But science was not sufficient for his mind, which overflowed with sensitiveness, and which Barbaroux poured forth in elegiac poetry as burning as the noonday, and vague as the horizon of the sea beneath his view.  There is felt that southern melancholy whose languor, is closer allied to pleasure than weakness, and which resembles the songs of man seated in the broad sunshine, before or after labour.  Mirabeau had thus begun his life.  The most energetic lives frequently open in gloom, as if they had in their very germ presentiments of their contrary destiny.  It would seem as though we read in the verses of this young man that through his tears he contemplated his faults, his expiation, and his scaffold.

VI.

After Mirabeau’s election, and the agitations which followed, Barbaroux was named secretary of the municipality of Marseilles.  At the troubles of Aries he took arms, and marched at the head of the young Marseillais against the rulers of the Comtal.  His martial figure, his gestures, his ardour, his voice, made him conspicuous everywhere:  he fascinated all.  Being deputed to Paris in order to give an account of the events of the south to the National Assembly, the Girondists, Vergniaud and Guadet, who were desirous of obtaining an amnesty for the crimes of Avignon, did all in their power to attach this young man to their party.  Barbaroux, impetuous as he was, did not justify the butchers of Avignon; but detested the victims.  He was a man requisite to the Girondists.  Struck by his eloquence and his enthusiasm, they presented him to Madame Roland:  no woman was more formed to seduce, no man more formed to be seduced.  Madame Roland—­in all the freshness of her youth, in all the brilliancy of her beauty, and also in all the fulness of sensibility, which all the purity of her life could not stifle in her unoccupied heart—­speaks thus tenderly of Barbaroux:  “I had read,” she says, “in the cabinet of my husband, the letters of Barbaroux, full of sense and premature wisdom.  When I saw him I was astonished at his youth.  He attached himself to my husband.  We saw more of him after we left the ministry; and it was then, that reasoning on the miserable state of things, and the fear of a triumph of despotism in the north of France, we formed the plan of a republic in the south.  This will be our pis aller, said Barbaroux, with a smile; but the Marseillais army here will dispense with our attempting it.”

VII.

Roland then lived in a gloomy house of the Rue St. Jaques, almost in the garrets:  it was a philosopher’s retreat, and his wife illumined it.  Present at all the conversations of Roland, she witnessed the conferences between her husband and the young Marseillais.  Barbaroux thus relates the interview in which the first idea of a republic was mooted:  “That astonishing woman was there,” said he.  “Roland