From the Dublin University Magazine. THE LAST DAYS OF MIRABEAU. BY F. PIERS HEALEY. In my intercourse with Frenchmen I have, met with no historic name which, after perhaps Napoleon's, exercises so general a spell on their imaginations as that of Mirabeau. There is an attractiveness about his personal characteristics, a glare, not to say a greatness, about his volcanic existence, irresistibly fascinating for his countrymen; and even cooler men, thinking over his achievements, may be disposed to find in the popular instinct but an anticipation of the judgments of posterity. No one, probably, ever did so much in so short a time against such difficulties. Born a prodigy of passion, his tempestuous youth and early manhood given up to all the debasing vices and humiliating expedients which need and profligacy naturally beget in the neglected scion of nobility, we have him in his fortieth year, on the eve of his political apparition, offering as the main result of a life to which his extraordinary activity and strange fortunes had given all the hues of romance, a reputation the worst and nearly the most unconsidered in France. There was scarcely a crime or an indignity, public or private, unattached by rumor or fame to his name; and his wife, mistress, father, mother, and nearest friends were the public vouchers, often in print, for accusations of which incest, projected parricide, swindling, breach of parole, and startling ingratitude, formed scarcely the darkest parts. Yet it was this person, "ugly and venemous," degenerated into a poor libelous "litterateur" immersed in debt, and only remaining in France because, like another Cromwell, balked in his plan of passing to America, who, suddenly appearing before the electors of Aix and Marseilles, evoked, by an eloquence till then unheard of in France, that tumultuous spirit of revolution which so soon afterward astounded despotic Europe with the spectacle of a sovereign democracy in its midst who returning to Paris a deputy, and marshaling by exhaustless ener gies the scattered weakness of popular discontent into an organized and systematic resistance, offered at its head defiance to absolute power in its moment of menace and determination, and legalizing rebellion by a polity as new as it was commanding, finally succeeded, in a few short months, in whelming the richest, the most learned, and the most powerful clergy in the world, into the enduring weakness and poverty of Apostolic epochs; in submerging in the popular mass they contemned, the proudest, the most ancient, and the most privileged of Europe's aristocracies, and mastering into personal obsequiousness and constitutional legality, a haughty court by which he had been for years despised and hated, and which, representing the mightiest monarch of the world, stood supported by an army of 100,000 soldiers, and by almost as many bulwarks of prescription, habit, duty, association, and large social interests. The closing scene in the career of this wonderful man exhibited the traits, both striking and gigantesque, which gave so much of character to all he did. The dictator of France, the consciousness of having her attendant on his sick bed but strengthened the singular vanity-natural, however, to every Frenchman of dying with robes gracefully adjusted like the first Cæsar, and the appeal "mihi plaudite" of the second. As Talleyrand, an eye-witness, happily phrased it, he "dramatized his death," and if historians had not gone a step farther, nor stripped the "drama" of much of its interest by debasing it into a romance, we should have had fewer justifications for the recital that now meets the eye of the reader.* * Alison, usually so careful, makes as many faults as he gives lines to the incident; among other inmonths before, and translating into a quotation from stances, attributing to the death speeches pronounced Hamlet an appeal for opium conveyed in the word " Dormer." It would, indeed, not be well for the The health of Mirabeau had long ceased to be good. A Hercules, he had used his powers in impairing the boon of Nature, abandoning himself to every excess except drunkenness, which, as the only family vice left unappropriated, was claimed as the heritage of his witty brother. His long imprisonments in the Isle of Rhe, in the Chateau d'If, in the fortress of Joux, the keep of Vincennes, and the prison of Pentarlier nearly half his early manhood given to the privations and infamy of the French jails of the eighteenth century, if relatively for time conserving the forces, permanently disorganized the mechanism of health. His recent long captivity in the "Donjon" of Vincennes was more especially mischievous. Snatched from the arms of a young, highborn and accomplished woman, who had renounced for him everything, he found himself suddenly transferred to the worst jail of the country he had so recently fled. Doomed for some time, without book, conversation, or correspondence, to feed on his own heart in the awful solitude of a dismal cell-sepulchred alive in all his marvelous activity from a world which the thoughts of an enthralling love, and the ripening hopes of fraternity, made just then priceless, the ardent spirit of the prisoner chafed in maddening impatience against the bars of his cage, and life itself was not without danger, no less from his own hand than disease, amid the outbreaks of his rage, and the broodings of his despair. After bearing for a month what he calls the "mute and terrible severities" of his horrible abode, he was allowed the privilege of complaint, and we have him writing to his jailer" My health is rapidly failing, and my mind, sinking under the weight of so many disgraces, loses all its energy. If I ought to have hopes in the clemency of the king, then, doubtless, he does not destine me to a perpetual prison. Ah! what a prison !* Alas! I am thoroughly wearied out by these inertitudes, these gleams of hope, these torturing fears! Never was I so weak and desolate. Physically, as morally, I feel as if annihilated!" repute of History, if her value were to be tested by her faithfulness on an incident so interesting at the moment to Europe, and occurring under the eyes of so many eminent writers. Discrepancies and mistakes, the results of negligence, meet us on every side; and the utmost brevity no more excludes them, as seen in Alison, than the greatest amplitude as shown in so many others. *Lettres Originales de Mirabeau, ecrites du Donjon de Vincennes." | Through 1778-79, and down to his enlargement, he complains of being subject to fainty fits-to frequent nephritic attacks-to inflammation of the eyes, causing frequent loss of sight-to accesses of fever-to swelling of the legs, from gouty rheumatism-to painful fits of indigestion, and to occasional vomiting of blood. His liberation, which did not take place till the end of 1780, was followed by years of the exhausting literary and forensic labors which distinguished the portion of his life preceding the meeting of the States-General. Dumont, the Genevese Jurisconsult, affirms that a person must have enjoyed his opportunity of observing Mirabeau, to comprehend how much literary labor one man can accomplish in a brief period. But during this period, exercise on horseback and foot, sharing the violence of all his doings, came in frequently to vary and relieve the exhausting sensations of intellectual strife. On the assembly, however, of the States-General, he devoted himself entirely to the toils and exercitations of public affairs, with no alternation save that won by a passion or vice which, dominant as his ambition, was, at least, as illicit. When the physician to whom he confided his death-bed first saw him, by accident, in July, 1789, shortly after the meeting of the States-General, he was suffering under jaundice, for which he was under no treatment. Like many great men who have dabbled in medicine, for that illusive art has its amateurs like others, Mirabeau began by an excessive faith in the miracles of physic, and ended, as usual, under the teachership of experience, in doubt and semi-incredulity. In one of the last of his immortal letters to "Sophie," he warns her "ne te medicamente pas trop," with the wise assurance, that care and prevention (l'hygiene) are the only true medicines. The choice of his medical attendant seems characterized by the spirit of his neglected jaundice. Cabanis was less a physician than a physiologist. He was the student who understood the construction of the complicated piece of mechanism, rather than the workman who by habit appreciated, and by instinct remedied its derangements. He was more at home in the science than the art-in the theory than in the practice of his profession; and curious as the phrase may sound, it will be seen by-and-bye, that his retainer was as much to kill as to cure his patient. A tall, thin, ungainly young man, of high and penetrating intellect, and of gentle and attaching manners-his course of life, as of so much more consequence by bodily inaction, and the unwise stopping of an issue,* threw additional elements of disturbance on a brain and heart already overtasked. His malady was obviously becoming not one of function, or quality, or chemical neutralization; diseases were now symptoms, not principals; it was the malady of life itself, arising in the mode of life, involving every function of life, sapping its sources with the same action with which it consumed its forces. The day's existence with him, as regards the regretful past, the exciting present, or the mysterious future, was but the day's rapid succession of mental trouble, anxiety, toil, torture, or excitement. There was no normal animal life; exorbitant vital action was exhausting, and by degrees annihilating the means, the tendencies, and the instincts of reparation. A sharer in almost every intrigue and plot of the day, from the most trivial to the most complicated-the author of almost every profound political combination, on which the success of his party turned-a part in every public movement to watch, to support, or to opposethe ceaseless student of every political character, to use, to circumvent, or to annihilate well as his track of studies, presented a thousand points for the attachment of Mirabeau. Though a younger man, he had gone through hardships alike, and almost as cruel, making his own way unaided through no common difficulties, to the respectable status of physicianship, and winning with it the familiar and confidential converse of Turgot, D'Holbach, Condillac, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Diderot, and D'Alembert. His physiological researches lent elucidations in a new path to the materialist doctrines of his friends; and as amid Mirabeau's conflicting sympathies, popular and patrician, he felt, at all events, as much glory in having made the revolution, as he had gratification in its subsequent sale, he allied himself with all the warmth of his character, and more than its usual stability, to the young savant of new thought and philosophic daring, who seemed to him to embody in its professional relations the higher spirit and tendencies of a public which had accepted himself as its gigantic motu power. At this time, the summer, as we have said, of 1789, Mirabeau, in addition to the jaundice, a disease symptomatic of disorganized liver, was suffering at intervals invasions of fever, the result immediately, perhaps, of excesses, but the indications, probably, of deep-seated disease. In the autumn, an obstinate ophthalmia came in to complicate the treatment, his table laden with the multifarious corand at a moment, when he was concentra- respondence of all lands, requiring always ting by its incessant writings and speeches attention, and often delicate handling-the the attention of Europe, and effecting a rev- press informed of every act of his priolution under the very arm of arbitrary pow-vate life, and swarming with attacks not aler, he was an invalid, with troublesome and increasing maladies, and rarely to be seen without bandaged eyes. Through 1790, he suffered under the same symptoms, aggravated by others. He was constantly complaining of pains in the bowels, with an equivocal rheumatic affection in the joints, accompanied by severe headache, and the signs of a confirmed gouty diathesis. The month of October was marked by an extremely severe attack of colic or cholera, attributed, of course, to poison, from which, however, he recovered, after a few hours' decisive treatment. Under the professional impression, as it would appear, that all these phenomena were evidence of a bad state of body, arising more from the excesses of his early youth than those of his recent cerebral exercitations, he underwent with questionable prudence a course of baths, charged with bichloride of mercury (corrosive sublimate), which diminishing the perspiratory secretion habitual to his constitution, and made now his house crowded with visitors and observers, each with his value in a revolution where nobody but the king could be a cipher ways to be despised or forgotten-pamphlets and weekly journals to be constantly prepared in his study-elaborate speeches or fiery conflicts to be ever and anon sustained in the Assembly, in whose heated and poisonous atmosphere he had to give daily attendance-creditors to appease-mistresses to satisfy-a mob to please-the Jacobins to soothe and deceive-the court to overawe and plunder-the constitutionalists to mystify and use-and, finally, his already huge reputation to aggrandize at any price-that reputation, too, of first orator, first statesman, first demagogue, and first roué in an epoch of such things-such were the tasks, sufferings, and labors of this modern Hercules, at the very moment that his sensitive and susceptible frame was festering to death, *It will be remembered that the empirical extirpation of a fistula has been professionally noted as partly the origin of the softening of the brain, which caused the death of the late Mr. O'Connell. under the exhaustion of all sorts of excesses, and the Nessus garment of an infamous name! But, as if appetite grew on what it fed-as if the utmost toil only increased the call for more-or, as if the man's avidity or ambition was so uncontrollable that he could refuse nothing that took the shape of credit or profit--it was at this moment, when all his engagements were most pressing, and his health most infirm, that this Titan of labor sought and obtained the office of commander in the National Guards, director of the Department of Paris, and president of the National Assembly. The presidentship was a specially fatal honor; it hastened the death that followed six weeks later. With out sensibly lessening his customary labors, its two sittings daily required an exhausting attendance, in addition to the peculiar engagements inseparable from the office, in those days of demonstrative patriotism. 66 Dumont, who then often saw him, says that he was suffering constantly from ophthalmia, and that more than once he was obliged to apply leeches, and reappear in the chair with his neck covered with towels to stanch the blood. He was at this time also, as we learn from Cabanis, often visited by severe spasms and pains in the bowels, and by nervous attacks (crispations of the nerves) of short duration, but causing horri ble suffering, till in fine this athlete of muscular power became, as we are told, as 'nervously sensitive to the smallest impression as a fine lady in a fit of the vapors.' Worn down by his sufferings and toils, he was often noticed, during these forty or fifty pre-obit days, to give way to fits of the lowest despondency. His body moved heavily, as if devoid of vital energy, his memory both for ideas and expressions failed by fits; the idea of death entered into all his thoughts, and chased from them even his cherished anticipations of glory. Words of gloom and presage fell from his lips-"I feel I am dying by inches," he once broke out to Dumont. "I am consumed as by a slow fire. I shall die at the stake! "Twill be only when I am gone that my value will be understood." Doomed himself, his great spirit, in process of disenthralment, occupied itself in prophecies-alas! but too true!-of kindred woes to his country. the Hurrying, however, with his eyes open, to that physical ruin which he designates "finest invention of nature," Gabriel Mirabeau remained the same man. His proaching" aneantissement," as he called it, had influences on him wholly special. Above! ap all people, an opinion with him had practical effect; once adopted, no doubt stood between him and its kindred action. Four years before he had written, "I am so little certain of living the month after that in which I have conceived a good idea, that I burn with impatience to see it realized, fearful lest it should perish with me, and that time should cut me down before 1 can bequeath it to mankind; for we ought no more to die than to live without glory. My opinion respecting this world is, that the smallest good, as well as the greatest, is rewarded beyond its worth; and thus I will pass my life in acquirement, physically and morally, knowing well, however, that the game is not worth the candle. But I am tormented by my own activity, and when the candle, burnt out at both ends, shall be exhausted well, it will go out, but it will have given for the smallness of its volume a bright light!" And on this reckless system of extravagant economy, grand in its very recklessness, the aim of the last month of his existence was to devote the remaining scraps of the candle of life to expire in a conflagration! So late as the 28th of February, with charges of treason and threats of assassination ringing in his ear, he entered the tribune to return, as he said, in triumph, or dead; and, in one of the most energetic of his many speeches, successfully took up the daring position of defiance and opposition to the Jacobin party, which was to mark a new epoch in the Revolution. On the 22d of the following month, he again passed through an exciting and fiery ordeal. After imposing silence in his last great effort on the "Thirty" conspirators of the Jacobin Club, he now waged open war on the Regency question, against his former friends, the Orleanists. Late suppers with actresses, and kindred excesses, were at this critical moment the agencies to which the dying gladiator had recourse in the intermission of his public life. In the very proportion of his exhaustion, his discouragement, and overwhelming melancholy, were the wretched efforts he made to escape from them in the artificial excitations of the passions. Ever young in the essence of his character, he looked at his great fame with much the same feelings as he looked on the immense sums placed at his command by the court the feelings of a roué possessed for the first time of his fortune. The heroines of the opera, contending for his favors as a homage to the genius of the Revolution, was a flattery too irresistible to the charac-lessness amounted to self-slaughter, he reterless adventurer who, amid the triumphs of his statesmanship, could hardly yet persuade himself of his higher identity; and till within a week of his death, with direful fidelity to his own principle of vital conduct, did this great man seek, at the price of, perhaps, years of his life, spasmodic accesses of forgetfulness, which would have done no honor to the wildest days of his youth. These scenes, if we may believe Prudhomme, and the general rumor of the day, were not strangers to the country house which Mirabeau had recently acquired near Argenteuil, about eight miles from Paris. There, on the 27th March (Saturday), he had a return of the severe spasmodic attacks which had recently so often troubled him. Suffering under the malady, weak, and wholly unfit to leave his bed, he quitted his villa to attend the Assembly, which was about to decide on a law for the regulation of mines, on which, so lately as the 21st, he had introduced a project in an elaborate discourse. The question deeply affected the value of the mines of Arzin, and a rumor was prevalent that Mirabeau had received from the proprietors a large sum, fifty thousand francs, for the favor of his advocacy. Although not strictly the fact, for it seems that the explanation of his zeal implies nothing lower than a wish to serve his friend, Comte De La Marck, who is said to have speculated largely in the mines-the wellknown facility on pecuniary matters of the politician who had publicly boasted, "A man like me may take fifty thousand crowns, but a man like me is not to be had for fifty thousand crowns," lent enough countenance to the calumny to secure for the orator a rather unfavorable auditory. Difficulty and dislike, however, were to Mirabeau old acquaintances, in the excitement of meeting whom again, for the last time in public life, he forgot his sickness and infirmity, and, after five successive speeches, the last glorious wreck of his old pertinacity and daring, the murmurs of dislike and opposition ceased to be heard, and Mirabeau carried his plied, "Could one do less for justice, and in so important a case?" so important a case?" A crowd rapidly surrounding the popular idol, each, with French vivacity, requiring personal evidence of notice or attention, Mirabeau, needing repose, and impatient at a homage he was latterly always anxious to escape, requested his friend to disengage him from the crowd, and to accompany him to his suburban villa. He proceeded thither after a dinner marked by more or less imprudence, where he was detained by returns of the paroxysm till the following afternoon, when he returned to Paris. Awaiting Cabanis-whom through a series of misadventures he had not seen for two days-he spent his time in perusing Racine, or good-humoredly discussing with Champfort and some other friends the sort of historic appreciation that then awaited him in the event of death. The literature of the day connects with these discussions a luxurious dinner, marked by excesses, in which female jealousy and poison were no strangers; but the only fact authentically recorded is, that Mirabeau, in the evening, under the advice of Lacheze, hazarded a warm bath, from which he derived sufficient relief to feel encouraged-again, in the pursuit of strong emotions-to betake himself to the Italian opera. Here he indulged, with Lacheze, in the striking criticisms and new projects the scene suggested to his fertile fancy; but he had not remained there long before he had another violent spasm, which, now changing its locality, seemed to involve the whole thoracic cavity. His carriage not being at the spot appointed, he declined to await it, and in dreadful tortures made his way home slowly on foot. Cabanis, who saw him immediately afterward, found him in an agony, with breathing so painful that the whole face was swelled by it, and suffocation seemed imminent. was struck with the desperate condition of his patient. Never did any one appear so evidently marked for death. His emotion revealed his impressions to the acute eye of Mirabeau, who said to him, "I feel, my friend, very decidedly, that I cannot live It was his last victory there alive, and many hours in anxities so painful-make dearly purchased. He walked out of the haste, for it cannot last. I should feel sathall death-stricken. Taking the arm of isfied if I had discharged one duty which Lacheze, a medical friend of Cabanis, he was my friend Frochot is acquainted with!" He conducted to the Terrace de Feuillants. meant his will, on whose execution, he said, Painting, in his vivid way, the effects of his "the lot of many dear to him depended," late exhausting exertions, symptoms more and which with much difficulty he allowed ominous even than painful and assured, in to be postponed, that he might be bled and answer, of the obvious truth that his reck- blistered. After these operations, aided, it measure. The physician |