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Updated: August 2, 2024
Four times daily the king had sent to inquire after Mirabeau's welfare, and when at noon, on the 2d of April, Count de la Marck brought the tidings of his death, the king turned pale. "Disaster is hovering over us," he said, sadly, "Death too arrays himself on the side of our enemies!" Marie Antoinette was also very deeply moved by the tidings. "He wanted to save us, and therefore must die!
I do not, however, presume to decide in a case so very delicate; their panegyrists in England may adjust the claims of Mirabeau's integrity, and that of his accusers, at their leisure. Another patriot of "distinguished note," and more peculiarly interesting to our countrymen, because he has laboured much for their conversion, is Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun.
Compared with Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de Monnier, they are cold and chaste. Froude says that the King wanted a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after Anne's execution. The character of Henry VIII. is only important now as it bears upon the policy of his reign.
He translated, besides these Memoirs of Baron Trenck, Mirabeau's Secret History of the Court of Berlin, Les Veillees du Chateau of Madame de Genlis, and the posthumous works of Frederick II., King of Prussia, in thirteen volumes. The Memoirs of Baron Trenck were first published at Berlin as his Merkwurdige Lebensbeschreibung, in three volumes octavo, in 1786 and 1787.
Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue heavens. Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly in the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard.
Mirabeau's ambition to be Prime Minister, how shall we blame it, if he were "the only man in France that could have done any good there"? Hopefuler perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he could do!
This was not from modesty, but from resignation founded on reason, which had demonstrated the immediate inutility of his gifts, the impossibility of entering and living in the sphere for which he was fitted. Those eyes could at times flash lightnings. From those lips a voice of thunder must surely proceed; it was a mouth like Mirabeau's.
First came the Memoirs of Mallet du Pan, a liberal, independent, and discerning observer, whom, apart from the gift of style, Taine compares to Burke, and who, like Burke, went over to the other side. This was followed by Mirabeau's Secret Correspondence with the Court. His prevarication and double-dealing as a popular leader in the pay of the king had long been known.
It would seem as though we read in the verses of this young man that through his tears he contemplated his faults, his expiation, and his scaffold. After Mirabeau's election, and the agitations which followed, Barbaroux was named secretary of the municipality of Marseilles. At the troubles of Aries he took arms, and marched at the head of the young Marseillais against the rulers of the Comtal.
Mirabeau's life was, as we have seen, a pupilage, as it is now to become a mastership, in revolution.
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