Death of Mirabeau.
But Mirabeau could not live another year, any more than he could
live another thousand years. Men’s years are numbered, and the
tale of Mirabeau’s was now complete. Important, or unimportant;
to be mentioned in World-History for some centuries, or not to be
mentioned there beyond a day or two,—it matters not to peremptory
Fate. From amid the press of ruddy busy Life, the Pale Messenger
beckons silently: wide-spreading interests, projects, salvation
of French Monarchies, what thing soever man has on hand, he must
suddenly quit it all, and go. Wert thou saving French Monarchies;
wert thou blacking shoes on the Pont Neuf! The most important of
men cannot stay; did the World’s History depend on an hour, that
hour is not to be given. Whereby, indeed, it comes that these
same _would-have-beens_ are mostly a vanity; and the World’s
History could never in the least be what it would, or might, or
should, by any manner of potentiality, but simply and altogether
what it _is_.
The fierce wear and tear of such an existence has wasted out the
giant oaken strength of Mirabeau. A fret and fever that keeps
heart and brain on fire: excess of effort, of excitement; excess
of all kinds: labour incessant, almost beyond credibility! “If I
had not lived with him,” says Dumont, “I should never have known
what a man can make of one day; what things may be placed within
the interval of twelve hours. A day for this man was more than a
week or a month is for others: the mass of things he guided on
together was prodigious; from the scheming to the executing not a
moment lost.” ‘Monsieur le Comte,’ said his Secretary to him
once, ‘what you require is impossible.’—‘Impossible!’ answered he
starting from his chair, ‘_Ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot_,
Never name to me that blockhead of a word.’[355] And then the
social repasts; the dinner which he gives as Commandant of
National Guards, which “costs five hundred pounds;” alas, and
“the Sirens of the Opera;” and all the ginger that is hot in the
mouth:—down what a course is this man hurled! Cannot Mirabeau
stop; cannot he fly, and save himself alive? No! There is a
Nessus’ Shirt on this Hercules; he must storm and burn there,
without rest, till he be consumed. Human strength, never so
Herculean, has its measure. Herald shadows flit pale across the
fire-brain of Mirabeau; heralds of the pale repose. While he
tosses and storms, straining every nerve, in that sea of ambition
and confusion, there comes, sombre and still, a monition that for
him the issue of it will be swift death.
In January last, you might see him as President of the Assembly;
“his neck wrapt in linen cloths, at the evening session:” there
was sick heat of the blood, alternate darkening and flashing in
the eye-sight; he had to apply leeches, after the morning labour,
and preside bandaged. “At parting he embraced me,” says Dumont,
“with an emotion I had never seen in him: ‘I am dying, my friend;
dying as by slow fire; we shall perhaps not meet again. When I am
gone, they will know what the value of me was. The miseries I
have held back will burst from all sides on France.’”[356]
Sickness gives louder warning; but cannot be listened to. On the
27th day of March, proceeding towards the Assembly, he had to
seek rest and help in Friend de Lamarck’s, by the road; and lay
there, for an hour, half-fainted, stretched on a sofa. To the
Assembly nevertheless he went, as if in spite of Destiny itself;
spoke, loud and eager, five several times; then quitted the
Tribune—for ever. He steps out, utterly exhausted, into the
Tuileries Gardens; many people press round him, as usual, with
applications, memorials; he says to the Friend who was with him:
Take me out of this!
And so, on the last day of March 1791, endless anxious multitudes
beset the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin; incessantly inquiring:
within doors there, in that House numbered in our time “42,” the
over wearied giant has fallen down, to die.[357] Crowds, of all
parties and kinds; of all ranks from the King to the meanest man!
The King sends publicly twice a-day to inquire; privately
besides: from the world at large there is no end of inquiring. “A
written bulletin is handed out every three hours,” is copied and
circulated; in the end, it is printed. The People spontaneously
keep silence; no carriage shall enter with its noise: there is
crowding pressure; but the Sister of Mirabeau is reverently
recognised, and has free way made for her. The People stand mute,
heart-stricken; to all it seems as if a great calamity were nigh:
as if the last man of France, who could have swayed these coming
troubles, lay there at hand-grips with the unearthly Power.
The silence of a whole People, the wakeful toil of Cabanis,
Friend and Physician, skills not: on Saturday, the second day of
April, Mirabeau feels that the last of the Days has risen for
him; that, on this day, he has to depart and be no more. His
death is Titanic, as his life has been. Lit up, for the last
time, in the glare of coming dissolution, the mind of the man is
all glowing and burning; utters itself in sayings, such as men
long remember. He longs to live, yet acquiesces in death, argues
not with the inexorable. His speech is wild and wondrous:
unearthly Phantasms dancing now their torch-dance round his soul;
the soul itself looking out, fire-radiant, motionless, girt
together for that great hour! At times comes a beam of light from
him on the world he is quitting. ‘I carry in my heart the
death-dirge of the French Monarchy; the dead remains of it will
now be the spoil of the factious.’ Or again, when he heard the
cannon fire, what is characteristic too: ‘Have we the Achilles’
Funeral already?’ So likewise, while some friend is supporting
him: ‘Yes, support that head; would I could bequeath it thee!’
For the man dies as he has lived; self-conscious, conscious of a
world looking on. He gazes forth on the young Spring, which for
him will never be Summer. The Sun has risen; he says: ‘_Si ce
n’est pas là Dieu, c’est du moins son cousin
germain_.’[358]—Death has mastered the outworks; power of speech
is gone; the citadel of the heart still holding out: the moribund
giant, passionately, by sign, demands paper and pen; writes his
passionate demand for opium, to end these agonies. The sorrowful
Doctor shakes his head: _Dormir_ “To sleep,” writes the other,
passionately pointing at it! So dies a gigantic Heathen and
Titan; stumbling blindly, undismayed, down to his rest. At
half-past eight in the morning, Dr. Petit, standing at the foot
of the bed, says ‘_Il ne souffre plus_.’ His suffering and his
working are now ended.
Even so, ye silent Patriot multitudes, all ye men of France; this
man is rapt away from you. He has fallen suddenly, without
bending till he broke; as a tower falls, smitten by sudden
lightning. His word ye shall hear no more, his guidance follow no
more.—The multitudes depart, heartstruck; spread the sad tidings.
How touching is the loyalty of men to their Sovereign Man! All
theatres, public amusements close; no joyful meeting can be held
in these nights, joy is not for them: the People break in upon
private dancing-parties, and sullenly command that they cease. Of
such dancing-parties apparently but two came to light; and these
also have gone out. The gloom is universal: never in this City
was such sorrow for one death; never since that old night when
Louis XII. departed, “and the _Crieurs des Corps_ went sounding
their bells, and crying along the streets: _Le bon roi Louis,
père du peuple, est mort_, The good King Louis, Father of the
People, is dead!”[359] King Mirabeau is now the lost King; and
one may say with little exaggeration, all the People mourns for
him.
For three days there is low wide moan: weeping in the National
Assembly itself. The streets are all mournful; orators mounted on
the _bornes_, with large silent audience, preaching the funeral
sermon of the dead. Let no coachman whip fast, distractively with
his rolling wheels, or almost at all, through these groups! His
traces may be cut; himself and his fare, as incurable
Aristocrats, hurled sulkily into the kennels. The bourne-stone
orators speak as it is given them; the Sansculottic People, with
its rude soul, listens eager,—as men will to any Sermon, or
_Sermo_, when it _is_ a spoken Word meaning a Thing, and not a
Babblement meaning No-thing. In the Restaurateur’s of the Palais
Royal, the waiter remarks, ‘Fine weather, Monsieur:’—‘Yes, my
friend,’ answers the ancient Man of Letters, ‘very fine; but
Mirabeau is dead.’ Hoarse rhythmic threnodies comes also from the
throats of balladsingers; are sold on gray-white paper at a _sou_
each.[360] But of Portraits, engraved, painted, hewn, and
written; of Eulogies, Reminiscences, Biographies, nay
_Vaudevilles_, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France,
there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable
crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of
burlesque might be in it, is Gobel’s Episcopal _Mandement_
wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional
Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein _Ça ira_ alternates very
strangely with _Nomine Domini_, and you are, with a grave
countenance, invited to “rejoice at possessing in the midst of
you a body of Prelates created by Mirabeau, zealous followers of
his doctrine, faithful imitators of his virtues.”[361] So speaks,
and cackles manifold, the Sorrow of France; wailing articulately,
inarticulately, as it can, that a Sovereign Man is snatched away.
In the National Assembly, when difficult questions are astir, all
eyes will “turn mechanically to the place where Mirabeau
sat,”—and Mirabeau is absent now.
On the third evening of the lamentation, the fourth of April,
there is solemn Public Funeral; such as deceased mortal seldom
had. Procession of a league in length; of mourners reckoned
loosely at a hundred thousand! All roofs are thronged with
onlookers, all windows, lamp-irons, branches of trees. “Sadness
is painted on every countenance; many persons weep.” There is
double hedge of National Guards; there is National Assembly in a
body; Jacobin Society, and Societies; King’s Ministers,
Municipals, and all Notabilities, Patriot or Aristocrat. Bouillé
is noticeable there, “with his hat on;” say, hat drawn over his
brow, hiding many thoughts! Slow-wending, in religious silence,
the Procession of a league in length, under the level sun-rays,
for it is five o’clock, moves and marches: with its sable plumes;
itself in a religious silence; but, by fits, with the muffled
roll of drums, by fits with some long-drawn wail of music, and
strange new clangour of trombones, and metallic dirge-voice; amid
the infinite hum of men. In the Church of Saint-Eustache, there
is funeral oration by Cerutti; and discharge of fire-arms, which
“brings down pieces of the plaster.” Thence, forward again to the
Church of Sainte-Genevieve; which has been consecrated, by
supreme decree, on the spur of this time, into a Pantheon for the
Great Men of the Fatherland, _Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie
réconnaissante_. Hardly at midnight is the business done; and
Mirabeau left in his dark dwelling: first tenant of that
Fatherland’s Pantheon.
Tenant, alas, who inhabits but at will, and shall be cast out!
For, in these days of convulsion and disjection, not even the
dust of the dead is permitted to rest. Voltaire’s bones are, by
and by, to be carried from their stolen grave in the Abbéy of
Scellières, to an eager _stealing_ grave, in Paris his
birth-city: all mortals processioning and perorating there; cars
drawn by eight white horses, goadsters in classical costume, with
fillets and wheat-ears enough;—though the weather is of the
wettest.[362] Evangelist Jean Jacques, too, as is most proper,
must be dug up from Ermenonville, and processioned, with pomp,
with sensibility, to the Pantheon of the Fatherland.[363] He and
others: while again Mirabeau, we say, is cast forth from it,
happily incapable of being replaced; and rests now,
irrecognisable, reburied hastily at dead of night, in the central
“part of the Churchyard Sainte-Catherine, in the Suburb
Saint-Marceau,” to be disturbed no further.
So blazes out, farseen, a Man’s Life, and becomes ashes and a
_caput mortuum_, in this World-Pyre, which we name French
Revolution: not the first that consumed itself there; nor, by
thousands and many millions, the last! A man who “had swallowed
all formulas;” who, in these strange times and circumstances,
felt called to live Titanically, and also to die so. As he, for
his part had swallowed all formulas, what Formula is there, never
so comprehensive, that will express truly the _plus_ and the
_minus_, give us the accurate net-result of him? There is
hitherto none such. Moralities not a few must shriek condemnatory
over this Mirabeau; the Morality by which he could be judged has
not yet got uttered in the speech of men. We shall say this of
him, again: That he is a Reality, and no Simulacrum: a living son
of Nature our general Mother; not a hollow Artfice, and mechanism
of Conventionalities, son of nothing, _brother_ to nothing. In
which little word, let the earnest man, walking sorrowful in a
world mostly of “Stuffed Clothes-suits,” that chatter and grin
meaningless on him, quite _ghastly_ to the earnest soul,—think
what significance there is!
Of men who, in such sense, are alive, and see with eyes, the
number is now not great: it may be well, if in this huge French
Revolution itself, with its all-developing fury, we find some
Three. Mortals driven rabid we find; sputtering the acridest
logic; baring their breast to the battle-hail, their neck to the
guillotine; of whom it is so painful to say that they too are
still, in good part, manufactured Formalities, not Facts but
Hearsays!
Honour to the strong man, in these ages, who has shaken himself
loose of shams, and is something. For in the way of being
_worthy_, the first condition surely is that one _be_. Let Cant
cease, at all risks and at all costs: till Cant cease, nothing
else can begin. Of human Criminals, in these centuries, writes
the Moralist, I find but one unforgivable: the Quack. “Hateful to
God,” as divine Dante sings, “and to the Enemies of God,
‘A Dio spiacente ed a’ nemici sui!’
But whoever will, with sympathy, which is the first essential
towards insight, look at this questionable Mirabeau, may find
that there lay verily in him, as the basis of all, a Sincerity, a
great free Earnestness; nay call it Honesty, for the man did
before all things see, with that clear flashing vision, into what
was, into what existed as fact; and did, with his wild heart,
follow that and no other. Whereby on what ways soever he travels
and struggles, often enough falling, he is still a brother man.
Hate him not; thou canst not hate him! Shining through such soil
and tarnish, and now victorious effulgent, and oftenest
struggling eclipsed, the light of genius itself is in this man;
which was never yet base and hateful: but at worst was
lamentable, loveable with pity. They say that he was ambitious,
that he wanted to be Minister. It is most true; and was he not
simply the one man in France who could have done any good as
Minister? Not vanity alone, not pride alone; far from that! Wild
burstings of affection were in this great heart; of fierce
lightning, and soft dew of pity. So sunk, bemired in wretchedest
defacements, it may be said of him, like the Magdalen of old,
that he loved much: his Father the harshest of old crabbed men he
loved with warmth, with veneration.
Be it that his falls and follies are manifold,—as himself often
lamented even with tears.[364] Alas, is not the Life of every
such man already a poetic Tragedy; made up “of Fate and of one’s
own Deservings,” of _Schicksal und eigene Schuld;_ full of the
elements of Pity and Fear? This brother man, if not Epic for us,
is Tragic; if not great, is large; large in his qualities,
world-large in his destinies. Whom other men, recognising him as
such, may, through long times, remember, and draw nigh to examine
and consider: these, in their several dialects, will say of him
and sing of him,—till the right thing be said; and so the Formula
that _can_ judge him be no longer an undiscovered one.
Here then the wild Gabriel Honoré drops from the tissue of our
History; not without a tragic farewell. He is gone: the flower of
the wild Riquetti or Arrighetti kindred; which seems as if in
him, with one last effort, it had done its best, and then
expired, or sunk down to the undistinguished level. Crabbed old
Marquis Mirabeau, the Friend of Men, sleeps sound. The Bailli
Mirabeau, worthy uncle, will soon die forlorn, alone.
Barrel-Mirabeau, already gone across the Rhine, his Regiment of
Emigrants will drive nigh desperate. “Barrel-Mirabeau,” says a
biographer of his, “went indignantly across the Rhine, and
drilled Emigrant Regiments. But as he sat one morning in his
tent, sour of stomach doubtless and of heart, meditating in
Tartarean humour on the turn things took, a certain Captain or
Subaltern demanded admittance on business. Such Captain is
refused; he again demands, with refusal; and then again, till
Colonel Viscount Barrel-Mirabeau, blazing up into a mere burning
brandy barrel, clutches his sword, and tumbles out on this
_canaille_ of an intruder,—alas, on the _canaille_ of an
intruder’s sword’s point, who had drawn with swift dexterity; and
dies, and the Newspapers name it _apoplexy_ and _alarming
accident_.” So die the Mirabeaus.
New Mirabeaus one hears not of: the wild kindred, as we said, is
gone out with this its greatest. As families and kindreds
sometimes do; producing, after long ages of unnoted notability,
some living quintescence of all the qualities they had, to flame
forth as a man world-noted; after whom they rest as if exhausted;
the sceptre passing to others. The chosen Last of the Mirabeaus
is gone; the chosen man of France is gone. It was he who shook
old France from its basis; and, as if with his single hand, has
held it toppling there, still unfallen. What things depended on
that one man! He is as a ship suddenly shivered on sunk rocks:
much swims on the waste waters, far from help.