Kitabı oku: «Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.», sayfa 4

After passing a couple of hours in confidences and lamentations, they recollected that the hours of liberty granted, as an especial favor, to Mademoiselle Hortense, had expired: but ashamed to exhibit her husband in his present condition to the eyes of strangers, Natalie prepared to re-conduct her to the Maison Royale herself. Looking into the dining-room as they passed, they saw De Chaulieu lying on a sofa fast asleep, in which state he continued when his wife returned. At length, however, the driver of their carriage begged to know if Monsieur and Madame were ready to return to Paris, and it became necessary to arouse him. The transitory effects of the Champagne had now subsided; but when De Chaulieu recollected what had happened, nothing could exceed his shame and mortification. So engrossing indeed were these sensations that they quite overpowered his previous ones, and, in his present vexation, he, for the moment, forgot his fears. He knelt at his wife's feet, begged her pardon a thousand times, swore that he adored her, and declared that the illness and the effect of the wine had been purely the consequences of fasting and over-work. It was not the easiest thing in the world to reassure a woman whose pride, affection, and taste, had been so severely wounded; but Natalie tried to believe, or to appear to do so, and a sort of reconciliation ensued, not quite sincere on the part of the wife, and very humbling on the part of the husband. Under these circumstances it was impossible that he should recover his spirits or facility of manner; his gayety was forced, his tenderness constrained; his heart was heavy within him; and ever and anon the source whence all this disappointment and woe had sprung would recur to his perplexed and tortured mind.

Thus mutually pained and distrustful, they returned to Paris, which they reached about nine o'clock. In spite of her depression, Natalie, who had not seen her new apartments, felt some curiosity about them, while De Chaulieu anticipated a triumph in exhibiting the elegant home he had prepared for her. With some alacrity, therefore, they stepped out of the carriage, the gates of the Hôtel were thrown open, the concierge rang the bell which announced to the servants that their master and mistress had arrived, and while these domestics appeared above, holding lights over the balusters, Natalie, followed by her husband, ascended the stairs. But when they reached the landing-place of the first flight, they saw the figure of a man standing in a corner as if to make way for them; the flash from above fell upon his face, and again Antoine de Chaulieu recognized the feature of Jacques Rollet!

From the circumstance of his wife's preceding him, the figure was not observed by De Chaulieu till he was lifting his foot to place it on the top stair: the sudden shock caused him to miss the step, and, without uttering a sound, he fell back, and never stopped till he reached the stones at the bottom. The screams of Natalie brought the concierge from below and the maids from above, and an attempt was made to raise the unfortunate man from the ground; but with cries of anguish he besought them to desist.

"Let me," he said, "die here! What a fearful vengeance is thine! Oh, Natalie, Natalie!" he exclaimed to his wife, who was kneeling beside him, "to win fame, and fortune, and yourself, I committed a dreadful crime! With lying words I argued away the life of a fellow-creature, whom, while I uttered them, I half believed to be innocent; and now, when I have attained all I desired, and reached the summit of my hopes, the Almighty has sent him back upon the earth to blast me with the sight. Three times this day – three times this day! Again! again!" – and, as he spoke, his wild and dilated eyes fixed themselves on one of the individuals that surrounded him.

"He is delirious," said they.

"No," said the stranger! "What he says is true enough – at least in part;" and bending over the expiring man, he added, "May Heaven forgive you, Antoine de Chaulieu! I was not executed; one who well knew my innocence saved my life. I may name him, for he is beyond the reach of the law now – it was Claperon, the jailor, who loved Claudine, and had himself killed Alphonse de Bellefonds from jealousy. An unfortunate wretch had been several years in the jail for a murder committed during the frenzy of a fit of insanity. Long confinement had reduced him to idiocy. To save my life Claperon substituted the senseless being for me, on the scaffold, and he was executed in my stead. He has quitted the country, and I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth ever since that time. At length I obtained, through the assistance of my sister, the situation of concierge in the Hôtel Marbœuf, in the Rue Grange-Batelière. I entered on my new place yesterday evening, and was desired to awaken the gentleman on the third floor at seven o'clock. When I entered the room to do so, you were asleep, but before I had time to speak you awoke, and I recognized your features in the glass. Knowing that I could not vindicate my innocence if you chose to seize me, I fled, and seeing an omnibus starting for St. Denis, I got on it with a vague idea of getting on to Calais, and crossing the Channel to England. But having only a franc or two in my pocket, or indeed in the world, I did not know how to procure the means of going forward; and while I was lounging about the place, forming first one plan and then another, I saw you in the church, and concluding you were in pursuit of me, I thought the best way of eluding your vigilance was to make my way back to Paris as fast as I could; so I set off instantly, and walked all the way; but having no money to pay my night's lodging, I came here to borrow a couple of livres of my sister Claudine, who lives in the fifth story."

"Thank Heaven!" exclaimed the dying man; "that sin is off my soul! Natalie, dear wife, farewell! Forgive! forgive all!"

These were the last words he uttered; the priest, who had been summoned in haste, held up the cross before his failing sight; a few strong convulsions shook the poor bruised and mangled frame; and then all was still.

And thus ended the Young Advocate's Wedding Day.

[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

THE REVOLUTIONISM OF MIRABEAU

The moral is evolved out of the physical, and the extraordinary in animal structure has a kinship to the portentous in human action.

Mirabeau, the infamous, born in an age, of a family, in a rank the most vicious in the annals of vice, of parents whose depravity had contaminated even their blood, was ushered with infinite difficulty into the breathing scene he was so much to trouble, and offered, at the outset of his disorderly career, misfortune and singularity in a twisted fool, a tied tongue, and two molar teeth.

Maltreated by fortune, which, at the age of three, turned him by disease into the ugliest of children – "a tiger marked by the small-pox" – caressed and neglected by his dissolute mother, disowned and persecuted as a spurious graft in his house and home by the celebrated "Economist," his father – his very childhood presaged the disorders of his youth and manhood; and his father, mysteriously reverting to early crimes and calamities as the blight of his life, made it matter of complaint that Honoré Gabriel, as a boy, had more cleverness "than all the devils in h – l," and seemed destined from his childhood "to disturb the monarchy, as a second Cardinal de Retz."

He was indeed born a Revolutionist; and if he had not found the elements of a bouleversement, was competent to have created them. But just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and Thyestes, the child was trained into demoralization, vicissitude, and daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and an absconding wife, bragging of her love for her husband." The Vicomte, his brother, "would have been a roué and a wit," he tells us, "in any family but his own," and was, of a dissolute noblesse, its most dissolute member. His mother, driven with contumely from her home and the bosom of her family, under accusations the most revolting a wife may hear from one who is her husband and a father, addressed the world in public recriminations for her persecutor, not less disgusting or condemnatory. The son himself, the most infamous man of his time, completes the picture in the boast he made to the National Assembly, that among the tragic woes of his family he had been the witness of fifty-four lettres-de-cachet, seventeen of them on his own account!

As in Eastern climates the abundance of degenerate man will, at some spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself in one family, produced the man who was to begin the catastrophe.

At seventeen, leaving a military academy, he entered the army as a sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek, but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a fair share of the scattered erudition won by readings more desultory than diligent.

Presented at court, admitted to the rare aristocratic privilege of riding in the king's carriages at Versailles, laughed at as the Princess Elizabeth's living specimen of inoculation, the incipient courtier and embryo revolutionist was awakened from his delightful vision to find himself suddenly transferred from his regal residence and gayeties, to the sombre solitude of a country jail. He had been guilty of a passionate attachment to a young lady of disproportionate expectations.

The young victim of parental wrong, thus severely taught that the splendors of a court were but a veneer under which lay the terrible springs of a wayward tyranny, killed time in brooding over the ideas and studies which subsequently formed his "Essai" no less than his character – "sur le despotisme." But before completing the work, the father's monomania had been temporarily mitigated by the vengeance of a year's imprisonment; and the son, instead of being sent to Surinam, the Dutch Sierra Leone of that day, was graciously permitted, under the bourgeois name of "Buffiere," to enter as a gentleman volunteer the French army that was about to crush the Corsicans in their noble struggle against Genoese oppression.

In this liberticidal war, the liberty-loving Mirabeau performed his first manly act, won his first public distinction, and initiated that series of paradox, and moral revolutionism, that was hence to follow him as lover, litterateur, and politician, to the grave. As his sword was against Corsica and freedom, his pen was for them. He wrote over the ruins of both a boyish philippic, admired by his victims, and burnt by his father!

And while the brain that was to rule France as a tribune-king, was thus evolving its idle progeny, the womb of a Corsican woman near him was travailing with him who was to be Napoleon! At the instant France, by the sword of her future liberator, was mowing down the new-born liberties of Corsica – Corsica was breathing the breath of life into a child, whose sword was to cleave down the fresh-won freedom of France! As a Cæsar and a Marius sprung from the blood of the Gracchi, there would have been no Corsican exterminator for France, had there been no French exterminators for Corsica.⁷ There are surely times when fate plays with mortals, making of the murder of a generation or the revolution of an empire a nursery game of coincidences!

Of the twenty years that followed, bringing Mirabeau to the footsteps of the revolution, and within two years of his death, it was the odd fate of this gay and gifted noble, guilty of no offense against the state, nor in a legal sense against society, to pass more than the moiety of his time in the sad rôle of a state prisoner; and the main incidents in the unhappy sequence of wrong and suffering, the inevitable but unrecognized logic of Providence, were briefly, and in succession, a profitless marriage with the most distinguished heiress of his province, carried off from twenty more eligible rivals by the superior strategy of seduction and defamation, pecuniary extravagance, dissipation, debts, sequestration of property, marital separation, successive imprisonments by paternal intervention, deadly hate with the father, permanent alienation from his adulterous wife and only child, licentious connection with a friend's wife, with whom he abandoned his country, exile in Switzerland, Holland, and England, successive litigations self-conducted, a ministerial spyship in Prussia, and a career more or less stormy, as a litterateur, in France.

Entombed in one of the horrid dungeons of Vincennes, solitary, hopeless, almost without a sympathy, though in the very spring-tide of his rich youth and activity, the angel of consolation, never far from us in our darkest hour, came down, and in the genial guise of literature, visited in his dungeon this man of infamies and suffering. It must, however, be confessed against him that, maddened by the severity of a despotism without appeal, in the wrong – and from that hand, too, whence he might fairly have hoped a kinder gift, even the wholesomeness of books became poisoned under his diseased digestion, and it became his wretched pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination.

But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those extensive studies of history and its philosophy to which we owe, among much else that is great in literature or in event, the three works on "Despotism," "State Prisons," and "Lettres-de-Cachet."

To our present purpose it would be of little use to indulge in any lengthened analysis or literary estimate of these performances. Gratifying his need of money, his love of fame, and, above all, a vengeance warmly nursed, which even virtue can not censure, their publication formed, probably, the happiest incidents of his life. The first published in his twenty-fifth year, bears all the characteristics of the young man of genius, roughened, no less than strengthened by the asperities of the experience out of whose ireful plenitude he writes. Rough and disorderly in arrangement, it is lofty, striking, eloquent in style – cogent, daring, powerful in matter.

The last, the result of his long, final imprisonment, and published in his thirty-first year, possesses similar attributes, aggrandized, or improved. A great work, involving an inquiry into the first principles of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great, sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general rule, work, rather than literature, in his sentences, and the just, the practical, the statesman-like are the dominating qualities. We must not look for the artist in Mirabeau as a writer: he is above that: nor, whatever the range of thought we may justly concede him, may we, therefore, expect the sublime; he is below that. With the eloquence of an impassioned imagination, united to the unornamented vigor of a ready, versatile, and comprehensive reason, he reminds one of some colossal engine in forceful, though not always in graceful action.

In Holland, occupied in literature and the society of literary men, and subsequently in England, in commerce with Franklin, Dr. Price, Samuel Romilly, and Wilkes – among whom be it said, en passant, he acquired the reputation of an habitual liar – a thousand circumstances must have presented themselves, not more in his own studies than in the freedom, seriousness, and activity he saw around him, to prepare and stimulate his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of popular action for France, in which he is to play a leading part – a faith so early ripened that, in 1782, meeting at Neufchatel certain State Deputies of Geneva, he based on the inevitable meeting of the States General the prediction, or rather the promise, that he would become a deputy, and in that character restore their country to freedom.

Returning to Paris at a moment when the increasing and unmanageable deficit brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance, while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence, willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of the great question of the times.

His ministerial spyship in Prussia, which, subsequently divulged by his own audacious publication of his secret correspondence, won from M. de Montesquieu the remark, that "the infamy of the person might be estimated by the infamy of the thing," was not without its compensations in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him – I could wish to say honestly – those historic and statistical data which, published in his elaborate work on the Prussian monarchy, countenanced some serious claims to statesmanship.

Misfortune, passion, solitude, suffering, travel, extraordinary adventures, extensive readings, varied studies, innumerable writings thus admirably endowing his mind, so disposed, too, by nature, for the daring and stormy struggles of the revolution, the only resource that could surely be wanting to so enormous a compound of intellectual strength, I mean the power of oratory, he was fated to acquire in his lengthened trials for the recovery of his wife and legal rights.

Opposed by Alps of difficulties, the moral greater than the legal, for the suits ploughed deeply into all the crimes or errors that had dishonored his career, and would necessarily turn up masses of documentary evidence, which on no less authority than that of his father, must carry the tale of his infamy to every eye; yet his audacity dared, as his genius surmounted, every disadvantage, and after fixing the admiration of a province – to him a sufficient compensation – by the ingenuity, the power, and the extraordinary resources of his eloquence in a path so new to him, he succeeded in re-establishing his civil rights, and but failed in the second, and, perhaps, less important suit, by the accident of a technicality.

Passing by his double election as Deputy, at Aix and Marseilles, marked by excitement, insurrection and all the stirring incidents that, in a moment of great public agitation, might be expected to accompany the début of a daring and accomplished demagogue, we are now brought to the greatest epoch of France, and, therefore, of Mirabeau – the meeting of the States General; and the observation is naturally suggested that, if this extraordinary succession of circumstances, marvelous as incidents, but still more marvelous as coincidents, had not specially moulded the man for his work, it might well be doubted that the French revolution could have happened, or at all events, in such gigantic proportions. Mirabeau's life was, as we have seen, a pupilage, as it is now to become a mastership, in revolution. His Saturn of a father had trained him, from his youth upward, into the executionership of his order; and Heaven itself, as if seconding some such inscrutable design, seems to have stooped to lead by the hand this servant of Nemesis, through paths the most devious and unfrequented, but, of all others, the most fitted to form and conduct him to the emergency.

A change, it is true of some kind in French Government, accompanied by more or less confusion and bloodshed, had been long inevitable. Genius, good sense, suffering, luxury, oppression, contumely, unprincipledness, and folly, each boon of nature, each wrong of man, had concurred, after more than a century of struggle, in necessitating a consummation.

In my opinion, the popular horrors that darkened the end of the eighteenth century, though pointed in their way by the finger of Mirabeau, legitimately trace their pedigree to the royal grandeurs that closed the preceding one. The French Revolution was born of Louis the Fourteenth. His policy – his achievements – his failures, and, still more, his personal character and court deportment, killed monarchy in the hearts of the French people. The prominent ruling characteristic of himself and reign was an all-absorbing egotism. A maelstrom of selfishness, and unconscious of any law of reciprocity to arise from his relations to a common humanity, this chief and example of a numerous aristocracy was the grand centre to which was to be directed every affection and service, from which was to be circulated every volition and ordinance. And need I say that no eminence of intellectual power – no prudence of personal deportment – no brilliancy of external achievement, can or ought to have any effect on spectators so keen-witted and impressionable as the French, save to make additionally insupportable a character which, even on the smallest scale, is, of all others, the most odious and repulsive. The stern unity and perfection of order in which he was enabled to present political power – that necessary evil of human existence – but added intensity to the hate, as it added grandeur to the idea of his despotism. In the eyes of his suffering subjects it brought him face to face with the catastrophes no less than with the glories of his reign, and without the merit of the avowal —adsum qui feci! gave him all its dread responsibilities. An old despot surviving his greatness while retaining the stinging irony of its title – a saint amid the standing reminiscences of his adulteries, expiating his pleasures by annihilating those of others, and tormenting consciences to save his own – his suffering and downcast people became at length disabused but too utterly of the base apotheosis of his person and character, so long maintained by him in the name of a false glory and debased religion. They even publicly rejoiced at a death-bed made pitiable by the absence of his mistress, confessor, and family; and meeting in mobs that, encountering his corpse on its way through by-lanes to hugger-mugger interment at St. Denis, they might tear it into shreds, gave early and portentous evidence that the germ of an envenomed and bloody democracy had been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to complete the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his throne, surrounded by a dissolute clergy, an overbearing aristocracy, and a discontented and impoverished people, the robed Louis the Sixteenth seemed but the calf of atonement of the Scriptures decked for sacrifice, and doomed to expiate a century of court gayeties and crimes in which he had had no part!

Mirabeau began the revolution with a thousand vague hopes and expectations, and the conviction, communicated to his friend Mauvillon, that "it was not given to human sagacity to devise where all this would end." A living conflict of passions and principles, of low needs and high ambitions, of lofty genius and infamous repute, a demagogue by policy, an aristocrat by vanity, a constitutionalist by conviction, his public conduct anxiously and perpetually brought in evidence one or other of these conflicting agencies; but beyond the personal aim of recovering his rank, and winning some sort of greatness at any price, he was without one pervading or dominant public purpose, save that of extinguishing the despotism that had injured him. Above all policies, abstractedly considered, this was the one dear to his heart. "I come here to grant, not to ask pardon," was his reply, in a voice of angry defiance, to some oratorical assurance that a life of usefulness might secure the pardon of his earlier delinquencies. A horrid, but too natural vindictiveness had interwoven the hate of arbitrary power into every fibre of his brain. It was a passion or sentiment that he never abandoned: it may be even doubted if he could have been purchased out of it. Despite all the evils and mischances of life, there stood erect in his soul this one small altar to virtue, or something that resembled it, which he would have thrown down but under the direst necessity.

But of all the circumstances glanced at as furnishing the key to many of the paradoxes of his public conduct, one of the most important, though perhaps the least appreciated, is the dishonor of his repute. It is difficult, with his present position in history, especially when taken in relation to the now well-certified worthlessness of his contemporaries, to realize to the imagination the full extent of his infamy. "You dare," said his former friend Rulhiere, in a pamphlet that had a wide circulation, "You dare to speak of a country, Count Mirabeau! If your brow were not trebly bronzed, how must you have blushed at its very name! Have you one quality of father, friend, brother, husband, or relative? An honorable vocation? Any one attribute that constitutes the citizen? Not one! You are without a refuge, without a relative. I seek your most ordinary domiciles, and I find them but in the prison of Vincennes, the Chateau d'If, the fortress of Ioux, the jail of Pontarlier!"⁸

Dumont, coming over to Paris, was so moved by the discredit attached, in respectable circles, to his acquaintance, that he visited him with repugnance and as a duty, but records the characteristic incident, that on his first call he was so won by the magic of his host's conversation, as to depart resolved on retaining, at all hazards, so agreeable a friendship. The mention of his name, with the sight of his person, at the opening of the States General, elicited groans and hisses on all sides. The Tiers-Etat– whom he had honored by his aristocratic adoption – were unanimous in refusing him a hearing the two or three occasions on which he first sought to address them. The queen, whose life, family, and regal heritage were at stake, received the assurance, that such a person was willing to assist the views of the court, with "the contempt due to vice;"⁹ and "assassin!" "robber!" "slanderer!" were the epithets almost daily applied to him in the senate of the nation! Society, expiring under the weight of its own vices, saw in him that well-defined excess that entitled it to the merits of purgation in his extruism, of atonement in his martyrdom, and to place the hand of menace and malediction on his head, as the scape-goat of its redemption!

Thus detested by all parties, his low character keeping him low, Mirabeau, with all his marvelous power, found himself placed, by public contempt, more even than by private need, at the mercy of circumstances. Befoulment had so far eaten into his name, that, with occasionally the best of desires, and always the greatest of energies, there stood a blight over both. He felt that a moral leprosy incrusted him, which repelled the good, and kept aloof the prudent. The contemned inferior, in moral standing, of those that surrounded him, it was difficult to be honest, and impossible to be independent. By a sort of law of nature, too, his tarred repute attracted to it every floating feather of suspicion, no less than of guilt, as to its natural seat; and thus it happened that the lofty genius of Mirabeau, under the "grand hests" of a hateful necessity, like the "too delicate spirit," Ariel, tasked to the "strong biddings" of the "foul witch Sycorax," was condemned for a while to pander rather than teach, to follow rather than lead, to please rather than patronize, and to halloo others' opinions rather than vindicate his own!

No man could appreciate the misfortune more fully or sensitively than himself. Dumont tells us that, taught by events that a good character would have placed France at his feet, "he would have passed seven times through the fiery furnace to purify his name;" and that, "weeping and sobbing, he was accustomed to exclaim, 'Cruelly do I expiate the errors of my youth!'" And, indeed, the more sensible his heart, the more rich and elevated his soul, the more must his torments have been bitter and redoubled; for the very preciousness of the gifts of nature, the charms of society, even the friendship of those that surrounded him, must have turned but to the increase of his wretchedness!