494 MIRABEAU the whole law proceedings. From Pontarlier he went to Aix, where he claimed the court s order that his wife should return to him. She naturally objected, but his eloquence would have won his case, even against Portalis, the leader of the Aix bar, had he not in his excitement accused his wife of infidelity, on which the court pronounced a decree of separation. He then with his usual impetuosity inter vened in the suit pending between his father and mother before the parlement of Paris, and so violently attacked the ruling powers that he had to leave France and again go to Holland, and try to live by literary work. About this time began his connexion with Madame de Nehra, which sweetened the ensuing years of toil and brought out the better points of his character. She was the daughter of Zwier van Haren, a Dutch statesman and political writer, and was a woman of a far higher type than Sophie, more educated, more refined, and more capable of appreciating Mirabeau s good points and helping him to control his passions. With her the lion became a lamb, and his life was strengthened by the love of his petite horde, Madame de Nehra, her baby son, afterwards Lucas de Montigny, and his little dog Chico. After a period of work in Holland he betook himself to England, where his treatise on Lettres de Cachet had been much admired, and where he was soon admitted into the best Whig literary and political society of London, through his old schoolfellow Gilbert Elliot, who had now inherited his father s baronetcy and estates, and become a leading Whig member of parliament. Sir Gilbert introduced him freely, but of all his English friends none seem to have been so intimate with him as Lord Lans- downe, and Mr (afterwards Sir Samuel) Romilly. The latter became particularly attached to him, and really understood his character ; and it is strange that his remarks upon Mirabeau in the fragment of autobiography which he left, and Mirabeau s letters to him, should have been neglected by French writers. Romilly was introduced to Mirabeau by D lvernois, and readily undertook to translate the Considerations on the Order of Cincinnatus. Romilly writes thus of him in his autobiography : "The count was difficult enough to please ; he was sufficiently impressed with the beauties of the original. He went over every part of the translation with me, observed on every passage in which justice was not done to the thought or the force of the expression lost, and made many useful criticisms. During this occupation we had occasion to see one another often, and became very inti mate ; and, as he had read much, had seen a great deal of the world, was acquainted with all the most distinguished persons who at that time adorned either the royal court or the republic of letters in France, had a great knowledge of French and Italian literature, and possessed very good taste, his conversation was extremely interest ing and not a little instructive. I had such frequent opportunities of seeing him at this time, and afterwards at a much more import ant period of his life, that I think his character was well known to me. I doubt whether it has been so well known to the world, and I am convinced that great injustice has been done him. This, indeed, is not surprising, when one considers that, from the first moment of his entering upon the career of an author, he had been altogether indifferent how numerous or how powerful might be the enemies he should provoke. His vanity was certainly excessive ; but I have no doubt that, in his public conduct as well as in his writings, he was desirous of doing good, that his ambition was of the noblest kind, and that he proposed to himself the noblest ends. Ho was, however, like many of his countrymen, who were active in the calamitous Revolution which afterwards took place, not suffi ciently scrupulous about the means by which those ends were to be accomplished. He indeed to some degree professed this ; and more than once I have heard him say that there were occasions upon which la petite morale etait ennemie dc la grande. It is not sur prising that with such maxims as these in his mouth, unguarded in his expressions, and careless of his reputation, he should have afforded room for the circulation of many stories to his disadvan tage. Violent, impetuous, conscious of the superiority of his talents, and the declared enemy and denouncer of every species of tyranny and oppression, he could not fail to shock the prejudices, to oppose the interests, to excite the jealousy, and to wound the pride of many descriptions of persons. A mode of refuting his works, open to the basest and vilest of mankind, was to represent him as a monster of vice and profligacy. A scandal once set on foot is strengthened and propagated by many, who have no malice against the object of it. They delight to talk of what is extraordi nary ; and what more extraordinary than a person so admirable for his talents and so contemptible for Ms conduct, professing in his writings principles so excellent and in all the offices of public and private life putting in practice those which are so detestable ? I indeed possessed demonstrative evidence of the falsehood of some of the anecdotes which by men of high character were related to his prejudice." Life of Sir S. Romilly, vol. i. p. 58. This luminous judgment, the best that is extant on the character of Mirabeau, deserved to be quoted at length ; it must be noted that it was written by a man of acknow ledged purity of life, who admired Mirabeau in early life, not when he was a statesman, but when he was only a struggling literary man. This close association with Romilly, and his friends Baynes, Trail, and Wilson, does credit to Mirabeau, and must have helped that moral revolution against his passions which was passing within him. He was a warm friend, and first made Romilly acquainted with Lord Lansdowne, and tried to get him a seat in parliament. Lord Lansdowne was himself an extraordinary man, and the first of the new Whigs might well feel sympathy with the statesman of the French Revolution. The Considerations sur I ordre de Cincinnatus which Romilly translated was the only important work Mirabeau wrote in the year 1785, and it is a good speci men of his method. He had read a pamphlet published in America attacking the proposed order, which was to form a bond of association between the officers who had fought in the American War of Independence against England ; the arguments struck him as true and valuable, so he rearranged them in his own fashion, and rewrote them in his own oratorical style. He soon found such work not sufficiently remunerative to keep his " petite horde " in comfort, and then turned his thoughts to employment from the French foreign office either in writing or in diplomacy. He first sent Madame de Nehra to Paris to make his peace with the authorities, in which she was completely successful, and then returned himself, hoping to get employment through an old literary collaborateur of his, Durival, who was at this time director of the finances of the department of foreign affairs. One of the functions of this official was to subsidize political pamphleteers, and Mirabeau had hoped to be so employed, but he ruined his chances by a series of financial works. On his return to Paris he had become acquainted with Clavieres, a Genevese exile, who was minister of finance during the Revolution, and who now introduced him to a banker named Panchaud. From them he heard plenty of abuse of stock-jobbing, and seizing their ideas he began to regard stock-jobbing, or agiotage, as the source of all evil, and to attack in his usual vehement style the Banque de St Charles and the Compagnie des Eaux. This was at least disinterested on his part, for, while his supporters were poor, the bankers he attacked were rich, and would gladly have bought his silence ; but Mirabeau, though ever ready to take money for what he wrote, never sold his opinions, or wrote what he did not really believe. The very eloquence of his style rests upon the enthusiastic conviction that he himself was right, and those who differed from him were stupidly and wilfully wrong. This last pamphlet brought him into a contro versy with Beaumarchais, who certainly did not get the best of it, but it lost him any chance of literary employ ment from Government. However, his ability was too great to be neglected by a great minister such as M. do Vergennes undoubtedly was, and after a preliminary tour in the early spring of 1786 he was despatched in Juno 1786 on a secret mission to the court of Prussia, from which he returned in January 1787, and of which he gave
a full account in his Histoire Secrete de la Cour de Berlin.