CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY.

THE deputies quitted Versailles, and held their first sitting on the 19th of October, in one of the large rooms of the Archbishop's palace. On the 9th of November, they removed to the ridinghouse near the Tuileries. The remainder of the year 1789 witnessed the successive decrees which despoiled the clergy, destroyed the old magistracy, and created the assignats, the resolution of the commune of Paris to appoint the First Committee of Inquiry, and the order of the judges for the prosecution of the Marquis de Favras.

The Constituent Assembly, notwithstanding all that may have been said against it, nevertheless must continue to be regarded as the most illustrious popular assembly which ever appeared among nations, both on account of the magnitude of its designs, and the vast importance of their results. There was no great political question which was not brought under its consideration, and suitably resolved. What would have been the case, if it had confined itself to the resolution of the States-General, and had not gone beyond! All that experience and human knowledge had conceived, discovered, and elaborated for three centuries, are to be found in the minutes of its proceedings. The various abuses of the old monarchy are there pointed out, and their remedies proposed; all the principles of liberty are asserted, -even the freedom of the press; all the necessary ameliorations are demanded for industry-manufactures, trade, highways, the army, taxation, finance, colleges, public education, &c. We have traversed without advantage the abysses of crime, and the heights of glory; the Republic and the Empire have promoted no advance; the Empire has only wielded the brute force of the arms which the Republic set in motion; it has left us the principle of centralisation, a species of vigorous administration which I regard as an evil, but which alone, perhaps, was sufficient to replace local administrations when they were destroyed, and anarchy and ignorance everywhere ruled supreme. Since the time of the Constituent Assembly, we have not advanced a single step; its labours are like those of the great physician of antiquity, which at once marked out and fixed the limits of science. We will now refer to some of the members of that assembly, and first of all fix our attention on Mirabeau, who may be regarded as the preeminent illustration of them all.

Paris, Nov., 1821.

MIRABEAU.

By the irregularities and accidents of his life, Mirabeau was mixed up with the greatest events, and brought into contact with convicts, ravishers and adventurers; Mirabeau, the tribune of the aristocracy, the representative of the democracy, combined in his character Gracchus and Don Juan, Cataline and Guzman d'Alfarache, Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal de Retz, the roué of the regency and the terrorist of the Revolution; moreover, Mirabeau possessed the character of his family, Florentine exiles who retained their armed palaces, and were conspicuous as specimens of those leaders of faction celebrated by Dante; his ancestors were naturalised in France, where the republican spirit of the Italians of the middle ages, and the feudal spirit of the middle ages in France, were found united in a succession of extraordinary men.

The ugliness of Mirabeau, engrafted upon the element of beauty peculiar to his race, produced a species of striking figure such as those in the "Last Judgment" of Michael Angelo, the fellow-countryman of the Arrighetti. The deep furrows left by the small-pox on the orator's face were like scars left by fire. Nature seemed to have moulded his head either for dominion or the gallows, fashioned his arms either to hold down a nation or to carry off a woman; when he shook his locks and looked at the people, he subdued them to his will; when he raised his fist and showed them his nails, the multitude became furious. In the midst of the most frightful disorders of a sitting, I have seen him at the tribune, dark, ugly, and motionless; he recalled to mind Milton's chaos, impassible and without form, in the centre of confusion.

Mirabeau resembled his father and his uncle, who, like St. Simon, wrote immortal pages in honour of the devil. These furnished him with speeches for the tribune; he took from them whatever his mind could amalgamate with his own substance. Whenever he adopted them as a whole he delivered them boldly; it was obvious they were not his own from occasional words which were mixed up with them, and which revealed himself. His energy was the offspring of his vices; and these vices were not the children of a frigid temperament, but of passions deep, burning, and tempestuous. Cynicism of manners, by the annihilation of the

moral sense, introduces a kind of barbarism into society. These barbarians of society are men fitted to destroy like the Goths, but destitute of their power of reconstruction; the latter were enormous children of a virgin nature; the former monstrous abortions of a depraved one.

I have twice met Mirabeau at a banquet, once at the Marquise de Vilette's, Voltaire's niece, and a second time at the Palais Royale, with the Deputies of the Opposition, to whom I was introduced by Chapelier Chapelier was drawn to the scaffold in the same wagon with my brother and M. de Malesherbes.

Mirabeau talked a great deal, and especially a great deal about himself. This son of lions, and himself a lion with the head of the Chimera-this man so positive in his facts, was all romance, all enthusiasm, in imagination and language: in him might be seen the lover of Sophie, exalted in his sentiments, and capable of sacrifices.

"I have found her," said he, "that adorable woman.... I knew her soul—a soul formed by the hands of nature in a moment of magnificence."

Mirabeau enchanted me with his tales of love, with his recollections of that retreat where he passed his time in dry discussions. He interested me still more by his accounts of another passage in his life like myself, he had been harshly treated by his father, who, like mine, had preserved the inflexible traditions of absolute paternal authority.

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The great guest spoke profusely on foreign politics, but said almost nothing of home affairs, which, nevertheless, completely occupied his mind. Occasional expressions escaped him, which showed his sovereign contempt for men who made pretensions to superiority, by the indifference which they affected towards evils and crimes.

Mirabeau was by nature generous, sensible to friendship, and ready to pardon offences. Notwithstanding his immorality, he was unable to repress the workings of his conscience; it was only dead for himself; his upright and firm mind never regarded murder as a sublimity of intelligence; he felt no admiration whatever for the slaughter-houses and lay-stalls.

Mirabeau, however, was not deficient in pride; he boasted enormously; and though he became a draper in order to be elected by the tiers état (the nobility having had the honourable folly to reject him), he was very proud of his birth; his father called him a wild bird, whose nest was among four turrets.

He

never forgot that he had appeared at court, ridden in one of the king's carriages, and accompanied him to the hunt. He required to be addressed by the title of count; he stuck to his colours, and loaded his servants with livery when every one else gave it up. In season and out of season he always quoted his relation, the Admiral de Coligny. The Moniteur having called him Riquet"Do you know, said he, with warmth to the journalist, "that with your Riquet you have confounded Europe for three days ?"

He was accustomed to repeat the following impudent and wellknown pleasantry :

"In another family my brother the viscount would be the man of genius and the vagabond; in my family he is the fool and the good man.'

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Biographers attribute this saying to the viscount, when comparing himself with humility to the other members of his family.

In the main, Mirabeau's feelings were monarchical, as may be seen from the following beautiful expressions :-"I was anxious to cure the French of the superstition of monarchy, and to replace it by its worship." In a letter intended to be brought under the notice of Louis XVI., he wrote;-"I had no desire to have laboured merely for a vast destruction." That, however, was what took place; Heaven, in order to punish us for our unemployed talents, has sent us repentance for our success.

Mirabeau moved opinions by two levers; on the one hand, he made the masses his fulcrum, of whom, whilst despising them, he had constituted himself the defender; on the other, although a traitor to his order, he retained its sympathy by other affinities of caste and common interests. This never could have happened to a plebeian who might have become the champion of the privileged classes such an one would have been abandoned by his own party without gaining the aristocracy, which is, in its very nature, ungrateful, and inaccessible to all not born within its ranks. The aristocracy, moreover, cannot improvise a noble, because nobility is the daughter of time.

Mirabeau founded a school. By freeing themselves from the bonds of morality, the men of this school imagined that they became statesmen. These imitations have never produced any thing better than perverse dwarfs; he who flatters himself at being corrupt and a robber, is merely a debauché and a knave; he who believes himself virtuous, is only vile; he who boasts of being criminal, is only infamous.

Too soon for himself and too late for it, Mirabeau sold himself to the court, and the court bought him. He staked his reputation against a pension and an embassy: Cromwell was on the brink of bartering his future fame for a title and the order of the garter. In spite of his haughtiness, Mirabeau did not value himself high enough. Now that abundance of money and places has raised the price of consciences, there is not a political tumbler who does not cost hundreds of thousands of francs and the highest honours of the state. The tomb released Mirabeau from his promises, and sheltered him from dangers which probably he would not have been able to overcome: his life showed his weakness for good; his death has left him in possession of his power for evil.

Going away from dinner, there arose some discussion about Mirabeau's enemies; I was by his side, and had not spoken a word. He looked in my face with his eyes of pride, genius, and vice, and placing his hand upon my shoulder, said, "They will never pardon me for my superiority." I still feel the impression of that hand, as if Satan had touched me with his claw of fire.

When Mirabeau fixed his eye on the young mute, had he a presentiment of my future productions? Did he think that he would one day be summoned back to my recollection? I was destined to become the historian of high personages; they have filed before me, without my having attached myself to their cloaks, so as to be drawn along with them to posterity.

Mirabeau has already undergone that metamorphosis which takes place amongst those whose memories must live. Carried from the Pantheon to the common sewer, and from the sewer back to the Pantheon, he has been elevated to the very pinnacle of the time which now serves as his pedestal. The real Mirabeau is no longer to be seen; but Mirabeau idealised, such as artists draw him, in order to render him the symbol or myth of the period which he represents; in this way he becomes both more true and more false. Out of so many reputations, actors, events, and ruins, only three men remain, one belonging to each of the three great revolutionary periods-Mirabeau to the aristocracy, Robespierre to the democracy, and Bonaparte to despotism. Monarchy has none. France has paid dear for these three reputations, which virtue cannot acknowledge.