BOOKS.
THE MIRABEAU FAMILY.* [FIRST NOTICE.]
No one could be better equipped than M. Mezieres to write of Mirabeau. From M. Lucas de Montigny, the adopted son. of the orator, M. de Lomenie received a mass of original information, used by him in the very important five volumes of his work on the Mirabeau family. Only two of them he saw through the Press ; but his son has continued the memoir to its conclusion, and M. Mezieres, collaborating with both, has condensed it in a series of articles in the Revue des Deux
• Vie de Ifirabeau. Par A. Idezieres, de l'Acad6mie Frangaise. Paris: Hachette. 1892.
Mondes, which are republished in this excellent and handy volume. It is a difficult task to write shortly of the Antteus of the eighteenth century. No great historical figure was ever more affected by mother-earth, by family influences, and the episodes of a stormy youth. Apart from the Revolution, it is, indeed, questionable whether the records of his father and his uncle are not more interesting than his own. But they are of the past, and we are yet in the eddies of that Revolu- tion which the younger Mirabeau so largely influenced, and every detail of which remains valuable in proportion as it is cleared of passion and partisanship. The family ties of the patrician demagogue are interesting, as they partially explain his career ; and in themselves Lomenie's studies have special value, as they illustrate provincial manners in France, and bring to notice some of the many able and patriotic men who detested Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, not less than the court of Madame de Pompadour. In these memoirs may be seen the far-reaching roots of the feudal and family system, and the temper of men in every class and in the furthest provinces, credulous of Utopias which in ten or twenty years were to mend the sorrows of mankind, clear the earth of its briars, and replace existing tyrannies by a dance of enthusiast s.
It is probable that the family of Riquetti, like that of Bonaparte, was Italian. Its first clearly discernible figure is that of a coral-fisher and maker of scarlet stuffs at Marseilles, elected Consul in 1562. He married a lady of minor nobility, and bought the fief of Mirabeau, a fortress rather than dwelling-house, on one of the inland spurs of the Provençal Alps. His grandson, again strengthening his position by marriage, obtained in 1629 an admission for a younger son to the aristocratic Republic of the Knights of Malta, which set the stamp on his claim to nobility even more decisively than a visit from Louis XIV. in 1662. Twenty-five years later, his marquisate was created, and meantime he had produced a hero to illustrate it,—that Jean Antoine who did sa well," as St. Simon puts it, at the Battle of Cassano. Colonel of his regiment, he was ordered to defend a bridge against Prince Eugene's forces. It was a desperate service, but in his splendid height and beauty he stood firm until cavalry and infantry swept him down, and passed over what seemed his dead body ; but his broken bones were set, his half-dislocated neck was supported by a silver collar, which he wore hence- forth. A portrait still exists of his beautiful face and noble air when, three years after, he found an equally handsome wife of the finest nobility willing to accept him and his unques- tionable eccentricities. Lie governed his subjects with the paternal rigour of the day, yet with that respect for them which goes with clear delimitation of class. One of his sons narrates the kick he received from the Lord of Mirabeau because he did not return a peasant's salutation. His children were not admitted to touch his bare hand, nor was their mother less austere in ceremony. Yet the sketch of the family evenings in their house at Aix is of the best Quixotism :
" They were a school of honour, of historical narrative, and of dignified eloquence. The Marquis liked high-bred pleasantry, but as in his case it might have tended to sarcasm, his principles forbade it."
His good looks and radiant refinement of cleanliness and good dress lasted to the end. He left his wife the fall control of the family estate until their eldest son was twenty-five. She held the reins firmly and haughtily, and received profound affection and respect from her sons even during the two strange years of her decrepitude when she became insane at eighty-two, with a reverse of her whole character that seemed like mediaeval possession, and during which she asked for prayers for Franc wise de Castellane as though she were already dead. Of her children, we have but space to sketch lightly Victor, the "Friend of Men," and the admirable Bailli de Mirabeau, perhaps the finest gentleman and truest heart of the century. The Marquis Victor served for a short time in the Army ; his younger brother was nominated to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, or Knights of Malta. The boyhood of both was of the wildest. Sent out into the world at twelve and thirteen years old respectively, nothing but sharp discipline and frequent imprisonment cured them of precocious drunkenness ; but Jean Antoine, the little Knight, got through his first service in the King's galleys, and afterwards performed his earavanes, or initia- tion to the same training, in the galleys of his Order, from which he was again transferred with higher rank to the Royal Navy. By fifteen he had shaken himself free of drunkenness,
and henceforth, during twenty-seven years of active service, he earned the praise of the great orator : "My uncle has the soul and the virtues of a hero." Engaged in the action which cost Byng his disgrace, he records nothing in excuse of the English commander; but he was prejudiced against us, as became a French sailor when his ships were so often in trouble- He became Governor of Guadeloupe, and shocked by the vices of the Creoles, he "prayed God to be preserved from injustice, and given firmness to repress it." He considered slavery as inconsistent with Christian faith, not a way to acquire popu- larity; and as meantime his brother, as head of the family, bad pushed his interests in Paris, the Knight, worthy of the Round Table as he was, returned there with some expectation of the Naval Portfolio. He would not, however, for a day court Madame de Pompadour, who was quite ready to approve his good looks, as remarkable as those of his father. Few correspondences equal in interest that constant intercourse of letters maintained by the Knight soon to be Bailli, with his elder brother. Faithful to family interests, obedient to the Marquis as head of his race, even in im- portant personal affairs, he impersonates nobly what was best and most stable in the old order of France. The rights and duties of primogeniture were carried to extremes by both brothers. Inspired by the honourable maxims of their parents, both were absolutely honest in money matters ; and even when the elder became the poorer, and the younger was the mainstay of his race, the relations did not alter. He only thought of marriage as it might strengthen the common weal, and because the Maltese commanderies were rich, he obeyed his brother, and took the final vows which might secure one. His personal charge on the family estate, £60 a year, was, he considered, inalienable,—in fact, he only reserved the rights of a most sincere conscience and spotless honour. In return, the Marquis spared no sacrifice to serve his brother ; and if the Knight rose to the highest rank in his Order short of Grand-Mastership, it was by the extraordinary exertions of his elder. A curious light is cast on the poverty and ambitions of country nobles in these memoirs. The Mirabeaus counted francs where Englishmen would have written pounds sterling, yet Marquis Victor successfully claimed his place among the best who figured in Paris or at Versailles. With his financial dexterity, he contrived to raise £6,000, or the Bailli could not have obtained the generalship of the Maltese galleys, an office held only for two years, but leading to one or more rich commanderies. It was a good investment, for it secured later some £2,000 a year. The outfit was magnificent ; and the Bailli, fulfilling what he conceived his duty, was lavish. Gorgeously attired on State occasions in the scarlet cloak, with the gold-headed cane of his office, served by a staff in splendid liveries, he kept open house and the best cheer for the Knights at Malta. Anxious to serve his brother when family trouble assailed him, the Bailli, after his term as General of his Order, devoted him.- self to his kin,—now ruling the peasants at Mirabeau, and curbing the future tribune in his lawless youth, now pro- tecting the Marquis against the wicked folly of his wife and subtle intrigues of his third daughter. We bear little of him during his nephew's triumph, of which he could have hardly approved. He died in 1794, four years before the suppression of his Order,—with what sad thoughts we can imagine, but thoughts always sweetened by faith and love, as were Colonel Newcome's.
Ridicule of Marquis Victor, the "Friend of Men," was general enough in the superior conceit of 1789 ; yet these memoirs engage sympathy and respect for his honest Utopias. Admirable as son and brother, working with a "hand of bronze" in untiring philanthropic effort to avert the public ruin he foresaw, an active enthusiast in his endeavour to gain for all his fellow-men perhaps even more than the " Rights " of the Declaration in 1789, he raises his fine head above the Encyclopedists and sentimental quacks of his day. He made no war on religion, even though honour may have been the highest sanction of his life. He was a brilliant pioneer of Free-trade and some of the economic laws which now are axioms. He was the figure-head of the physiocmtic school to which Tnrgot owed probably his wider conceptions of reform in taxation and land-management. Had he not forestalled much of his son's statesmanship by thirty years, Mirabeau would not have remained still the greatest figure, except Bonaparte's, of the Revolution. Poor "Friend of Men "l his record was marred by the freakish mischief of a vulgar and depraved wife and ber lawless brood. He was driven to con- tradiction with his tastes and principles, to meanness and lettres de cachet ; but be earned his name as " syndic of the poor," and A. de Tocqueville notes his essay on Etats Provinciaux and his Ami des Hommes as really greater than any of his son's work still extant. Born in 1715, he lived for seventy-four years in an age of social decomposition, and was keenly conscious of it. For the central corruption of Paris and the Court, he sought remedies with no doubt some blind- ness of enthusiasm. His enterprise in the acquisition of land whereon to labour, his robust diligence, the very archaisms of his Montaigne phrases, are marvellous in the sentimental relaxation of his period. He lies bare to us in his corre- spondence with the Bailli, and we sympathise with him rather than ridicule his efforts to illustrate the name of Mirabeau and to right humanity. He was as a man in chain-mail fighting in a modern battle, modern himself, and even before his age, yet maintaining the antique armour. When he left home for his regiment, a boy of twelve, his majestic father gave him but two warnings, against brag and dishonesty. Like his brother, he fell into every excess consistent with discipline, but at sixteen he had reformed himself. His father, punishing him by poverty, left him for six months to live on a cup of coffee and a roll a day. to seek supper where he might. The boy never tried to excuse himself, nor did he get into debt. After a short time at a military academy, he rejoined his regi- ment with the rank of Captain ; he made his most intimate friend of Vauvenargues, and when he was but twenty he sought the society of Montesquieu. We probably owe what we possess of Vauvenargues to the incitements of the young Marquis, who urged him to write ; and Sainte-Beuve considers the Masis of Vauvenargues to be a portrait of the future "Friend of Men; " while, in a letter to him, the moralist reproaches him for being " more nervous, more restless, more unequal than the sea." Family ambition was his ruling passion, and the . origin of his worst misfortunes. He left the Army at twenty- eight to marry, in such haste to find an heiress who would aggrandise the Mirabeau fortunes, that he did not consult his mother, or make due inquiries even about the exact for- tune of the lady, still less make her personal acquaintance. The Marquis de Vassan, her father, had property in Central France, which suited his plans. The " Friend of Men," like most dwellers in Utopia, had little of that science of entregent in which his celebrated son excelled. He found himself tied to a vulgar, vicious woman, so impossible socially that he had to give up the diplomatic career to which he had looked. The negotiations for the marriage reveal a poverty that is astonish- ing. The Marquis de Mirabeau was a figure in the highest class of Paris society, yet he had only about £650 a year after paying his mother and brothers their pittance.
The Vassan property was worth £1,200 a year, of which they gave a ruined fragment of perhaps £160 in Gascony to their daughter. It is amazing how the honest Marquis could buy a large house in Paris, and Bignon a property near Montargis, on borrowed money, and finally, without visiting it, pay £16,000 for the Duche of Roquelaure at a time when he had but £300 a year net. He found relief from his self- imposed burdens in incessant writing. Forty volumes and innumerable manuscripts attest his power of work. Never was a keen-witted man more chimerical; but grandeur and tenacity in aim, impassioned enthusiasms and fine manners, with yet finer principles, kept him noble in degradations that would have swamped most men. The strict laws of French family life alone could have made existence possible between his mother and his wife ; and the same sense of duty kept husband and wife together for nineteen years, during which she bore him eleven children, the eldest of whom, by curious irony, was poisoned by drinking ink. At last he could endure the torment of Vassan perversities no longer ; the ill-matched couple separated, and henceforth all the furies of outraged home pursued them both. No doubt the flow and violence of Provençal expression accentuate the tale of lawless fighting and disgrace. We will pass over the too frequent presence of Madame de Pailly, who at least restored to the Marquis some lost amenities of the fireside.
L'Ami des Hommes was published in 1756, and gained for its author immediate attention by its vigorous style and the courage of its proposed reforms. It was a work of " great national pride and patriotism," at a time when both were well- nigh lost under the Pompadour obsession. Not till a year after did the Marquis meet Quesnay, the theorist of the physiocratic economists ; but he at once approved their doc- trine of government according to natural law, and became their most brilliant advocate. The credit belongs to this noble of the nobles of being the first of his century to con- sider efficiently the material welfare of the peasant classes. He was alike before and after his period, and his brain was a meeting-place for ideas at once revolutionary and despotic. He desired unlimited free-trade. Opposed to Colbert's system, he made agriculture the basis of national wealth. To him may be traced the principle of laissez-faire, laissez-passer, dominant fifty years ago in England, and from which we are now in full reaction.
By his essay on " The Theory of Taxation," the Marquis gained a brilliant imprisonment of eight days and a great popularity, for he dared to say that taxes are voluntary tribute granted by the people, and not to be imposed without their assent ; and he held that a single tax on the net produce of the soil was the only legitimate one. He was not materialist in an age when most thinkers were, and he held that in obe- dience to physical law, divine law could be best fulfilled. Absentee landowners were in his eyes criminal, and he lived happiest among his farms, overlooking his improved flour- mills and ovens, of which the method is still in use. The time was not ripe for his and Turgot's risky experiments, if it ever has been. They were discredited after a short but vivid renown, and the " Friend of Men " was left in the cold shade of failure, to bear the fierce and sometimes personal onslaught of his wife, and of the son and daughter she had bribed to join her. Inconsistent as it was, he used no less than seventeen lettres de cachet, most odious form of illegal power, against her and her confederates. Domestic tragedy and comedy go near to reach their last expression in this mean ruin of all his ambitions. A network of debt, the cruel madness that over- threw his mother's venerable character in her extreme old age. his eldest daughter's imbecility, the criminal disgrace of his most gifted children, found him a very Lear in 1781, when a thirteen years' lawsuit with his wife was decided against him. Henceforth he was but the impassive though vigilant sentry of the family honour threatened by his sons. Yet before his death in July, 1789, he had some foretaste of his heir's great- ness as the champion of many ideas which had their birth and fosterage in his own untiring labours and inspirations.
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