With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, not the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

gave it to be understood that money would be To the God who made the Sabbath for the weary

From the Dublin University Magazine.
THE LAST DAYS OF MIRABEAU.

BY F. PIERS HEALEY.

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 attendIn my intercourse with Frenchmen I have met ant on his sick bed, but strengthened the singular with no historic name which, after perhaps Na-vanity-natural, however, to every Frenchmanpoleon's, exercises so general a spell on their of dying with robes gracefully adjusted like the imaginations as that of Mirabeau. There is an first Cæsar, and the appeal "mihi plaudite" of the attractiveness about his personal characteristics, a second. As Talleyrand, an eye-witness, happily glare, not to say a greatness, about his volcanic phrased it, he "dramatized his death," and if existence, irresistibly fascinating for his country- historians had not gone a step further, nor stripped men; and even cooler men, thinking over his the "drama" of much of its interest by debasing achievements, may be disposed to find in the it into a romance, we should have had fewer justipopular instinct but an anticipation of the judg-fications for the recital that now meets the eye of ments of posterity. No one, probably, ever did the reader.*

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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 gaols 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, high-born and accomplished woman, who had renounced for him everything, he found himself suddenly transferred to the worst gaol 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

so much in so short a time against such difficulties. The health of Mirabeau had long ceased to be 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 venomous," degenerated into a poor libellous "litterateur" immersed in debt, and only remaining in France because, like another Cromwell, balked in his plan of passing to America, who, suddenly ap- cell-sepulchred alive in all his marvellous acpearing before the electors of Aix and Marseilles, tivity from a world which the thoughts of an evoked, by an eloquence till then unheard of in enthralling love, and the ripening hopes of fraFrance, that tumultuous spirit of revolution which ternity, made just then priceless, the ardent so soon afterwards astounded despotic Europe with spirit of the prisoner chafed in maddening impathe spectacle of a sovereign democracy in its tience against the bars of his cage, and life itself midst who, returning to Paris a deputy, and was not without danger, no less from his own marshalling by exhaustless energies the scattered hand than disease, amid the outbreaks of his rage, weakness of popular discontent into an organized and the broodings of his despair. After bearing and systematic resistance, offered at its head for a month what he calls the "mute and terrible defiance to absolute power in its moment of severities" of his horrible abode, he was allowed menace and determination, and legalizing rebellion the privilege of complaint, and we have him by a polity as new as it was commanding, finally writing to his gaoler-"My health is rapidly succeeded, in a few short months, in whelming failing, and my mind, sinking under the weight of the richest, the most learned, and the most power- so many disgraces, loses all its energy. If I ful clergy in the world, into the enduring weakness ought to have hopes in the clemency of the king, 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

* Alison, usually so careful, makes as many faults as he gives lines to the incident; among other instances, attributing to the death speeches pronounced months before, and translating into a quotation from Hamlet an appeal for opium conveyed in the word "Dormir." It would, indeed, not be well for the repute of History, if dent so interesting at the moment to Europe, and occurher value were to be tested by her faithfulness on an inciring 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.

then, doubtless, he does not destine me to a per- | way unaided through no common difficulties, to the 'petual prison. Ah! what a prison !* respectable status of physicianship, and winning Alas! I am thoroughly wearied out by these with it the familiar and confidential converse of inertitudes, these gleams of hope, and these tor- Turgot, D'Holbach, Condillac, Benjamin Franklin, turing fears! Never was I so weak and desolate. Jefferson, Diderot, and D'Alembert. His physioPhysically, as morally, I feel as if annihilated!" logical researches lent elucidations in a new path Through 1778-79, and down to his enlargement, to the materialist doctrines of his friends; and as he complains of being subject to fainty fits-to amid Mirabeau's conflicting sympathies, popular frequent nephritic attacks—to inflammation of the and patrician, he felt, at all events, as much glory eyes, causing frequent loss of sight-to accesses in having made the revolution, as he had gratificaof fever to swelling of the legs, from gouty tion in its subsequent sale, he allied himself rheumatism-to painful fits of indigestion, and to with all the warmth of his character, and more occasional vomiting of blood. His liberation, than its usual stability, to the young savant of new which did not take place till the end of 1780, was thought and philosophic daring, who seemed to followed by years of the exhausting literary and him to embody in its professional relations the forensic labors which distinguished the portion of higher spirit and tendencies of a public which had his life preceding the meeting of the States-Gen-accepted himself as its gigantic motu power. At eral. Dumont, the Genevese Jurisconsult, affirms this time, the summer, as we have said, of 1789, that a person must have enjoyed his opportunity Mirabeau, in addition to the jaundice, a disease of observing Mirabeau, to comprehend how much symptomatic of disorganized liver, was suffering literary labor one man can accomplish in a brief at intervals invasions of fever, the result immediperiod. But during this period, exercise on ately, perhaps, of excesses, but the indications, horseback and foot, sharing the violence of all probably, of deep-seated disease. In the autumn, his doings, came in frequently to vary and relieve an obstinate ophthalmia came in to complicate the the exhausting sensations of intellectual strife. treatment, and at a moment, when he was concenOn the assembly, however, of the States-General, trating by his incessant writings and speeches the he devoted himself entirely to the toils and exer- attention of Europe, and effecting a revolution citations of public affairs, with no alternations under the very arm of arbitrary power, he was an save that won by a passion or vice which, domi-invalid, with troublesome and increasing maladies, nant as his ambition, was, at least, as illicit. and rarely to be seen without bandaged eyes. When the physician to whom he confided his death-bed first saw him, by accident, in July, 1789, shortly after the meeting of the StatesGeneral, 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 semiincredulity. 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-by, 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 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 "Lettres Originales de Mirabeau, ecrites du Donjon de Vincennes."

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 colie 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 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 myste

*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.

66

rious future, was but the day's rapid succession of | told, as nervously sensitive to the smallest immental trouble, anxiety, toil, torture, or excitement. pression as a fine lady in a fit of the vapors." There was no normal animal life; exorbitant vital Worn down by his sufferings and toils, he was action was exhausting, and by degrees annihilating often noticed, during these forty or fifty pre-obit the means, the tendencies, and the instincts of rep- days, to give way to fits of the lowest despondency. aration. A sharer in almost every intrigue and His body moved heavily, as if devoid of vital plot of the day, from the most trivial to the most energy, his memory both for ideas and expressions complicated the author of almost every profound failed by fits; the idea of death entered into all political combination, on which the success of his his thoughts, and chased from them even his party turned a part in every public movement to cherished anticipations of glory. Words of gloom watch, to support, or to oppose the ceaseless and presage fell from his lips-"I feel I am dying student of every political character, to use, to by inches," he once broke out to Dumont. "I circumvent, or to annihilate-his house crowded am consumed as by a slow fire. I shall die at the with visitors and observers, each with his value in stake! "T will be only when I am gone that my a revolution where nobody but the king could be value will be understood." Doomed himself, his a cipher-his table laden with the multifarious great spirit, in process of disenthralment, occupied correspondence of all lands, requiring always at- itself in prophecies-alas! but too true!-of tention, and often delicate handling-the press kindred woes to his country. informed of every act of his private life, and Hurrying, however, with his eyes open, to that swarming with attacks not always to be despised physical ruin which he designates the “finest inor forgotten-pamphlets and weekly journals to vention of nature," Gabriel Mirabeau remained be constantly prepared in his study-elaborate the same man. His approaching" aneantissement,” speeches or fiery conflicts to be ever and anon as he called it, had influences on him wholly sustained in the Assembly, in whose heated and special. Above all people, an opinion with him poisonous atmosphere he had to give daily attend- had practical effect; once adopted, no doubt stood ance-creditors to appease-mistresses to satisfy between him and its kindred action. Four years -a mob to please the Jacobins to soothe and before he had written, "I am so little certain of deceive the court to overawe and plunder-the living the month after that in which I have conconstitutionalists to mystify and use-and, finally, ceived a good idea, that I burn with impatience his already huge reputation to aggrandize at any to see it realized, fearful lest it should perish with price-that reputation, too, of first orator, first me, and that time should cut me down before I statesman, first demagogue, and first roué, in an can bequeath it to mankind; for we ought no epoch of such things-such were the tasks, suf- more to die than to live without glory. My ferings, and labors of this modern Hercules, at the opinion respecting this world is, that the smallest very moment that his sensitive and susceptible good, as well as the greatest, is rewarded beyond frame was festering to death, under the exhaustion its worth; and thus I will pass my life in acquireof all sorts of excesses, and the Nessus garment ment, physically and morally, knowing well, of an infamous name! But, as if appetite grew however, that the game is not worth the candle. on what it fed-as if the utmost toil only increased But I am tormented by my own activity, and when the call for more-or, as if the man's avidity or the candle, burnt out at both ends, shall be ex ambition was so uncontrollable that he could refuse hausted well, it will go out, but it will have give nothing that took the shape of credit or profit-for the smallness of its volume a bright light!' it was at this moment, when all his engagements And on this reckless system of extravagant econwere most pressing, and his health most infirm, omy, grand in its very recklessness, the aim of that this Titan of labor sought and obtained the the last month of his existence was to devote the office of commander in the National Guards, remaining scraps of the candle of life to expire in director of the Department of Paris, and president a conflagration! of the National Assembly. The presidentship So late as the 28th of February, with charges was a specially fatal honor; it hastened the death of treason and threats of assassination ringing in that followed six weeks later. Without sensibly his ear, he entered the tribune to return, as he lessening his customary labors, its two sittings said, in triumph, or dead; and, in one of the daily required an exhausting attendance, in addition | most energetic of his many speeches, successfully to the peculiar engagements inseparable from the office, in those days of demonstrative patriotism.

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 reäppear 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 horrible suffering, till in fine this athlete of muscular power became, as we are

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

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

his public life. In the very proportion of his ex- | rapidly surrounding the popular idol, each, with haustion, 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 characterless 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 spas-criticisms and new projects the scenes suggested modic 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 specuJated largely in the mines-the well-known 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 coun-acquainted with!" He meant his will, on whose tenance 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 measure.

It was his last victory there alive, and dearly purchased. He walked out of the hall deathstricken. Taking the arm of Lacheze, a medical friend of Cabanis, he was conducted to the Terrace de Feuillants. Painting in his vivid way the effects of his late exhausting exertions, symptoms more ominous even than painful-and assured, in answer, of the obvious truth that his recklessness amounted to self-slaughter, he replied, Could one do less for justice, and in so important a case?" A crowd

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 afterwards, found him in an agony, with breathing so painful that the whole face was swelled by it, and suffocation seemed imminent. The physician 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 many hours in anxieties so painful-make haste, for it cannot last. I should feel satisfied if I had discharged one duty which my friend Frochot is

execution, he said, "the lot of many dear to him
depended," and which with much difficulty he al-
lowed to be postponed, that he might be bled and
blistered. After these operations, aided, it would
seem, by some saline medicines, he derived so
much relief, that, during the night, and part of
Tuesday, he seemed to progress to assured recov-
ery. He surveyed the improvement with a gratifi-
cation in some shape peculiar. The "possessor
of ten men's life," to use his own phrase, he had
a thousand men's love of it. His mind full of
gigantic projects, which his superhuman activity
was every day ripening into form and fact, had
found at last an arena and an epoch every way
worthy of its aspirations.
Before him was an
undefined and measureless career of ambition and
glory; around him a circle of friends whose
affections he prized, and, at least, as warmly re-
turned in one word, life at this moment offered