Paris, November 1821
MIXED up in world events by the chaos and coincidences of his life, in contact with fugitives of justice, rapists, and adventurers, Mirabeau, the tribune of the aristocracy, the deputy of democracy, had something of Gracchus and Don Juan, of Catiline and Guzmán d’Alfarache, of Cardinal de Richelieu and Cardinal de Retz, of the Regency rake and the Revolutionary savage; he had, moreover, something of “Mirabeau,” an exiled Florentine family that carried with them a memory of those fortified palaces and great factions celebrated by Dante: a naturalized French family in which the Republican spirit of the Italian Middle Ages and the feudal spirit of our Middle Ages were to be united in a succession of extraordinary men.
Mirabeau’s ugliness, laid over the foundation of the beauty particular to his race, gave him a powerful figure, as though he had stepped out of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, Arrighetti’s countryman. The furrows plowed by smallpox in the orator’s face looked more like scars left by fire. Nature seemed to have molded his head either for imperium or for the gallows, chiseled his arms to annul a nation or abduct a woman. When he shook his mane and looked at the people, he stopped them cold; when he lifted his paw and showed his claws, the plebes ran wildly away. In the middle of one horribly disorderly session, I saw him at the rostrum, dark, ugly, and motionless. He called to mind Milton’s Chaos, impassive and formless, standing at the center of his own confusion.[9]
Mirabeau took after his father and uncle, who, like Saint-Simon, could write immortal prose offhand. Speeches were often written for Mirabeau, but he borrowed only what his spirit could amalgamate with its own substance. If he adopted them in their entirety, he delivered them badly; one could hear that they were not his by the stray words which he added to them, and which revealed the man. He pooled his energy from his vices, but these vices weren’t born of a frigid temperament but of deep, burning, tempestuous passions. Cynicism of manners, by annihilating the moral sense, brings society back to a kind of barbarism, but these social barbarians, prone to destruction like the Goths, have no power to create like the Goths. The barbarians of old were enormous children of virgin nature; the new ones are the monstrous abortions of nature depraved.
Two times I met Mirabeau at a banquet: once at the house of Voltaire’s niece, the Marquise de Villette, and once more at the Palais-Royal, with some deputies of the opposition to whom Chapelier had introduced me. Chapelier would go to the scaffold in the same tumbrel as my brother and M. de Malesherbes.
Mirabeau talked a great deal, especially about himself. This son of lions was himself a lion with a chimera’s head; this man so practical when it came to facts was all romance, poetry, and enthusiasm when it came to language and imagination. One could see in him the lover of Sophie, exalted in his feelings and capable of sacrifice. “I found her,” he wrote, “this adorable woman . . . I knew what her soul was—that soul formed by Nature’s hand in a moment of magnificence.”
Mirabeau enchanted me with his stories of love and his dreams of escape, which he interspersed with dry discussions. He interested me in another way also: like me, he had been treated severely by his father, who, like mine, had stood by the inflexible tradition of absolute paternal authority.
The great talker expounded on foreign politics and said almost nothing of domestic affairs, although these were what occupied him. But he did let slip a few words of sovereign contempt for those men who proclaim themselves superior by reason of the indifference that they affect toward disasters and crimes. Mirabeau was by nature generous, given to friendship, and quick to pardon offenses. Despite his immorality, he could not warp his conscience, and he was corrupt only within himself. His firm and upright mind never made an intellectual sublimity of murder. He had no admiration for slaughterhouses and garbage heaps.
Mirabeau was not, however, lacking in pride. He boasted about himself outrageously. Although he had become a cloth merchant in order to be elected a member of the Third Estate (the Order of the Nobility having had the honorable madness to reject him), he was enamored of his birth: “a haggard-looking bird whose nest was up between four turrets,” his father said of him. He would not forget that he had appeared at Court, ridden in coaches, and hunted with the King. He demanded to be addressed by the title of Comte and, sticking to his guns, clothed his servants in livery even when everyone else had ceased doing so. Whenever possible, and often when it seemed almost impossible, he brought up his “ancestor,” Admiral Coligny. Once the Moniteur referred to him as Riquet and he said angrily to the journalist, “Do you realize that with your ‘Riquet,’ you have disoriented all of Europe for three days?” He often repeated this impudent and well-known pleasantry: “In any other family, my brother the Vicomte would be a wit and a vagabond; in my family, he is a fool and a good man.” Biographers attribute this bon mot to the Vicomte himself, as though he were humbly comparing himself to other members of his family.
Deep down, Mirabeau was a Royalist. He once spoke these fine words: “I wanted to cure the French of superstition about the monarchy and replace it with worship for the monarchy.” In a letter, destined for the eyes of Louis XVI, he wrote, “I would not like to have labored only to make way for a vast destruction.” This is, however, exactly what happened to him. Heaven, to punish us for talents badly employed, makes us repent of our success.
Mirabeau moved public opinion by two levers. With one hand, he pivoted his fulcrum among the masses, of whom he had fashioned himself the defender while loathing them; with the other, though a traitor to his order, he maintained its sympathy through caste affinities and common interests. This wouldn’t have been possible for a plebeian, if one had managed to become a champion of the privileged classes: such a man would have been abandoned by his party without winning over the aristocracy, who are by nature ungrateful and unwinnable if one isn’t born within their ranks. The aristocracy cannot, besides, simply improvise a noble, since nobility is the daughter of time.
Mirabeau founded a school. By freeing themselves from moral shackles, men dreamed that they were transforming into statesmen. But these imitations produced only perverse dwarfs: one who prides himself on being a corrupt thief and is no more than a debauched scoundrel; another who thinks himself vicious and is merely vile; still another who brags of his criminality but who is merely infamous.
Too soon for him and too late for it, Mirabeau sold himself to the Court, and the Court bought him. He staked his reputation on a pension and an embassy: Cromwell, in his day, was once on the brink of bartering his future for a title and the Order of the Garter. Yet, in spite of his arrogance, Mirabeau didn’t value himself highly enough. Now that the abundance of cash and positions has raised the price of a conscience, there is not an errand-boy who doesn’t fetch hundreds of thousands of francs and the highest honors that the State can bestow. Only the grave relieved Mirabeau of his promises and rescued him from perils that he probably could not have overcome. His life would have showed his weakness for good; his death has left him in possession of his capacity for evil.
On leaving our dinner, there was some talk of Mirabeau’s enemies. I found myself beside him without having uttered a word. He looked me in the face with eyes full of arrogance, depravity, and genius, and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he said to me, “They will never forgive me my superiority!” I still feel the impression of that hand, as if Satan had touched me with his fiery claw.
When Mirabeau fixed his gaze on a young mute, did he have an inkling of my futuritions? Did he consider that one day he would figure in my memories? I was destined to become the historian of great personages: they have filed away before me, without my having to hang on their coattails and be dragged with them into posterity.
Mirabeau has already undergone the metamorphosis that has its way with everyone whose memory will survive. Carried from the Panthéon to the gutter, and from the gutter back to the Panthéon, he has been raised to the pinnacle of those times that today form his pedestal. The real Mirabeau is no longer anywhere to be found; only the idealized Mirabeau, the Mirabeau of the artists, who has become a symbol or a myth of the epoch he represents. In this way he becomes more false and more true. Among so many reputations, so many actors, so many events, so many ruins, only three men remain—each of them attached to one of the great Revolutionary epochs: Mirabeau for aristocracy, Robespierre for democracy, Bonaparte for despotism. The monarchy has nothing: France has paid dearly for those three reputations that Virtue can never acknowledge.