Zwier van Haren, a Dutch statesman and political writer, and was a woman of a far higher type than Sophie, more educated, more refined, and more capable of appreciating Mirabeau’s good points and helping him to control his passions. With her the lion became a lamb, and his life was strengthened by the love of his petite horde, Madame de Nehra, her baby son, afterwards Lucas de Montigny, and his little dog Chico. After a period of work in Holland he betook himself to England, where his treatise on Lettres de Cachet had been much admired, and where he was soon admitted into the best Whig literary and political society of London, through his old schoolfellow Gilbert Elliot, who had now inherited his father’s baronetcy and estates, and become a leading Whig member of parliament. Sir Gilbert introduced him freely, but of all his English friends none seem to have been so intimate with him as Lord Lansdowne, and Mr (afterwards Sir Samuel) Romilly. The latter became particularly attached to him, and really understood his character; and it is strange that his remarks upon Mirabeau in the fragment of autobiography which he left, and Mirabeau’s letters to him, should have been neglected by French writers. Romilly was introduced to Mirabeau by D’lvernois, and readily undertook to translate the Considerations on the Order of Cincinnatus. Romilly writes thus of him in his autobiography :—

“The count was difficult enough to please; he was sufficiently impressed with the beauties of the original. He went over every part of the translation with me, observed on every passage in which justice was not done to the thought or the force of the expression lost, and made many useful criticisms. During this occupation we had occasion to see one another often, and became very intimate; and, as he had read much, had seen a great deal of the world, was acquainted with all the most distinguished persons who at that time adorned either the royal court or the republic of letters in France, had a great knowledge of French and Italian literature, and possessed very good taste, his conversation was extremely interesting and not a little instructive. I had such frequent opportunities of seeing him at this time, and afterwards at a much more important period of his life, that I think his character was well known to me. I doubt whether it has been so well known to the world, and I am convinced that great injustice has been done him. This, indeed, is not surprising, when one considers that, from the first moment of his entering upon the career of an author, he had been altogether indifferent how numerous or how powerful might be the enemies he should provoke. His vanity was certainly excessive; but I have no doubt that, in his public conduct as well as in his writings, he was desirous of doing good, that his ambition was of the noblest kind, and that he proposed to himself the noblest ends. He was, however, like many of his countrymen, who were active in the calamitous Revolution which afterwards took place, not sufficiently scrupulous about the means by which those ends were to be accomplished. He indeed to some degree professed this; and more than once I have heard him say that there were occasions upon which ‘ la petite morale était ennemie de la grande. ’ It is not surprising that with such maxims as these in his mouth, unguarded in his expressions, and careless of his reputation, he should have afforded room for the circulation of many stories to his disadvantage. Violent, impetuous, conscious of the superiority of his talents, and the declared enemy and denouncer of every species of tyranny and oppression, he could not fail to shock the prejudices, to oppose the interests, to excite the jealousy, and to wound the pride of many descriptions of persons. A mode of refuting his works, open to the basest and vilest of mankind, was to represent him as a monster of vice and profligacy. A scandal once set on foot is strengthened and propagated by many, who have no malice against the object of it. They delight to talk of what is extraordinary; and what more extraordinary than a person so admirable for his talents and so contemptible for his conduct, professing in his writings principles so excellent and in all the offices of public and private life putting in practice those which are so detestable? I indeed possessed demonstrative evidence of the falsehood of some of the anecdotes which by men of high character were related to his prejudice.”— Life of Sir S. Romilly, vol. i. p. 58.

This luminous judgment, the best that is extant on the character of Mirabeau, deserved to be quoted at length; it must be noted that it was written by a man of acknowledged purity of life, who admired Mirabeau in early life, not when he was a statesman, but when he was only a struggling literary man. This close association with Romilly, and his friends Baynes, Trail, and Wilson, does credit to Mirabeau, and must have helped that moral revolution against his passions which was passing within him. He was a warm friend, and first made Romilly acquainted with Lord Lansdowne, and tried to get him a seat in parliament. Lord Lansdowne was himself an extraordinary man, and the first of the new Whigs might well feel sympathy with the statesman of the French Revolution. The Considérations sur Vordre de Cincinnatus which Romilly translated was the only important work Mirabeau wrote in the year 1785, and it is a good specimen of his method. He had read a pamphlet published in America attacking the proposed order, which was to form a bond of association between the officers who had fought in the American War of Independence against England; the arguments struck him as true and valuable, so he rearranged them in his own fashion, and rewrote them in his own oratorical style. He soon found such work not sufficiently remunerative to keep his “petite horde” in comfort, and then turned his thoughts to employment from the French foreign office either in writing or in diplomacy. He first sent Madame de Nehra to Paris to make his peace with the authorities, in which she was completely successful, and then returned himself, hoping to get employment through an old literary collaborateur of his, Durival, who was at this time director of the finances of the department of foreign affairs. One of the functions of this official was to subsidize political pamphleteers, and Mirabeau had hoped to be so employed, but he ruined his chances by a series of financial works. On his return to Paris he had bècome acquainted with Clavières, a Genevese exile, who was minister of finance during the Revolution, and who now introduced him to a banker named Panchaud. From them he heard plenty of abuse of stock-jobbing, and seizing their ideas he began to regard stock-jobbing, or agiotage, as the source of all evil, and to attack in his usual vehement style the Banque de St Charles and the Compagnie des Eaux. This was at least disinterested on his part, for, while his supporters were poor, the bankers he attacked were rich, and would gladly have bought his silence; but Mirabeau, though ever ready to take money for what he wrote, never sold his opinions, or wrote what he did not really believe. The very eloquence of his style rests upon the enthusiastic conviction that he himself was right, and those who differed from him were stupidly and wilfully wrong. This last pamphlet brought him into a controversy with Beaumarchais, who certainly did not get the best of it, but it lost him any chance of literary employment from Government. However, his ability was too great to be neglected by a great minister such as Μ. do Vergennes undoubtedly was, and after a preliminary tour in the early spring of 1786 he was despatched in Juno 1786 on a secret mission to the court of Prussia, from which he returned in January 1787, and of which he gavo a full account in his Histoire Secrète de la Cour de Berlin.

The months he spent at Berlin were important ones in the history of Prussia, for in them Frederick the Great died. The letters just mentioned show clearly what Mirabeau did and what he saw, and equally clearly how unfit he was to be a diplomatist; for, with all his knowledge of men and his influence over them, he thought (and showed he thought) too much of himself ever to be able to surprise their secret thoughts and intentions. He certainly failed to conciliate the new king Frederick William; and thus ended Mirabeau’s one attempt at diplomacy. During his journey he had made the acquaintance of a Major Mauvillon, whom he found possessed of a great number of facts and statistics with regard to Prussia; these he made use of in a great work on Prussia published in 1788, as Romilly says, to show that he could write more than a fugitive pamphlet. But, though his Monarchie Prussienne gave him a general reputation for historical learning, he had in this same year lost a chance of political employment. He had offered himself as a candidate for the office of secretary to the Assembly of Notables which the king had just convened, and to bring his name before the public published another financial work, the Dénonciation de ΓAgiotage, dedicated to the king and notables, which abounded in such violent diatribes that he not only lost his election, but was obliged to retire to Tongres; and he further injured his prospects by publishing the reports he had sent in during his secret mission at Berlin. But 1789 was at hand; the states-general was summoned; Mirabeau’s period of probation was over, and he was at last to have that opportunity of showing his great qualities both as statesman and orator on a worthy arena.

On hearing of the king’s determination to summon the states-general, Mirabeau started for Provence, and offered to assist at the preliminary conference of the noblesse of his district. They rejected him; he appealed to the tiers état, and was returned both for Aix and for Marseilles. He elected to sit for the former city, and was present at the opening of the states-general on May 4, 1789. From this time the record of Mirabeau’s life forms the best history of the first two years of the Constituent Assembly, for at every important crisis his voice is to be heard, though his advice was not always followed. It is impossible here to detail minutely the history of these two eventful years; it will be rather advisable to try and analyse the manner in which Mirabeau regarded passing events, and then show how his policy justifies our analysis.

Mirabeau possessed at the same time great logical acuteness and most passionate enthusiasm; he was therefore both a statesman and an orator, and the interest of the last two years of his life lies mainly in the gradual but decided victory of the statesmanlike and practical over the impulsive and oratorical qualities. From the beginning Mirabeau recognized that government exists in order that the bulk of the population may pursue their daily work in peace and quiet, and that for a Government to be successful it must be strong. In this practical view of the need of a strong executive lies one of Mirabeau’s greatest titles to the name of statesman. At the same time he thoroughly comprehended that for a Government to be strong it must be in harmony with the wishes of the majority of the people, and that the political system of Louis XIV. was now falling for lack of this. He had carefully studied the English constitution in England under...