| Show 1 REVOLUTIONS GIANT John Clark Kidpaths Estimate j of Mirabeau HE WAS GREATEST OF THEM ALL A Glance at His Character and the Disastrous Consequences of His Death in the Assembly I REATEST of them all was Mica beaul We of this I age should have 4c ii GREATEST that VLilt 4 first Saturday of 4 May 1789 a he T marched with the 6 delegates to the Hall of the Menus lk Versailles It Versaies Itis l the day of the assembling sembling of the states general to z begin the regeneration regener-ation of France and if of France then the world Among those 600 depu ties of the Third Estate no such other was there as Gabriel Honord Riquetti do Mirabeau Ho was delegate from rtij wuutu uis jreviuus me nan been notorious and uniquea strange mb tare of crime and generosity and aspiration as-piration From his childhood he had been more likeone of the personsof an old Greek tragedy than like a living man of the Eighteenth century Even as a boy his passions were a thunder and lightning roaring and striking in the forest He was perhaps the most uncontrolled and uncon rollable being of his age Neither with his own family nor with the people of his proven al town could he get on in any kind of peace He was always in rebellion and I struggle and conflict The grandfather of Mirabeau was nicknamed nick-named Old Silverstock Ho too had been ben a fighter of great fame In one battle at the bridge of Canine he stood and fought until he was gashed with twentyseveu saber wounds Then falling in his place with a camp kettle placed over his head by one of his men he lay there while the cavalry cav-alry of Prince Eugene galloped back and forth over himlay there not to die but to get up and b the father of men among the rest of this Gabriel Riquetti Mirabeau was born at Bignon close to Nemours on the 9th of March 1719 He I was forty years and two months old when the states general convened He was bat Wl bat tered and scarred scred already by almost every kind of violence and excess Ho had been excoriated with the smallpox disfigured thereby till ho became an object of loathing even t his father a man not unlike himself him-self in temper The father was the Marquis Mar-quis Victor do Mirabeau and he fain would have brought his son up t greatness great-ness But the latter was a surly Carlyle hits expressed it the roughest lions whelp ever lttered of tht 1nnh 11 It is in vain says he oh marquis This cub though thou flay him or slay him will not learn to draw in the dogcart of political economyl I All the early life of this le man was a scene of disorder and misery What should he do length but marry Mile de Marag nane a rich heiress of Aix And what then but rush ahead in spite of his own resources and hers and get into debt to the extent of 800000 livres like a madman mad-man The old marquis his father said he was mad and swore to it and procured against him a writ of lunacy and had him shut up as a sort of stay against his debts Hereupon the enraged Gabriel left Aix and settled at Manosque until Manosquc on unti account ac-count of a quarrel he was imprisoned in the castle of I That oh reader i l sig nificant name that If As though a man should b jailed in a hypothesis I If you can keep him there I If he does not getaway get-away and become a deputy t the states rpnfr + + h 1 L u c r u unu IUI nownl But between this and that lie many episodes epi-sodes The passions of Mirabeau drove him as the cyclone drives the leaf At length in Franche Comte he made the lengh Fanche acquaintance ac-quaintance of the beautiful wife of the president of the Parliament of Bean n Her name was Sophie do Ruffey Marchioness ess of Monier With her he fell in love aqd she with him and ad when the affair was out they fled to Holland Cause was had against him He was tried convicted condemned and was beheaded that is by proxy This is to say that the wise and vindictive court had an effigy made of Gabriel and that was beheaded but not he which would have been a more serious matter A the revolution came on the event seemed t open to Mirabeau for he was now returned to his native citya field exactly ex-actly suited for his stormy activities He would fain be a delegate t the states general gener-al Of course he was now the Comte de Mira beau a nobleman by birth and natural rep I resentative of the aristocracy but the lris rep tocracy of Provence would have none of him The nobles of the south spewed him out But that does not signify for we will wi be elected anyhow We will become one of the Commons one of the Third Estate Etnte But in order to do this we must be engaged in some industrial pursuit Therefore we hire an old warehouse and put up over the door this inscription Mirabeau the Woolen Wool-en Draper So we are an artisan and when the election is held we are the candi date of the Third Estate for A and are l r elected greatly to the Joy of the populace I Thus at the states general was this extraor dinary character pitted against the aristocracy aris-tocracy and the king Already in the ars procession pro-cession he was pointed out a the coming leader l The snarling old father had said of him that he was nothing but reflex and echo composed of two clattering jawbones and a vacant head Here however we find fnd it greatly different From the first day he was leader or the grit assembly He only had in him the daring and the native kingship king-ship necessary t overawe and command such a body of men As he took his seat on the front bench reserved for the Third E I tate he glanced at the king who sat in his crown jewels under the canopy at the other I end of the hall and said to those about I him Behold the victim already adorned In the gallery on the opposite side above next to the wife of Montmorin the minister minis-ter of foreign affairs satGermaine Necker afterward known t the world as Mme de Staul She caught a glance of Mirabeau pointed him out t the ministers wife and almost shouted with delight at the sight of such a fierce visaged tiger among the Commons Com-mons Mme Montmorin responded You must not rejoice for not only France shall suffer for this but e ourselves Prophetic Pro-phetic words they were too for Mme de Montmorin fell with one of her sons under the guillotine Another son was drowned Her husband was killed in the September massacre Her eldest daughter died in jail and the youngest of a broken heart I Asfor Mme doStael she shall indeed rejoice re-joice for a season but after that Twenty years of exile On the 31st of last January it was a hundred years since Mirabeau became president of the national assembly Al reaay ne nan oecome the King or men like Agamemnon Already France was in the throes of that mighty revolution by which all things have been transformed and made anew Already from the crater of the volcano vast masses of cinders and lava were pouring forth floods of molten bitumen clouds of sulphurous smoke and all the scoria of the Middle Ages In the midst of the universal confusion and down rushing of things it had become strangely apparent that Mirabeau was the one man who might still control the tempest By his birth and antecedents he was al lied with the aristocracy At the beginning begin-ning ho was very far from being a radical revolutonist a it respected the monarchy Perhaps to the day of his death he was not convinced that the monarchy must go or that even the king must go His attitude atti-tude of hostility and implacable battle with the ruling powers of France had been the result of the disparagement to which I he had been subjected by his own order r the nobility But meanwhile broader democratic I dem-ocratic principles had taken possession of I his mind He had become sympathetic sym-pathetic with the Third Estate and was ready to declare with the most pronounced radical that the French nation consisted of the Third Estate without the nobility or the clergy In this complexity of forces putting back one party with one hand and the other with the other he went forward like lke Samson pulling up the very gateposts of power and becoming the autocrat of the assembly and the people of France The court trembled before him The clergy were obsequious Marie Antoinette from hating and deriding him had sought an intervipv nnrl WA < nnili + 1 nn nuu Y + u u b iUC tion of making him minister of state The commons looked to him with confidence and applause His name echoed around Europe When tities were abolished ho still would retain his He would be called Mirabeau and not the Citizen Riquetti I the assembly he said one day with in finite sarcasm You have now for three days set all Europe at cross purposes with your Riquetti This tremendous ascendancy over France and the revolution itself Mirabeau retained re-tained to the day of his death It came to believed that the cloud compelling Titan could really outride the storm and when it was known that the storm within him was about to prevail that the terrible surge and swell of his volcanic spirit were about to break in death a feeling of universal uni-versal alarm pervaded all circles of society His prodigious activities and burning passions pas-sions had at length conspired to do what opposition and enmity the hatred of mann man-n + 1 unable to accomplish He continued in the presidency of the assembly for two months but in the last days of March 1791 it became be-came evident that the end was at hand i3i COMTE DE MIA EAU But the prodigy was greatest at the last On the 27thof the month Mirabean on his way t the assembly hal fainted and fell by the road Meanwhile though he presently recovered himself and went to his place flashes of fire strange visionary gleams of things unseen to natural vision began to dart before his eyes and the roar of the blood river rose ever higher in his brain like thq surge of an ocean Ho seemed to burning up in the flames His speech became wild ana not wnouy ot eartn Phantasmal specters entered his room and sat about his bed His thought shot like meteors across the skies of memory and imagination In my heart said he1 carry the death dirge of the French monarchy mon-archy the dead remains of it will now bathe ba-the spoil of the factions Perceiving that Paris held her breath for the event of his going forth and hearing the cannon boOm outside ho said 1 tho funeral of Achilles prepared already Self conscious and proud ho was in the lash hour His faculties lost nothing of their brilliancy In the early dawn of April 2 he roused himself from his sufferings and said cheerfully to his physician Cubans My friend I shall die shal today When one ha come to such a crisis there remains remang only one thing to be done that is t be perfumed crowued with flowers and soothed with music in order to enter sweetly into that slumber from which there is no awaking A friend supported his head Yes said he support than head I would I could bequeath it to I thee1 Again when the sun shone into his room he said I he is not God he is atj least his cousin Finally when he had begged for opium and they would give him none he murmured U DormEr dormirl To sleep to sleepl I Behold the image of this man fierce in his aspect a veritable lions whelp heavy but not tall coarse and strong a man of iron with liquid fire in his veins a head and face to which he himself was fond of referring a tho head and visage of a boar tusks in his jaws that gleamed through the foam a he spoke Opposed in the assembly sembly he was wont to say I will show them C hiiretha st the boars head weutLI U UWUI LJ S nalr wa an mre seribable mass growing thickly around his brow and flung back more like the mane of an African lion than the hair of a man His voice was as the echo of thun der and his oratory as the storm Every thing bent or broke before itl Mirabeaus outgoing from life let in all the floods Chaos came roaring from every hand From that day discord tumult violence audacity and blood rushed swiftly in and mixed and mingled in the arena From that day the fate of the ancient monarchy mon-archy was sealed From that day Napoleon Bonaparte was possible From that day tho fiery revolution must run its own wild course until society be born anew out of the furnace and the seeds of the future begin be-gin t germinate spring from the renovated reno-vated soil of France Jonir CLARK RIDEATH 1 |
