from her aged husband.  The lovers, happy for some months, took refuge in Holland; they were seized there, separated and shut up, the one in a convent and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes.  Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in some crevice of man’s destiny, lighted up in a single and ardent blaze all Mirabeau’s passions.  In his vengeance it was outraged love that he appeased; in liberty, it was love which he sought and which delivered him; in study, it was love which still illustrated his path.  Entering obscure into his cell, he quitted it a writer, orator, statesman, but perverted—­ripe for any thing, even to sell himself, in order to buy fortune and celebrity.  The drama of life was conceived in his head, he wanted but the stage, and that time was preparing for him.  During the few short years which elapsed for him between his leaving the keep of Vincennes and the tribune of the National Assembly, he employed himself with polemic labours, which would have weighed down another man, but which only kept him in health.  The Bank of Saint Charles, the Institutions of Holland, the books on Prussia, the skirmish with Beaumarchais, his style and character, his lengthened pleadings on questions of warfare, the balance of European power, finance, those biting invectives, that war of words with the ministers or men of the hour, resembled the Roman forum in the days of Clodius and Cicero.  We discern the men of antiquity in even his most modern controversies.  We may fancy that we hear the first roarings of those popular tumults which were so soon to burst forth, and which his voice was destined to control.  At the first election of Aix, rejected with contempt by the noblesse, he cast himself into the arms of the people, certain of making the balance incline to the side on which he should cast the weight of his daring and his genius.  Marseilles contended with Aix for the great plebeian; his two elections, the discourses he then delivered, the addresses he drew up, the energy he employed, commanded the attention of all France.  His sonorous phrases became the proverbs of the Revolution; comparing himself, in his lofty language, to the men of antiquity, he placed himself already in the public estimation in the elevated position he aspired to reach.  Men became accustomed to identify him with the names he cited; he made a loud noise in order to prepare minds for great commotions; he announced himself proudly to the nation in that sublime apostrophe in his address to the Marseillais:  “When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust towards heaven, and from this dust sprung Marius!  Marius, less great for having exterminated the Cimbri than for having prostrated in Rome the aristocracy of the nobility.”

From the moment of his entry into the National Assembly he filled it:  he was the whole people.  His gestures were commands; his movements coups d’etat.  He placed himself on a level with the throne, and the nobility felt itself subdued by a power emanating from its own body.  The clergy, which is the people, and desires to reconcile the democracy with the church, lends him its influence, in order to destroy the double aristocracy of the nobility and bishops.