They have
destroyed
cruel
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Warner - World's Best Literature - v17 - Mai to Mom
All eyes were looking for Mirabeau.
His ideas were well
known; his career had been most scandalous in an age of scandals.
The strong man, with the immense head and the lion's mane,- that
was he.
But there were others in the line. France did not yet know
Mirabeau. The King's address is over; the discussions begin. Every-
body is full of speech. What name shall the Assembly take? Mira-
beau proposed « The Representatives of the People of France, and
delivered the first oration that ever was heard by that people. He
spoke a second time, but in vain. The Members assumed the title of
“National Assembly. ” This was the beginning of the Reign of Ter-
The National Assembly was composed of a few men of landed
estate; a few eminent lawyers; but chiefly of adventurers without
fortune. "I should not be surprised,” remarked Mirabeau, “if civil
war were the result of their beautiful decree. ”
Meanwhile the King had been tampered with. On the 23d he
came into the Assembly in royal pomp. “I command you, gentle-
men, to disperse immediately, and to repair to-morrow morning to
your respective chambers, there to resume your sitting” — and the
King withdrew. Some of the clergy had joined the Assembly.
There was strong inclination to obey the royal command. Mirabeau
was quickly on his feet. "I call upon you, gentlemen, to assert your
dignity and legislative power, and to remember your oath [at the
Tennis Court] which will not permit you to disperse till you have
established the constitution. ” While he was sitting down, amidst
applause, the Marquis de Brézé, grand master of ceremonies, entered,
and turning to the President, Bailli, said, “You have heard the King's
orders. ”
“Yes, sir," flashed out Mirabeau: we have heard the intentions
that have been suggested to the King; and you, sir, who cannot be
his organ with the National Assembly,— you, who have here neither
place, nor voice, nor right of speech, you are not the person to
remind us thereof. Go, and tell those who sent you that we
here by the will of the people, and that we will only be driven
hence by the power of the bayonet. ”
That reply overthrew absolute monarchy in France, and began the
era of constitutional liberty. From the moment of that utterance,
»
are
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Mirabeau became a political party in France; and he stood alone.
Then followed in quick succession his orations, unparalleled in French
annals, rarely equaled and still more seldom surpassed in those of any
other country.
Oratory is a form of genius; but it makes great demands of those
who follow it when the man and the occasion are past. Great indeed
is he whose reputation, based on eloquence, survives the rarages of
time. To Demosthenic eloquence, Mirabeau gave the full force of a
masterful genius for practical politics. Because he was a practical
statesman he stood alone, and was an enigma to his colleagues and
to the people whom he loved and served. His reputation does not
rest merely on a series of dazzling utterances, but on the sound ideas
he scattered so lavishly before the Assembly. He foresaw the death
of the King and Queen; the overthrow of monarchy and the Reign of
Terror. He knew the centuries of wrongs that must be righted to
save France from utter disintegration. Yet no word of vengeance
or anarchy dropped from him. He would save the monarchy, and
make it the centre of a constitutional system. Therefore his orations
dealt wholly with practical matters: civil organization; the veto power;
finance; trade; slavery; the landed estates; taxation; the balance
of powers under a constitution. He was neither of the Right nor of
the Left, but of the whole estate of the people. His speech on the
inviolability of letters ranks with Milton's defense of unlicensed
printing. From his first conception of a constitutional monarchy, as
announced by him in his appeal to the electors of Aix, he never
departed. Like Montesquieu, he had learned from the British consti-
tution, but his efforts to secure a like balance of functions for France
were unsuccessful. The Radicals demanded a general proscription:
Paris was with the Radicals, and Paris was France.
In the midst of his career, while yet in his second youth, he
was suddenly cut off, the victim of his uncontrollable passions. The
revolution was completing its twenty-third month. Mirabeau was
dead. Unparalleled honors were paid to his memory. The Assem-
bly voted him a public funeral. St. Généviève should be devoted to
the reception of his ashes, and the birthday of French liberty should
be his monument. Paris was in mourning. All parties followed the
illustrious dead to the Pantheon. Swiftly the shadow of grief passed
over France, and departments and cities held funeral services in his
memory. The poets and pamphleteers issued their formal lamenta-
tions; the theatres brought out Mirabeau in life and Mirabeau in
death.
He had struggled to save the monarchy, and to construct a na-
tional government based on constitutional liberty.
After the King's death the royal papers were found in the iron
chest; and among them several that disclosed Mirabeau's plans. He
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1008
had been dead two years. His honors were re-examined, his memory
put under arrest, his bust destroyed; and from the Assembly there
went forth a decree that the body of Honoré Gabriel Riquetti Mira-
beau should be withdrawn from the French Pantheon, and that the
body of Marat should be put in its place. Soon after, rude hands
flung his remains into the burying-place for criminals, in the Fau-
bourg of St. Marcel. To this day no sign marks his grave.
Frencio N. horpen
ON THE REMOVAL OF THE TROOPS AROUND PARIS
From a Speech in the National Assembly, July 1789
G
ENTLEMEN, the time presses. I reproach myself for every
moment that I steal from your sage deliberations; and I
hope that these considerations, rather indicated than pre-
sented by me,— but whose evidence appears to me irresistible,-
will be sufficient to pass the motion which I have the honor now
to propose to you:-
That there be presented to the King a humble address, de-
scribing to his Majesty the vivid alarm which has been felt in
this National Assembly of his kingdom by reason of the abuse
which has been made of the King's name, within a short time, in
order to permit the approach to the capital, and to this city of
Versailles, of an artillery train, and of enormous bodies of troops,
foreign and national; a large number of which troops are already
quartered in neighboring villages: and also, through this abuse
of the King's name, the announced formation of fixed camps in
the neighborhood of these two cities.
That there be represented to the King, not only how much
these measures are opposed to the gracious intentions of his
Majesty toward relieving his people, in the present unhappy con-
ditions of the dearness and scantiness of grain, but also how
much these measures are contrary to the liberty and to the honor
of the National Assembly; how adapted they are to alter that
mutual confidence between the King and his people which makes
the glory and the security of a monarch, and which alone can
insure the repose and the tranquillity of his kingdom; and in fine,
procure for the nation the inestimable results which the country
awaits from the labors and the zeal of this Assembly.
XVII—631
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MIRABEAU
That his Majesty most respectfully be urged to reassure his
faithful subjects, by giving all necessary orders for the immediate
cessation of these measures, which are equally useless, dangerous,
and alarming; and also for the prompt return of the troops in
question, and of the artillery train, to the places from which
they have been brought.
And while waiting for this measure to be decided, and in
consequence of the disquietude and alarm which such a state
of affairs has brought to pass in the heart of the people, and
in order provisionally to maintain calm and tranquillity, let his
Majesty be begged to issue a command that in the two cities
of Paris and Versailles there shall be a levy of the civil guard,
which, acting under the orders of the King, will entirely suffice
for such duty without augmenting around the two cities in ques-
tion a population that must be supplied with food.
THE ADDRESS
SIRE, - You have invited the National Assembly to bestow on
you a mark of its confidence; in such a request you have gone
further than the most eager of its fervent hopes.
We have been imparting to your Majesty our most vivid
alarms: if we only were the object of them, if we had been so
weak as to be fearful only for ourselves, then your goodness
would condescend to reassure us; and moreover, in blaming us
for having been doubtful of your intentions toward us, you would
concentrate all our inquietudes, you would dissipate the cause
of them, and you would leave no uncertainty as to the position
before you of the National Assembly.
But, Sire, we do not implore your protection, for that would
be to accuse your justice: we have indeed felt fears, and we
dare to say that our fears are a part of the purest patriotism,
the interest of those who trust in us, of public tranquillity, and
of the happiness of that dear monarch, who, in making smooth
for our feet the road of happiness, certainly deserves to walk in
it himself without obstacles.
The promptings of your own heart, Sire — behold in them
the true safety of the French people. As soon as troops pour in
from all sides, as soon as camps are formed around us, the very
capital invested, we ask ourselves with astonishment, “Does the
King distrust the fidelity of his own people? If he had doubted
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>>
that, would he not have confided to us his paternal chagrin ?
What are we to understand by this menacing procedure? Where
are those enemies of the State and of the King to be overcome ?
Where are the rebels, the conspirators, that it is necessary to
reduce to subjection ? ” One unanimous voice replies to this in
the capital and throughout the kingdom: "Our King is true to
us; we bless Heaven for the gift which Heaven has bestowed
upon us in his love. »
Sire, the religious convictions of your Majesty cannot waver
except under the pretext of public benefit.
If those who have given these counsels to our King had had
enough confidence in their own principles to unfold them to us,
such a moment would bring in the fairest triumph of truth.
The State has nothing to dread from the evil ideas of those
who dare to lay siege even to the throne, who do not respect the
confidence of the purest and most virtuous of princes. And how
do they contrive, Sire, to make you disbelieve in the attachment
and the love of your subjects ? Have you shed their blood ?
Are you cruel, implacable? Have you abused justice? Do the
people impute to you their own misfortunes ? Do they connect
your name with their calamities? Can they have said to you that
the nation is impatient under your yoke, that it is weary of the
sceptre of the Bourbons ? No, no, they have not done this. The
calumny they employ is at least not absurd; they seek something
like probability to give color to their dark treacheries.
Your Majesty has seen recently all your own government can
do for your people: subordination is re-established in your per-
turbed capital; the prisoners set at liberty by the multitude have
themselves reassumed their chains; public order, which would
perhaps have cost torrents of blood to re-establish had it been
done by force, has been re-established by one single word from
your mouth.
But that word was a word of
peace;
it was the
expression of your heart, and your subjects feel it their glory
never to resist that. How grand to exercise such authority! It
is that of Louis IX. , of Louis XII. , of Henri IV. ; it is the only
authority which can be worthy of you.
We should deceive you, Sire, if we did not add, forced by cir-
cumstances, that this kind of rule is the only one which to-day it
would be possible to exercise in France. France will not tolerate
the abuse of the best of kings, or that there should be set aside,
through untoward measures, that noble plan which he himself
has outlined. You have called us hither to adjust in concert with
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MIRABEAU
(
you, the Constitution; to take measures for the regeneration of
the kingdom: this National Assembly has just declared solemnly
to you that your wishes shall be accomplished, that your prom-
ises are not vain, and that difficulties and terrors shall not retard
the work of the Assembly, nor intimidate in any way its courage.
But our enemies will presume to say, “What now is the harm
in the coming together of the troops ? ”
The danger, Sire, is pressing, is general, beyond all the calcu-
lations of human prudence.
The danger affects the people of your provinces. Once alarmed
as to our liberty, this alarm cannot be checked. Distance only
makes more of the matter, exaggerates everything, doubles, sharp-
ens, and poisons their disquietude.
The danger threatens the capital. With what sort of an eye
can a people in poverty, and tormented by most cruel anxieties,
see the poor relics of its own daily bread quarreled over by a
host of menacing soldiery? The mere presence of the military
will kindle excitement, and produce a general fermentation; and
the first act of real violence, originating under the pretext of a
matter for the police, may be the beginning of a horrible series
of calamities.
The danger threatens the troops themselves. French soldiers
brought near to the very centre of discussion, sharing in the
passions as well as in the interests of the people, can easily for-
get that enlistment has made them soldiers, in remembering that
nature has made them men.
The danger, Sire, menaces our own labors, which are our first
duty, and which will not have full success, genuine permanence,
except so far as the people regard them as the work absolutely
of our own free will. Besides this, there is a contagion in pas-
sionate popular movements. We are only men. Our defiance of
ourselves, the fear of appearing weak, can make us overshoot our
mark; we are besieged by violent and unregulated counsels; calm
reason and tranquil wisdom do not utter their oracles in the midst
of tumult, disorders, and scenes of faction.
The danger, Sire, is even more terrible; judge of its extent
by the alarms which bring us to you. Great revolutions have
had causes much less intelligible; more than one enterprise fatal
to nations and to kings has announced itself in a way less sin-
ister and less formidable. Do not give credence to those who
speak lightly to you of the nation at large; those who do not
know how to represent it before you except according to their
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own views,- sometimes as insolent, rebellious, seditious,- some-
times as submissive, docile under the yoke, and ready to bend its
head to receive it. These two pictures are equally untruthful.
Always ready to obey you, Sire, since you command us in the
name of the law, our fidelity is without limits, as it is without
stain.
Ready to resist to a man the arbitrary commands of those
who are abusing your name,- since they are enemies of the law,
our devotion to your Majesty itself commands such resistance;
and it shall be to our eternal honor to have merited the re-
proaches that our firmness may bring upon us.
Sire, we conjure you, in the name of our fatherland, in the
name of your happiness and your glory, send back your soldiers
to the garrison posts whence your counselors have brought them;
dismiss that artillery destined to protect our frontiers; and above
all, send away the foreign troops,—those allies of the nation
that we paid to defend and not to disturb our firesides. Your
Majesty has no need of them: why should a monarch, adored
by twenty-five millions of Frenchmen, at an enormous cost draw
together around his throne so many thousands of foreigners ?
Sire, surrounded by your children, let our love be your guard !
The deputies of the nation are summoned to consecrate with you
the supreme rights of royalty, upon the immovable basis of a
people's liberty: while they are doing their duty, while they are
yielding to the dictates of their reason, of their sentiment, will
you expose them to the suspicion of having yielded not to these
things, but to fear? Ah! the authority that all hearts confer on
you is the only authority that is pure, the only authority that
cannot be defied; it is the just return for your benefits, and it is
the immortal appanage of princes, of whom you are the model.
THE ELEGY ON FRANKLIN
Pronounced in the National Assembly
F*
RANKLIN is dead! The genius that freed America, and poured
a flood of light over Europe, has returned to the bosom of
the Divinity.
The sage whom two worlds claim as their own, the man for
whom the history of science and the history of empires contend
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MIRABEAU
with each other, held, without doubt, a high rank in the human
race.
Too long have political cabinets taken formal note of the
death of those who were great only in their funeral panegyr-
ics. Too long has the etiquette of courts prescribed hypocritical
mourning. Nations should wear mourning only for their bene-
factors. The representatives of nations should recommend to
their homage none but the heroes of humanity.
The Congress has ordained, throughout the United States, a
mourning of one month for the death of Franklin; and at this
moment America is paying this tribute of veneration and grati-
tude to one of the fathers of her Constitution.
Would it not become us, gentlemen, to join in this religious
act, to bear a part in this homage, rendered in the face of the
world, both to the rights of man and to the philosopher who has
most contributed to extend their sway over the whole earth?
Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius, who, to
the advantage of mankind, compassing in his mind the heavens
and the earth, was able to restrain alike thunderbolts and tyrants.
Europe, enlightened and free, owes at least a token of remem-
brance and regret to one of the greatest men who have ever been
engaged in the service of philosophy and of liberty.
I propose that it be decreed that the National Assembly, dur-
ing three days, shall wear mourning for Benjamin Franklin.
A LETTER TO THE KING OF PRUSSIA
Yº
ou have reached the throne at a fortunate period. The age
is becoming daily more enlightened. It has labored for
your benefit, in collecting sound notions for you. It ex-
tends its influence over your nation, which so many circumstances
have kept behind others. Everything is now tested by a severe
logic. The men who see only a fellow-creature under the royal
mantle, and require that he should possess some virtue, are more
numerous than ever. Their suffrages cannot be dispensed with.
In their opinion, one kind of glory alone remains; every other
is exhausted. Military success, political talents, wonders in art,
improvements in science, have all appeared in turn, and their
light has blazed forth from one extremity of Europe to the
other. That enlightened benevolence which gives form and life
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10087
to empires has not yet appeared, pure and unmixed, upon a
throne. To you it belongs to place it there; this sublime glory
is reserved for you. Your predecessor gained battles enough,
perhaps too many; he has too much fatigued Fame's hundred
tongues, and exhausted military glory, for several reigns,— nay,
for several centuries.
With much greater facility you
may create a glory more pure and not less brilliant, which shall
be wholly your own. Frederick conquered the admiration of man-
kind, but he never won their love.
This love you may
entirely possess.
Do not, ah! do not neglect the treasure which Providence has
spread in your path. Deserve the blessings of the poor, the love
of your people, the respect of Europe, and the good wishes of
wise men.
Be just, be good, and you will be great and happy!
You wish to obtain, dread sir, the title of Great; but you
wish to receive it from the mouth of history, and from the suf-
frage of ages to come,- you would despise it from the mouths
of your courtiers. If you do that which the son of your slave
could do, ten times a day, better than yourself, they will tell you
that you have performed an extraordinary action! If you suffer
your passions to mislead you, they will say that you are right!
If you are as lavish of the blood of your subjects as of the waters
of your rivers, again will they tell you that you are right! If
you barter for gold the air that preserves life, they will say that
you are right! If you revenge yourself - you who are so power-
ful — they will continue to tell you that you are right!
They said the same thing when Alexander, in a drunken fit,
plunged his dagger into the bosom of his friend; they said the
same thing when Nero murdered his mother.
If you indefatigably perform your duties, without ever putting
off till the following day the burthen of the present day; if by
great and fruitful principles you can simplify these duties, and
reduce them within the capacity of a single man; if you give
your subjects all the freedom they can bear; if you can protect
every kind of property, and facilitate useful labor; if you terrify
petty oppressors who in your name would prevent men from
doing, for their own advantage, that which injures not their fel-
lows,-a unanimous shout will bless your authority, and render
it more sacred and more powerful. Everything will then be easy
for you, because the will and the strength of all will be united
to your own strength and your own will, and your labor will
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MIRABEAU
SOV-
become every day less severe. Nature has made labor necessary
to man. It gives him also this precious advantage, that change
of labor is to him not only a relaxation but a source of pleasure.
Who, more easily than a king, can live in strict accordance with
this order of nature? A philosopher has said that "no man feels
such lassitude of spirit as a king”; he should have said, "a
slothful king. ” How could lassitude of mind fall upon a
ereign who did his duty ? Could he ever keep up his vigor of
intellect and preserve his health so well as by shielding himself,
under the pursuit of labor, from the disgust which every man of
sense must feel among those idle talkers, those inventors of ful-
some praises, who study their prince for no other purpose than
to corrupt, blind, and rob him ? Their sole art is to render him
indifferent and feeble, or else impatient, rude, and idle.
Your subjects will enjoy your virtues, which alone can preserve
and improve their patrimony. Your courtiers will cultivate your
defects, by which alone they can support their influence and their
expectations.
It is worthy of you not to govern too
much.
[I recommend the immediate] abolition of military slavery;
that is to say, the obligation imposed upon every Prussian to
serve as a soldier, from the age of eighteen years to sixty
and more: that dreadful law arising from the necessities of an
iron age and a semi-barbarous country; that law dishonoring a
nation without whom your ancestors would have been nothing
but slaves, more or less decorated with empty honors. This
law does not produce you a single soldier more than you would
obtain by a wiser system, which may enable you to recruit the
Prussian army in a manner that shall elevate men's hearts, add
to the public spirit, and possess the forms of freedom, instead of
those of brutishness and slavery. Throughout Europe, and more
especially in your Majesty's dominions, one of the most useful
instincts upon which patriotism could be founded is stupidly
lost. Men are forced to go to the battle-field like cattle to the
slaughter-house; whilst nothing is easier than to make the pub-
lic service an object of emulation and glory.
Be also the first sovereign in whose dominions every man
willing to work shall find employment. Everything that breathes
must obtain its nourishment by labor. This is the first law of
nature, anterior to all human convention: it is the connecting
bond of all society; for every man who finds nothing but a
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10089
refusal to his offer to work in exchange for his subsistence
becomes the natural and lawful enemy of other men, and has a
right of private war against society. In the country, as in cities,
let workshops be everywhere opened at your Majesty's cost; let
all men, of what nation soever, find their maintenance in the
price of their labor; let your subjects there learn the value of
time and activity. Instruction, you are aware, is one of the most
important of a sovereign's duties, and likewise one of his richest
treasures. Entire liberty of the press ought to be one of your
first acts: not only because any restraint upon this liberty is a
hindrance to the enjoyment of natural rights, but because every
obstacle to the advancement of knowledge is an evil, a great evil;
especially for you, who are debarred thereby from obtaining,
through the medium of printing, a knowledge of the truth, and
of public opinion,- that prime minister of good kings.
Let information be circulated through your dominions. Read,
and let others read. If light were rising on all sides toward
the throne, would you invoke darkness? Oh, no! for it would
be in vain. You would lose too much, without even obtaining
the fatal success of extinguishing it. You will read, you will
begin a noble association with books.
They have destroyed cruel
.
and disgraceful prejudices, they have smoothed the road before
you, they have served you even before you were born. You will
not be ungrateful toward the accumulated works of beneficent
genius.
You will read, and you will protect those who write; for with-
out them what would become of the human species, and what
would it be? They will instruct, they will assist, they will talk
to you without seeing you. Without approaching your throne,
they will introduce there the august truth.
This truth will enter
your palace alone, without escort, and without affected dignity; it
will bear neither title nor ribands, but will be invisible and dis-
interested.
You will read, but you will be desirous that your subjects
should also read. You will not think you have done all by re-
cruiting your academies from foreign countries: you will found
schools, you will multiply them, especially in country places, and
you will endow them. You would not reign in darkness; and you
will say, "Let there be light! ” The light will burst forth at your
voice; and its halo, playing round your brow, will form a more
glorious ornament than all the laurels won by conquerors.
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I trust, dread sir, that my candor will not displease you. Medi-
tate on these respectful lines, and say:-
« This is what will never be admitted to me as true, and is
the very reverse of what I shall be told every day. The boldest
offer to kings nothing but veiled truths, whilst here I see truth
quite naked
This is far preferable to that venal incense
with which I am suffocated by versifiers, and panegyrists of the
Academy, who seized upon me in my cradle, and will scarcely
leave me when I am in my coffin. I am a man before I am a
king. Why should I be offended at being treated as a man?
Why should I be offended with a foreigner, who wants noth-
ing of me, and will soon quit my court never more to see me,
for speaking to me without disguise ? He points out to me that
which his eyes, his experience, his studies, and his understanding
have collected; he gives me, without expectation of reward, those
true and free counsels of which no condition of man is so much
in want as kings. He has no interest in deceiving me, and can
have none but good intentions.
Let me examine atten-
tively what he proposes; for the mere common-sense and the
simple candor of a man who has no other pursuit than the culti-
vation of his reason and his intellect, may perhaps be as good as
the old routine, and trickery, and forms, and diplomatic illusions,
and the ridiculous dogmas, of statesmen by profession. ”
A LETTER TO VITRY
Yºu
ou know the plan of the journal I purpose establishing, but
others will not understand it. It is to be founded upon the
idea — novel perhaps, and which in my opinion is not with-
out its usefulness — of noticing old books, as the ordinary jour-
nals notice new ones. To abridge and select is now, assuredly,
the most urgent want of science and letters. To preserve is of
a usefulness less direct, perhaps, or rather less abundant. Never-
theless, in proportion as taste and erudition pass away; in pro-
portion as the mania of writing becomes more contagious; in
proportion to the ardor in publishing, the haste with which books
are published, the mania or necessity of sacrificing to the taste
of the day, to the coryphei of the times, to the pretension of
being free from prejudice — which, in point of fact, is scarcely
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10091
anything better than substituting one prejudice for another; - in
proportion, I say, as all these diseases gain upon us, and increase,
do we too much neglect the exertions of our predecessors, who,
although it should be true that we surpass them in the talent of
bringing out, ought not the less to attract our attention, in order
that we may set in an elegant framework that which they have
clumsily enchased. I say then that this article will yield some-
thing; and I invoke your researches in the works of our philolo-
gers of the sixteenth century, our learned of the seventeenth, our
collections and our compilations of all ages, but that in which no
books were made except with stolen fragments, well or ill-stitched
together, no tragedies except with old hemistichs.
You know that another of my projects is to give in successive
parts a work on the academic collections, more especially that
entitled Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-
lettres. My plan here is to take the interesting papers of the
collection, and unite them by amalgamating and blending them
together, by clearing and pruning, and criticizing them one by
another; and to draw from this chaos all that is worthy of the
attention of philosophers, men of letters, and men of the world,
without crushing them by the weight of a fastidious erudition.
This is an undertaking the want of which is generally felt, and
its utility incontestable.
I intend to include speculative politics, finance, etc. ; and the
little I shall take from recent literature is my own affair. I
say “speculative politics” because, although I may be strongly
solicited, I will never write what Linguet so ridiculously calls
annals. ” The trade of a hussar no longer suits me.
even in this application, compatible with self-respect; for is there
not great rashness in giving intelligence of what passes at a dis-
tance, and passing judgment upon it, whilst daily experience
shows how difficult it is to obtain information of what is passing
close to us?
The art of printing has so greatly facilitated the means of
instruction that science has become a very common commodity.
But the mind of man may be improved ad infinitum. To render
the road to improvement easier, and to make the human intel-
lect advance with rapid strides in its progress of discovery,- to
engender new ideas, and make our exertions more fruitful, — a
mode is wanting to abridge study and avoid repetitions; placing
the studious man, especially the man of genius, at the point
(
It is not,
## p. 10092 (#520) ##########################################
10092
MIRABEAU
whence he is to start. If, for instance, he who appeared desirous
of seeking new discoveries were to spend his time in studying
the Epicycles of Ptolemy, or the Vortices of Descartes, he should
be spoken to in the following words: “This is the point we have
reached: Kepler, Newton, Claireau, Euler, etc. , have guessed,
demonstrated, and investigated this branch of science; and it
is from the point of their discoveries that you must try to
advance. ” Is this not the case with all sciences ?
FROM THE LETTERS
K
.
INGS who raise themselves only by things, and whom things
instruct badly,- because they almost always bend to the
monarch's will, passions, and opinions, - would perhaps
appear the most stupid of human beings if it were known how
little knowledge and how few ideas they generally have. Every
rational saying that escapes them is preserved; which is assur-
edly the best possible proof that such sayings are not very
numerous.
If I speak only of Paris, because at court nothing is spoken
of but Paris, it is not less true that the wants of this city are
the least urgent of any, and that as much care must be taken
not to create new paupers as to relieve those who already exist.
With regard to the latter, it would be at least necessary to give
to all the parish priests in the kingdom a sufficient income
to live; for they will not aid your poor if they are themselves
in poverty. The curés in some provinces - in Brittany, for
instance — have scarcely three hundred livres a year. What
necessity is there for the Archbishop of Auch to have 500,000
livres a year? Not but he makes a good use of it. Arch-
bishop Apchon is one of the most respectable prelates in the
kingdom; but he is mortal. The diocese of Cambrai has not
always had a Fénelon. When shall a portion of these enormous
revenues be taken and distributed among all the curés in the
kingdom ? Madame Louise has just obtained 30,000 livres a year
in corn and land, to be taken from the abbey of St. Germain,
for the support of the Carmelites of the kingdom. Assuredly
corn would grow equally well if there were no Carmelites in
France. But 30,000 livres a year, distributed among the poor
curés of the kingdom, would suffice to give, in a year of dearth,
the indispensably necessary to a great number of honest poor.
## p. 10093 (#521) ##########################################
MIRABEAU
10093
It is more than time to finish this long and shapeless collec-
tion of all sorts of dreams. You know my principles and opin-
ions sufficiently well to have no doubt that I have made a great
sacrifice to etiquette, to habit, and to prejudice, by fixing your
view upon the metropolis alone. The rest of the kingdom is a
stranger land to the great, which is the worst of evils. I wished
to show you how many useful and great things you did not do,
even in the place where you constantly reside. But would not
traveling amuse your illustrious friend-or her royal husband,
who, if he remain at Versailles, will never complete his education
either as a man or as a king? What a sad existence is that of
sovereigns! They are shut up within a circle of forty leagues
in diameter, the radii of which they perambulate as if by a con-
stant oscillation. The active correspondence between the King
of Spain and Louis XV. during twenty years is curious. They
wrote to each other every day in the same terms. The King of
Spain wrote: "At five o'clock I left St. Ildefonso, and the ren-
dezvous for the chase was at the Round of St. Anthony. ” The
same day Louis XV. wrote from Versailles: “At ten o'clock I
went to the Carrefour des Rossignols, at Compiègne, etc. ” And
this went on during twenty years.
Each monarch had his map,
and followed the route of the other, as if they had been learned
geographers studying Cook's voyages !
Let the Queen imitate her brother's example; let her travel,
and excite her husband to travel likewise, without pomp- for
pomp tends only to ruin, tire, and deceive. Let her travel.
Alas! very near the spot where the ostentation of wealth and
luxury insults the misery of the people, the King and Queen will
see, learn, and feel that which ministers and courtiers never tell
them!
The wealth of a country consists solely in its agriculture.
From it the population, and consequently the strength, of a State
are derived. Colbert, to whom so many just reproaches may be
made, was wrongfully accused when it was stated that he con-
cerned himself about nothing but manufactures. It must be
admitted that he rendered several ordinances favorable to agri-
culture. One of the most celebrated, promulgated the year
before his death, and rendered in favor of Alsace, provides that
«all persons who will occupy empty and vague lands may culti-
vate them to their own profit, and use them in full property. ”
Colbert, just before he died, contemplated making this ordinance
## p. 10094 (#522) ##########################################
10094
MIRABEAU
general throughout the kingdom: for he perceived what is very
evident, that the King has a full quarter of his kingdom to con-
quer from enemies termed heaths, downs, and so forth; and that
it is necessary to plow with one hand whilst the other prunes,
in order soon after to cut down the parasitical and voracious tree
of fiscality.
Conventicles of monks should be established in the most
uncultivated parts of the kingdom, to do there that which they
did a thousand years ago in different places. Monks can be
.
useful to society in no other way. These conventicles must be
dispersed in the most barren spots, according to the system of
the primitive church, and there supported during the time neces.
sary, by the profits of the newly cultivated lands, which might
afterwards be added to the mass of ecclesiastical property in
the kingdom. By such means the monks would be usefully em-
ployed, the waste lands put into cultivation, the State enriched,
and no one would have a right to complain.
But not only must the lands be cultivated, but the inhabitants
ſikewise. And why should not a former measure be adopted
which time has justified ?
In 1769, married men announcing a decided capacity for a
trade were selected from different families, and sent to Paris for
a year.
The circumstance of these men being married was con-
sidered a security for their return. Thus the farrier was sent
to Alfort under Bourgelat, the miller to Corbeil, the mason to
St. Généviève, the carpenter among the machinery at the opera,
and the gardener to Montreuil. Each of these men
return obtained what he pleased; and they are now sent for
from a distance of ten leagues round. It would be very useful
if pupils were placed, in the same manner, under skillful agri-
culturists. Each would take back to his native place not only
the tools proper for his calling, but that knowledge which being
multiplied at the centre, will never reach the circumference
unless a zealous, active, and persevering government uses all
possible means to overcome indifference and routine.
on his
## p. 10095 (#523) ##########################################
MIRABEAU
10095
The
)
FROM A LETTER TO CHAMFORT, 1785
He approaches to London are of a rustic beauty of which not
even Holland has furnished models (I should rather com-
pare them to some valley in Switzerland): for – and this
very remarkable fact immediately catches an experienced eye-
this domineering people are, beyond everything, agriculturists in
their island; and it is this that has so long saved them from
their own delirium. I felt my heart strongly and deeply moved
as I passed through this highly cultivated and prosperous land,
and I said to myself, “Wherefore this emotion so new to me ? »
These country-seats compared with ours are mere country boxes.
Several parts of France, even in the worst of its provinces, and
all Normandy, through which I have just passed, are assuredly
more beautiful in natural scenery than this country. There are
to be found, here and there in France, especially in our own
province, noble edifices, splendid establishments, immense public
works, vast traces of the most prodigious efforts of man; and yet
here I am delighted much more than I was ever surprised in
my own country by the things I have mentioned. It is because
here nature is improved and not forced; it is because these roads,
narrow but excellent, do not remind me of forced or average
labor, except to lament over the country in which such labor is
known; it is because this admirable state of cultivation shows me
the respect paid to property; it is because this care, this univer-
sal cleanliness, is a speaking symptom of welfare; it is because
all this rural wealth is in nature, near to nature, and according
to nature, and does not, like splendid palaces surrounded with
hovels, betray the excessive inequality of fortunes, which is the
source of so many evils; it is because all tells me that here the
people are something — that every man enjoys the development
and free exercise of his faculties, and that I am in another order
of things.
I am not an enthusiast in favor of England, and I now
know sufficient of that country to tell you that if its constitution
is the best known, the application of this constitution is the worst
possible; and that if the Englishman is, as a social man, the
most free in the world, the English people are the least free of
any.
What then is freedom, since the small portion of it found in
one or two laws, places in the first rank a nation so little favored
.
## p. 10096 (#524) ##########################################
10096
MIRABEAU
by nature ? What may a constitution not effect, when this one,
though incomplete and defective, saves and will save for some
time to come the most corrupt people in the universe from their
own corruption ?
Will England be adduced as an objection? But that State is
constituted! The English have a country! - and this is the rea-
son why the people the most fanatic, the most ignorant, and the
most corrupt in the whole world, have a public spirit, civic vir-
tues, and incredible success, even in the midst of their delirium.
This is the reason why, despite of nature, they have assumed the
first rank among nations! .
How great must be the influence of a small number of data
favorable to the human species, since this people - ignorant,
superstitious, obstinate (for they are all this), covetous, and very
near to Punic faith — are better than most other nations known,
because they enjoy a small portion of civil liberty.
1
## p. 10097 (#525) ##########################################
10097
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
(1830-)
BY HARRIET WATERS PRESTON
RÉDÉRIC MISTRAL, the Provençal poet, will take rank among
the few highly original singers of the middle decades of
this century. Long after the fanciful philology and bardic
affectations of his school are forgotten, and his own unfinished diction-
ary of the Provençal tongue has taken its place among other massive
monuments of abortive human industry, Mistral's three very remark-
able narrative poems, Mirèio,' Calendau,'
and Nerto,' will continue to charm by the
music of their verse, the depth of their
human interest, their dramatic energy, and
the truth and splendor of their local color.
Frédéric Mistral was born on the 8th of
September, 1830, at Maillane in the Bouches-
du-Rhône; in one of those rich and quiet
farmsteads, buried amid well-tilled fields
and approached by deeply shaded avenues,
whose verdure diversifies the silvery same-
ness of the Provençal landscape. From
whatever stormy and untamable ancestor
Mistral inherited the name of that furious FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
winter wind of the Midi, which dispels, when
it arises, all the languors of the Mediterranean shore, and lashes the
soft sea of those parts into flying foam, the spirit of that free and
renovating gale was certainly in him. His father, a wealthy freehold
farmer, sent him to school at Avignon, and to college at Montpellier,
and meant to make a lawyer of him. But the youth rebelled; and
intimated instead that he had a mission to renew the glories of
ancient Provençal song. His teacher at Avignon was Joseph Rouma-
nille, who had already written verses in the dialect of the Bouches-
du-Rhône; and who was able to inspire a class of singularly apt and
brilliant pupils, of whom Frédéric Mistral and Théodore Aubanel were
the stars, with a boundless faith in its poetic possibilities and ardor
for its admission — they called it restoration — to literary honor. Ear-
lier still, by a score of years, Jacques Jasmin at Agen had made a
XVII--632
-
## p. 10098 (#526) ##########################################
10098
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
highly successful experiment with a kindred patois; but up to his day,
no Frenchman for generations had dreamed of writing in anything
but classic French. Some time in the early fifties, however, Master
Roumanille set up a publishing house at Avignon; and he and his
disciples formed themselves into a society which they called the Fili-
brige, whose members, the Félibres, agreed not merely to compose
in the rustic dialect which they were born to speak, but gravely to
combine for the purpose of formulating its etymology and grammar,
and establishing, beyond cavil, its claim to a high literary descent.
Like William Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet, who considered the
language of Shakespeare only a late and rather weak offshoot from
the primitive speech of Dorset, the Félibres claimed for their dialect
the full honors of a language. They held it to be essentially the
same as that of the mediæval Troubadours, many of whose Courts of
Love and Contests of Song had flourished within their territory; and
they also maintained that the early Provençal sprang directly from
the language of Rome, and was itself the parent of Italian, French,
and Spanish, as well as of all the other living forms of Latin speech.
Needless to say that these linguistic pretensions were never made
good; but this matters little beside the fact that works of great
freshness and distinction were actually produced under the impulse
of the so-called Provençal revival.
Among these works Mistral's were easily first; and his masterpiece,
Mirèio,' was originally printed at Avignon in 1858, in Provençal only,
and under the auspices of Roumanille. A year later it was brought
out in Paris with a very striking parallel French version of the
poet's own, which, by rendering it easily intelligible to the ordinary
reader, invited general criticism, while incidentally it revealed the
almost unparalleled wealth of the writer's vocabulary in both forms
of speech.
Mirèio,' then, was a pastoral poem of the present time, all suf-
fused with the hot sunshine of Southern France; as full as the
Georgics themselves of rustic lore and homely agricultural detail, but
embodying also, in twelve leisurely books, the tale of two very young
lovers, their innocent passion, thrilling adventures, and hapless end.
The story was told with a kind of sweet garrulity, and an affluence
of unworn imagery, that simply took the world by storm. The elab-
orate measure adopted by Mistral (apparently he did not, as was at
first claimed, invent it) was managed with consummate grace, and
gave a high idea of the musical capacities of the Provençal speech,
and its curious richness, especially in feminine rhymes. It is well
understood now that Mistral and his colleagues fashioned their new
instrument more or less to suit themselves: improvising grammati-
cal forms at need, and manipulating and modifying terminal syllables
## p. 10099 (#527) ##########################################
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
10099
with glorious license. But the Troubadours of the twelfth century
had done just the same; and these were the alleged heirs both of
their inspiration and their methods.
In 1867, after an interval of nine years, Mirèio was followed by
(Calendau, another poem of epic proportions; which naturally created
less astonishment than its predecessor, but really fell very little short
of it in vigor of conception, variety of action, and beauty of imagery.
The heroine of the new romance was a dispossessed Princess of Baux,
in whose veins ran the blood of more than one queen of love; while
her suitor was a man of humble birth, whom she inspired by reciting
legends of chivalry, and compelled to win her hand by a series of
extraordinary tests and adventures.
In 1875 M. Mistral published a collection of fugitive pieces under
the title of Lis Isclo d'Oro,' or the Golden Isles. In 1883 appeared
his third long poem, "Nerto,' a tale of the last days of the Popes at
Avignon. The florid stanza of the two previous compositions was
abandoned in Nerto for a simply rhymed octosyllabic metre, like
that employed for narrative by Chaucer, Byron, and William Morris;
and the whole tone and movement of the story were more tame and
conventional than those of the earlier ones. Here too we have for
the first time a didactic purpose plainly avowed by the author: the
singular but perfectly serious one of illustrating the personal exist-
ence and persistent activity among mankind of that formidable Being
whose name (O Lucifer, son of the morning! ) is oddly abbreviated by
the Provençaux into Cifèr.
In 1897 appeared M. Mistral's last extended poetical work up to
the date of this notice,-'Le Poème du Rhône) (The Poem of the
Rhône), eagerly expected during many years of slow completion. It
proved to be in twelve cantos; a highly romantic description and
indeed poetic romance of the great river and of sundry of its towns,
based on a narrative half mundane and half mysterious, that deals
with the humble life of the Rhodane boatmen prior to the advent
of the first steamboat that ruined the romance and industry of their
boating craft. A superb episode in the fourth canto presents Napo-
leon in his famous flight;— though it is but one passage among many
that won special praise. The whole work possesses a movement and
dramatic charm worthy of the poet.
M. Mistral writes always from the point of view of a devout
Catholic believer, whom no mysteries, whether of holy miracle or
Satanic witchcraft, can avail to stagger. Both in Mirèio) and in
Nerto' we find, by way of episode, specimens of the légende pieuse
in very beautiful modern renderings. But the plentiful lack of humor
which he shares with most of the associated Félibres —— wherein they
are, one and all, so inferior to Jasmin causes him to mingle the
## p. 10100 (#528) ##########################################
10100
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
supernatural and the matter-of-fact sometimes in a manner which is
almost grotesque. It is his one great fault as an artist.
M. Mistral has toiled heroically in his later years at a compre-
hensive lexicon of ancient and modern Provençal, two volumes of
which have appeared in print. France has awarded him all those
nominal distinctions — Academy crowns and prizes, badges of the
Legion – which she delights to bestow upon her gifted sons; but
he clings always, in his own person, to the old-fashioned rustic ways
which acquire so strong a fascination under his picturesque pen. He
lives very simply, on the farm or mas in the neighborhood of Saint
Rémy where he was born, and practices a free but homely hospi-
tality. He married, rather late in life, an exceedingly beautiful
bourgeoise of the renowned Arlesian type; and he himself has been,
from youth to old age, one of the handsomest men of his generation.
Harmet aux Prestone
THE INVOCATION, FROM MIRÈIO)
Copyright 1872, by Roberts Brothers
SING the love of a Provençal maid;
How through the wheat-fields of La Crau she strayed,
Following the fate that drew her to the sea.
Unknown beyond remote La Crau was she;
And I, who tell the rustic tale of her,
Would fain be Homer's humble follower.
What though youth's aureole was her only crown?
And never gold she wore, nor damask gown?
I'll build her up a throne out of my song,
And hail her queen in our despised tongue.
Mine be the simple speech that ye all know,
Shepherds and farmer-folk of lone La Crau.
Methinks I see yon airy little bough:
It mocks me with its freshness even now;
The light breeze lifts it, and it waves on high
Fruitage and foliage that cannot die.
Help me, dear God, on our Provençal speech,
To soar until the birds' own home I reach!
God of my country, who didst have thy birth
Among poor shepherds when thou wast on earth,
## p. 10101 (#529) ##########################################
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
JOIOI
Breathe fire into my song! Thou knowest, iny God,
How, when the lusty summer is abroad,
And figs turn ripe in sun and dew, comes he,-
Brute, greedy man,- and quite despoils the tree.
Yet on that ravaged tree thou savest oft
Some little branch inviolate aloft,
Tender and airy up against the blue,
Which the rude spoiler cannot win unto:
Only the birds shall come and banquet there,
When, at St. Magdalene's, the fruit is fair.
Translation of Harriet Waters Preston.
THE TUNNY FISHING
From "Calendau,' in the Atlantic Monthly.
Mifflin & Co.
By permission of Houghton,
B
UT when with dawn the pallid moon had set,
The whole unnumbered shoal into the net
Came pouring. Ah, but then I was elate!
Drunk with my joy, thought I had conquered fate:
“Now, love,” I said, “thou shalt have gems and gems;
I'll spoil the goldsmiths for thy diadems!
Love is the sun, the king of all this earth —
He fires, unites, fulfills with joy, gives birth,
Calls from the dead the living by the score,
And kindles war, and doth sweet peace restore.
Lord of the land, lord of the deep is he,
Piercing the very monsters of the sea
With fire-tipped arrows. Lo, the tunny yon!
Now in one silver phalanx press they on;
Anon they petulantly part and spring
And plunge and toss, their armor glittering
Steel-blue upon their crystal field of fight,
Or rosy underneath the growing light.
'Twas nuptial bliss they sought. What haste! what
fire!
With the strong rush of amorous desire
Spots of intense vermilion went and came
On some, like sparkles of a restless flame,
A royal scarf, a livery of gold,
A wedding robe, fading as love grew cold.
## p. 10102 (#530) ##########################################
IOIO2
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
So at the last came one prodigious swell,
And the last line, that seemed invincible,
Brake with the pressure, and our boats leaped high.
«Huzza! the prey is caged! ” we wildly cry:
Courage, my lads, and don't forget the oil!
The fish we have, let not the dressing spoil!
« 'Bout ship!
known; his career had been most scandalous in an age of scandals.
The strong man, with the immense head and the lion's mane,- that
was he.
But there were others in the line. France did not yet know
Mirabeau. The King's address is over; the discussions begin. Every-
body is full of speech. What name shall the Assembly take? Mira-
beau proposed « The Representatives of the People of France, and
delivered the first oration that ever was heard by that people. He
spoke a second time, but in vain. The Members assumed the title of
“National Assembly. ” This was the beginning of the Reign of Ter-
The National Assembly was composed of a few men of landed
estate; a few eminent lawyers; but chiefly of adventurers without
fortune. "I should not be surprised,” remarked Mirabeau, “if civil
war were the result of their beautiful decree. ”
Meanwhile the King had been tampered with. On the 23d he
came into the Assembly in royal pomp. “I command you, gentle-
men, to disperse immediately, and to repair to-morrow morning to
your respective chambers, there to resume your sitting” — and the
King withdrew. Some of the clergy had joined the Assembly.
There was strong inclination to obey the royal command. Mirabeau
was quickly on his feet. "I call upon you, gentlemen, to assert your
dignity and legislative power, and to remember your oath [at the
Tennis Court] which will not permit you to disperse till you have
established the constitution. ” While he was sitting down, amidst
applause, the Marquis de Brézé, grand master of ceremonies, entered,
and turning to the President, Bailli, said, “You have heard the King's
orders. ”
“Yes, sir," flashed out Mirabeau: we have heard the intentions
that have been suggested to the King; and you, sir, who cannot be
his organ with the National Assembly,— you, who have here neither
place, nor voice, nor right of speech, you are not the person to
remind us thereof. Go, and tell those who sent you that we
here by the will of the people, and that we will only be driven
hence by the power of the bayonet. ”
That reply overthrew absolute monarchy in France, and began the
era of constitutional liberty. From the moment of that utterance,
»
are
## p. 10080 (#508) ##########################################
10080
MIRABEAU
Mirabeau became a political party in France; and he stood alone.
Then followed in quick succession his orations, unparalleled in French
annals, rarely equaled and still more seldom surpassed in those of any
other country.
Oratory is a form of genius; but it makes great demands of those
who follow it when the man and the occasion are past. Great indeed
is he whose reputation, based on eloquence, survives the rarages of
time. To Demosthenic eloquence, Mirabeau gave the full force of a
masterful genius for practical politics. Because he was a practical
statesman he stood alone, and was an enigma to his colleagues and
to the people whom he loved and served. His reputation does not
rest merely on a series of dazzling utterances, but on the sound ideas
he scattered so lavishly before the Assembly. He foresaw the death
of the King and Queen; the overthrow of monarchy and the Reign of
Terror. He knew the centuries of wrongs that must be righted to
save France from utter disintegration. Yet no word of vengeance
or anarchy dropped from him. He would save the monarchy, and
make it the centre of a constitutional system. Therefore his orations
dealt wholly with practical matters: civil organization; the veto power;
finance; trade; slavery; the landed estates; taxation; the balance
of powers under a constitution. He was neither of the Right nor of
the Left, but of the whole estate of the people. His speech on the
inviolability of letters ranks with Milton's defense of unlicensed
printing. From his first conception of a constitutional monarchy, as
announced by him in his appeal to the electors of Aix, he never
departed. Like Montesquieu, he had learned from the British consti-
tution, but his efforts to secure a like balance of functions for France
were unsuccessful. The Radicals demanded a general proscription:
Paris was with the Radicals, and Paris was France.
In the midst of his career, while yet in his second youth, he
was suddenly cut off, the victim of his uncontrollable passions. The
revolution was completing its twenty-third month. Mirabeau was
dead. Unparalleled honors were paid to his memory. The Assem-
bly voted him a public funeral. St. Généviève should be devoted to
the reception of his ashes, and the birthday of French liberty should
be his monument. Paris was in mourning. All parties followed the
illustrious dead to the Pantheon. Swiftly the shadow of grief passed
over France, and departments and cities held funeral services in his
memory. The poets and pamphleteers issued their formal lamenta-
tions; the theatres brought out Mirabeau in life and Mirabeau in
death.
He had struggled to save the monarchy, and to construct a na-
tional government based on constitutional liberty.
After the King's death the royal papers were found in the iron
chest; and among them several that disclosed Mirabeau's plans. He
## p. 10081 (#509) ##########################################
MIRABEAU
1008
had been dead two years. His honors were re-examined, his memory
put under arrest, his bust destroyed; and from the Assembly there
went forth a decree that the body of Honoré Gabriel Riquetti Mira-
beau should be withdrawn from the French Pantheon, and that the
body of Marat should be put in its place. Soon after, rude hands
flung his remains into the burying-place for criminals, in the Fau-
bourg of St. Marcel. To this day no sign marks his grave.
Frencio N. horpen
ON THE REMOVAL OF THE TROOPS AROUND PARIS
From a Speech in the National Assembly, July 1789
G
ENTLEMEN, the time presses. I reproach myself for every
moment that I steal from your sage deliberations; and I
hope that these considerations, rather indicated than pre-
sented by me,— but whose evidence appears to me irresistible,-
will be sufficient to pass the motion which I have the honor now
to propose to you:-
That there be presented to the King a humble address, de-
scribing to his Majesty the vivid alarm which has been felt in
this National Assembly of his kingdom by reason of the abuse
which has been made of the King's name, within a short time, in
order to permit the approach to the capital, and to this city of
Versailles, of an artillery train, and of enormous bodies of troops,
foreign and national; a large number of which troops are already
quartered in neighboring villages: and also, through this abuse
of the King's name, the announced formation of fixed camps in
the neighborhood of these two cities.
That there be represented to the King, not only how much
these measures are opposed to the gracious intentions of his
Majesty toward relieving his people, in the present unhappy con-
ditions of the dearness and scantiness of grain, but also how
much these measures are contrary to the liberty and to the honor
of the National Assembly; how adapted they are to alter that
mutual confidence between the King and his people which makes
the glory and the security of a monarch, and which alone can
insure the repose and the tranquillity of his kingdom; and in fine,
procure for the nation the inestimable results which the country
awaits from the labors and the zeal of this Assembly.
XVII—631
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That his Majesty most respectfully be urged to reassure his
faithful subjects, by giving all necessary orders for the immediate
cessation of these measures, which are equally useless, dangerous,
and alarming; and also for the prompt return of the troops in
question, and of the artillery train, to the places from which
they have been brought.
And while waiting for this measure to be decided, and in
consequence of the disquietude and alarm which such a state
of affairs has brought to pass in the heart of the people, and
in order provisionally to maintain calm and tranquillity, let his
Majesty be begged to issue a command that in the two cities
of Paris and Versailles there shall be a levy of the civil guard,
which, acting under the orders of the King, will entirely suffice
for such duty without augmenting around the two cities in ques-
tion a population that must be supplied with food.
THE ADDRESS
SIRE, - You have invited the National Assembly to bestow on
you a mark of its confidence; in such a request you have gone
further than the most eager of its fervent hopes.
We have been imparting to your Majesty our most vivid
alarms: if we only were the object of them, if we had been so
weak as to be fearful only for ourselves, then your goodness
would condescend to reassure us; and moreover, in blaming us
for having been doubtful of your intentions toward us, you would
concentrate all our inquietudes, you would dissipate the cause
of them, and you would leave no uncertainty as to the position
before you of the National Assembly.
But, Sire, we do not implore your protection, for that would
be to accuse your justice: we have indeed felt fears, and we
dare to say that our fears are a part of the purest patriotism,
the interest of those who trust in us, of public tranquillity, and
of the happiness of that dear monarch, who, in making smooth
for our feet the road of happiness, certainly deserves to walk in
it himself without obstacles.
The promptings of your own heart, Sire — behold in them
the true safety of the French people. As soon as troops pour in
from all sides, as soon as camps are formed around us, the very
capital invested, we ask ourselves with astonishment, “Does the
King distrust the fidelity of his own people? If he had doubted
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>>
that, would he not have confided to us his paternal chagrin ?
What are we to understand by this menacing procedure? Where
are those enemies of the State and of the King to be overcome ?
Where are the rebels, the conspirators, that it is necessary to
reduce to subjection ? ” One unanimous voice replies to this in
the capital and throughout the kingdom: "Our King is true to
us; we bless Heaven for the gift which Heaven has bestowed
upon us in his love. »
Sire, the religious convictions of your Majesty cannot waver
except under the pretext of public benefit.
If those who have given these counsels to our King had had
enough confidence in their own principles to unfold them to us,
such a moment would bring in the fairest triumph of truth.
The State has nothing to dread from the evil ideas of those
who dare to lay siege even to the throne, who do not respect the
confidence of the purest and most virtuous of princes. And how
do they contrive, Sire, to make you disbelieve in the attachment
and the love of your subjects ? Have you shed their blood ?
Are you cruel, implacable? Have you abused justice? Do the
people impute to you their own misfortunes ? Do they connect
your name with their calamities? Can they have said to you that
the nation is impatient under your yoke, that it is weary of the
sceptre of the Bourbons ? No, no, they have not done this. The
calumny they employ is at least not absurd; they seek something
like probability to give color to their dark treacheries.
Your Majesty has seen recently all your own government can
do for your people: subordination is re-established in your per-
turbed capital; the prisoners set at liberty by the multitude have
themselves reassumed their chains; public order, which would
perhaps have cost torrents of blood to re-establish had it been
done by force, has been re-established by one single word from
your mouth.
But that word was a word of
peace;
it was the
expression of your heart, and your subjects feel it their glory
never to resist that. How grand to exercise such authority! It
is that of Louis IX. , of Louis XII. , of Henri IV. ; it is the only
authority which can be worthy of you.
We should deceive you, Sire, if we did not add, forced by cir-
cumstances, that this kind of rule is the only one which to-day it
would be possible to exercise in France. France will not tolerate
the abuse of the best of kings, or that there should be set aside,
through untoward measures, that noble plan which he himself
has outlined. You have called us hither to adjust in concert with
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MIRABEAU
(
you, the Constitution; to take measures for the regeneration of
the kingdom: this National Assembly has just declared solemnly
to you that your wishes shall be accomplished, that your prom-
ises are not vain, and that difficulties and terrors shall not retard
the work of the Assembly, nor intimidate in any way its courage.
But our enemies will presume to say, “What now is the harm
in the coming together of the troops ? ”
The danger, Sire, is pressing, is general, beyond all the calcu-
lations of human prudence.
The danger affects the people of your provinces. Once alarmed
as to our liberty, this alarm cannot be checked. Distance only
makes more of the matter, exaggerates everything, doubles, sharp-
ens, and poisons their disquietude.
The danger threatens the capital. With what sort of an eye
can a people in poverty, and tormented by most cruel anxieties,
see the poor relics of its own daily bread quarreled over by a
host of menacing soldiery? The mere presence of the military
will kindle excitement, and produce a general fermentation; and
the first act of real violence, originating under the pretext of a
matter for the police, may be the beginning of a horrible series
of calamities.
The danger threatens the troops themselves. French soldiers
brought near to the very centre of discussion, sharing in the
passions as well as in the interests of the people, can easily for-
get that enlistment has made them soldiers, in remembering that
nature has made them men.
The danger, Sire, menaces our own labors, which are our first
duty, and which will not have full success, genuine permanence,
except so far as the people regard them as the work absolutely
of our own free will. Besides this, there is a contagion in pas-
sionate popular movements. We are only men. Our defiance of
ourselves, the fear of appearing weak, can make us overshoot our
mark; we are besieged by violent and unregulated counsels; calm
reason and tranquil wisdom do not utter their oracles in the midst
of tumult, disorders, and scenes of faction.
The danger, Sire, is even more terrible; judge of its extent
by the alarms which bring us to you. Great revolutions have
had causes much less intelligible; more than one enterprise fatal
to nations and to kings has announced itself in a way less sin-
ister and less formidable. Do not give credence to those who
speak lightly to you of the nation at large; those who do not
know how to represent it before you except according to their
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own views,- sometimes as insolent, rebellious, seditious,- some-
times as submissive, docile under the yoke, and ready to bend its
head to receive it. These two pictures are equally untruthful.
Always ready to obey you, Sire, since you command us in the
name of the law, our fidelity is without limits, as it is without
stain.
Ready to resist to a man the arbitrary commands of those
who are abusing your name,- since they are enemies of the law,
our devotion to your Majesty itself commands such resistance;
and it shall be to our eternal honor to have merited the re-
proaches that our firmness may bring upon us.
Sire, we conjure you, in the name of our fatherland, in the
name of your happiness and your glory, send back your soldiers
to the garrison posts whence your counselors have brought them;
dismiss that artillery destined to protect our frontiers; and above
all, send away the foreign troops,—those allies of the nation
that we paid to defend and not to disturb our firesides. Your
Majesty has no need of them: why should a monarch, adored
by twenty-five millions of Frenchmen, at an enormous cost draw
together around his throne so many thousands of foreigners ?
Sire, surrounded by your children, let our love be your guard !
The deputies of the nation are summoned to consecrate with you
the supreme rights of royalty, upon the immovable basis of a
people's liberty: while they are doing their duty, while they are
yielding to the dictates of their reason, of their sentiment, will
you expose them to the suspicion of having yielded not to these
things, but to fear? Ah! the authority that all hearts confer on
you is the only authority that is pure, the only authority that
cannot be defied; it is the just return for your benefits, and it is
the immortal appanage of princes, of whom you are the model.
THE ELEGY ON FRANKLIN
Pronounced in the National Assembly
F*
RANKLIN is dead! The genius that freed America, and poured
a flood of light over Europe, has returned to the bosom of
the Divinity.
The sage whom two worlds claim as their own, the man for
whom the history of science and the history of empires contend
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MIRABEAU
with each other, held, without doubt, a high rank in the human
race.
Too long have political cabinets taken formal note of the
death of those who were great only in their funeral panegyr-
ics. Too long has the etiquette of courts prescribed hypocritical
mourning. Nations should wear mourning only for their bene-
factors. The representatives of nations should recommend to
their homage none but the heroes of humanity.
The Congress has ordained, throughout the United States, a
mourning of one month for the death of Franklin; and at this
moment America is paying this tribute of veneration and grati-
tude to one of the fathers of her Constitution.
Would it not become us, gentlemen, to join in this religious
act, to bear a part in this homage, rendered in the face of the
world, both to the rights of man and to the philosopher who has
most contributed to extend their sway over the whole earth?
Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius, who, to
the advantage of mankind, compassing in his mind the heavens
and the earth, was able to restrain alike thunderbolts and tyrants.
Europe, enlightened and free, owes at least a token of remem-
brance and regret to one of the greatest men who have ever been
engaged in the service of philosophy and of liberty.
I propose that it be decreed that the National Assembly, dur-
ing three days, shall wear mourning for Benjamin Franklin.
A LETTER TO THE KING OF PRUSSIA
Yº
ou have reached the throne at a fortunate period. The age
is becoming daily more enlightened. It has labored for
your benefit, in collecting sound notions for you. It ex-
tends its influence over your nation, which so many circumstances
have kept behind others. Everything is now tested by a severe
logic. The men who see only a fellow-creature under the royal
mantle, and require that he should possess some virtue, are more
numerous than ever. Their suffrages cannot be dispensed with.
In their opinion, one kind of glory alone remains; every other
is exhausted. Military success, political talents, wonders in art,
improvements in science, have all appeared in turn, and their
light has blazed forth from one extremity of Europe to the
other. That enlightened benevolence which gives form and life
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MIRABEAU
10087
to empires has not yet appeared, pure and unmixed, upon a
throne. To you it belongs to place it there; this sublime glory
is reserved for you. Your predecessor gained battles enough,
perhaps too many; he has too much fatigued Fame's hundred
tongues, and exhausted military glory, for several reigns,— nay,
for several centuries.
With much greater facility you
may create a glory more pure and not less brilliant, which shall
be wholly your own. Frederick conquered the admiration of man-
kind, but he never won their love.
This love you may
entirely possess.
Do not, ah! do not neglect the treasure which Providence has
spread in your path. Deserve the blessings of the poor, the love
of your people, the respect of Europe, and the good wishes of
wise men.
Be just, be good, and you will be great and happy!
You wish to obtain, dread sir, the title of Great; but you
wish to receive it from the mouth of history, and from the suf-
frage of ages to come,- you would despise it from the mouths
of your courtiers. If you do that which the son of your slave
could do, ten times a day, better than yourself, they will tell you
that you have performed an extraordinary action! If you suffer
your passions to mislead you, they will say that you are right!
If you are as lavish of the blood of your subjects as of the waters
of your rivers, again will they tell you that you are right! If
you barter for gold the air that preserves life, they will say that
you are right! If you revenge yourself - you who are so power-
ful — they will continue to tell you that you are right!
They said the same thing when Alexander, in a drunken fit,
plunged his dagger into the bosom of his friend; they said the
same thing when Nero murdered his mother.
If you indefatigably perform your duties, without ever putting
off till the following day the burthen of the present day; if by
great and fruitful principles you can simplify these duties, and
reduce them within the capacity of a single man; if you give
your subjects all the freedom they can bear; if you can protect
every kind of property, and facilitate useful labor; if you terrify
petty oppressors who in your name would prevent men from
doing, for their own advantage, that which injures not their fel-
lows,-a unanimous shout will bless your authority, and render
it more sacred and more powerful. Everything will then be easy
for you, because the will and the strength of all will be united
to your own strength and your own will, and your labor will
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MIRABEAU
SOV-
become every day less severe. Nature has made labor necessary
to man. It gives him also this precious advantage, that change
of labor is to him not only a relaxation but a source of pleasure.
Who, more easily than a king, can live in strict accordance with
this order of nature? A philosopher has said that "no man feels
such lassitude of spirit as a king”; he should have said, "a
slothful king. ” How could lassitude of mind fall upon a
ereign who did his duty ? Could he ever keep up his vigor of
intellect and preserve his health so well as by shielding himself,
under the pursuit of labor, from the disgust which every man of
sense must feel among those idle talkers, those inventors of ful-
some praises, who study their prince for no other purpose than
to corrupt, blind, and rob him ? Their sole art is to render him
indifferent and feeble, or else impatient, rude, and idle.
Your subjects will enjoy your virtues, which alone can preserve
and improve their patrimony. Your courtiers will cultivate your
defects, by which alone they can support their influence and their
expectations.
It is worthy of you not to govern too
much.
[I recommend the immediate] abolition of military slavery;
that is to say, the obligation imposed upon every Prussian to
serve as a soldier, from the age of eighteen years to sixty
and more: that dreadful law arising from the necessities of an
iron age and a semi-barbarous country; that law dishonoring a
nation without whom your ancestors would have been nothing
but slaves, more or less decorated with empty honors. This
law does not produce you a single soldier more than you would
obtain by a wiser system, which may enable you to recruit the
Prussian army in a manner that shall elevate men's hearts, add
to the public spirit, and possess the forms of freedom, instead of
those of brutishness and slavery. Throughout Europe, and more
especially in your Majesty's dominions, one of the most useful
instincts upon which patriotism could be founded is stupidly
lost. Men are forced to go to the battle-field like cattle to the
slaughter-house; whilst nothing is easier than to make the pub-
lic service an object of emulation and glory.
Be also the first sovereign in whose dominions every man
willing to work shall find employment. Everything that breathes
must obtain its nourishment by labor. This is the first law of
nature, anterior to all human convention: it is the connecting
bond of all society; for every man who finds nothing but a
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MIRABEAU
10089
refusal to his offer to work in exchange for his subsistence
becomes the natural and lawful enemy of other men, and has a
right of private war against society. In the country, as in cities,
let workshops be everywhere opened at your Majesty's cost; let
all men, of what nation soever, find their maintenance in the
price of their labor; let your subjects there learn the value of
time and activity. Instruction, you are aware, is one of the most
important of a sovereign's duties, and likewise one of his richest
treasures. Entire liberty of the press ought to be one of your
first acts: not only because any restraint upon this liberty is a
hindrance to the enjoyment of natural rights, but because every
obstacle to the advancement of knowledge is an evil, a great evil;
especially for you, who are debarred thereby from obtaining,
through the medium of printing, a knowledge of the truth, and
of public opinion,- that prime minister of good kings.
Let information be circulated through your dominions. Read,
and let others read. If light were rising on all sides toward
the throne, would you invoke darkness? Oh, no! for it would
be in vain. You would lose too much, without even obtaining
the fatal success of extinguishing it. You will read, you will
begin a noble association with books.
They have destroyed cruel
.
and disgraceful prejudices, they have smoothed the road before
you, they have served you even before you were born. You will
not be ungrateful toward the accumulated works of beneficent
genius.
You will read, and you will protect those who write; for with-
out them what would become of the human species, and what
would it be? They will instruct, they will assist, they will talk
to you without seeing you. Without approaching your throne,
they will introduce there the august truth.
This truth will enter
your palace alone, without escort, and without affected dignity; it
will bear neither title nor ribands, but will be invisible and dis-
interested.
You will read, but you will be desirous that your subjects
should also read. You will not think you have done all by re-
cruiting your academies from foreign countries: you will found
schools, you will multiply them, especially in country places, and
you will endow them. You would not reign in darkness; and you
will say, "Let there be light! ” The light will burst forth at your
voice; and its halo, playing round your brow, will form a more
glorious ornament than all the laurels won by conquerors.
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MIRABEAU
I trust, dread sir, that my candor will not displease you. Medi-
tate on these respectful lines, and say:-
« This is what will never be admitted to me as true, and is
the very reverse of what I shall be told every day. The boldest
offer to kings nothing but veiled truths, whilst here I see truth
quite naked
This is far preferable to that venal incense
with which I am suffocated by versifiers, and panegyrists of the
Academy, who seized upon me in my cradle, and will scarcely
leave me when I am in my coffin. I am a man before I am a
king. Why should I be offended at being treated as a man?
Why should I be offended with a foreigner, who wants noth-
ing of me, and will soon quit my court never more to see me,
for speaking to me without disguise ? He points out to me that
which his eyes, his experience, his studies, and his understanding
have collected; he gives me, without expectation of reward, those
true and free counsels of which no condition of man is so much
in want as kings. He has no interest in deceiving me, and can
have none but good intentions.
Let me examine atten-
tively what he proposes; for the mere common-sense and the
simple candor of a man who has no other pursuit than the culti-
vation of his reason and his intellect, may perhaps be as good as
the old routine, and trickery, and forms, and diplomatic illusions,
and the ridiculous dogmas, of statesmen by profession. ”
A LETTER TO VITRY
Yºu
ou know the plan of the journal I purpose establishing, but
others will not understand it. It is to be founded upon the
idea — novel perhaps, and which in my opinion is not with-
out its usefulness — of noticing old books, as the ordinary jour-
nals notice new ones. To abridge and select is now, assuredly,
the most urgent want of science and letters. To preserve is of
a usefulness less direct, perhaps, or rather less abundant. Never-
theless, in proportion as taste and erudition pass away; in pro-
portion as the mania of writing becomes more contagious; in
proportion to the ardor in publishing, the haste with which books
are published, the mania or necessity of sacrificing to the taste
of the day, to the coryphei of the times, to the pretension of
being free from prejudice — which, in point of fact, is scarcely
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10091
anything better than substituting one prejudice for another; - in
proportion, I say, as all these diseases gain upon us, and increase,
do we too much neglect the exertions of our predecessors, who,
although it should be true that we surpass them in the talent of
bringing out, ought not the less to attract our attention, in order
that we may set in an elegant framework that which they have
clumsily enchased. I say then that this article will yield some-
thing; and I invoke your researches in the works of our philolo-
gers of the sixteenth century, our learned of the seventeenth, our
collections and our compilations of all ages, but that in which no
books were made except with stolen fragments, well or ill-stitched
together, no tragedies except with old hemistichs.
You know that another of my projects is to give in successive
parts a work on the academic collections, more especially that
entitled Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-
lettres. My plan here is to take the interesting papers of the
collection, and unite them by amalgamating and blending them
together, by clearing and pruning, and criticizing them one by
another; and to draw from this chaos all that is worthy of the
attention of philosophers, men of letters, and men of the world,
without crushing them by the weight of a fastidious erudition.
This is an undertaking the want of which is generally felt, and
its utility incontestable.
I intend to include speculative politics, finance, etc. ; and the
little I shall take from recent literature is my own affair. I
say “speculative politics” because, although I may be strongly
solicited, I will never write what Linguet so ridiculously calls
annals. ” The trade of a hussar no longer suits me.
even in this application, compatible with self-respect; for is there
not great rashness in giving intelligence of what passes at a dis-
tance, and passing judgment upon it, whilst daily experience
shows how difficult it is to obtain information of what is passing
close to us?
The art of printing has so greatly facilitated the means of
instruction that science has become a very common commodity.
But the mind of man may be improved ad infinitum. To render
the road to improvement easier, and to make the human intel-
lect advance with rapid strides in its progress of discovery,- to
engender new ideas, and make our exertions more fruitful, — a
mode is wanting to abridge study and avoid repetitions; placing
the studious man, especially the man of genius, at the point
(
It is not,
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MIRABEAU
whence he is to start. If, for instance, he who appeared desirous
of seeking new discoveries were to spend his time in studying
the Epicycles of Ptolemy, or the Vortices of Descartes, he should
be spoken to in the following words: “This is the point we have
reached: Kepler, Newton, Claireau, Euler, etc. , have guessed,
demonstrated, and investigated this branch of science; and it
is from the point of their discoveries that you must try to
advance. ” Is this not the case with all sciences ?
FROM THE LETTERS
K
.
INGS who raise themselves only by things, and whom things
instruct badly,- because they almost always bend to the
monarch's will, passions, and opinions, - would perhaps
appear the most stupid of human beings if it were known how
little knowledge and how few ideas they generally have. Every
rational saying that escapes them is preserved; which is assur-
edly the best possible proof that such sayings are not very
numerous.
If I speak only of Paris, because at court nothing is spoken
of but Paris, it is not less true that the wants of this city are
the least urgent of any, and that as much care must be taken
not to create new paupers as to relieve those who already exist.
With regard to the latter, it would be at least necessary to give
to all the parish priests in the kingdom a sufficient income
to live; for they will not aid your poor if they are themselves
in poverty. The curés in some provinces - in Brittany, for
instance — have scarcely three hundred livres a year. What
necessity is there for the Archbishop of Auch to have 500,000
livres a year? Not but he makes a good use of it. Arch-
bishop Apchon is one of the most respectable prelates in the
kingdom; but he is mortal. The diocese of Cambrai has not
always had a Fénelon. When shall a portion of these enormous
revenues be taken and distributed among all the curés in the
kingdom ? Madame Louise has just obtained 30,000 livres a year
in corn and land, to be taken from the abbey of St. Germain,
for the support of the Carmelites of the kingdom. Assuredly
corn would grow equally well if there were no Carmelites in
France. But 30,000 livres a year, distributed among the poor
curés of the kingdom, would suffice to give, in a year of dearth,
the indispensably necessary to a great number of honest poor.
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10093
It is more than time to finish this long and shapeless collec-
tion of all sorts of dreams. You know my principles and opin-
ions sufficiently well to have no doubt that I have made a great
sacrifice to etiquette, to habit, and to prejudice, by fixing your
view upon the metropolis alone. The rest of the kingdom is a
stranger land to the great, which is the worst of evils. I wished
to show you how many useful and great things you did not do,
even in the place where you constantly reside. But would not
traveling amuse your illustrious friend-or her royal husband,
who, if he remain at Versailles, will never complete his education
either as a man or as a king? What a sad existence is that of
sovereigns! They are shut up within a circle of forty leagues
in diameter, the radii of which they perambulate as if by a con-
stant oscillation. The active correspondence between the King
of Spain and Louis XV. during twenty years is curious. They
wrote to each other every day in the same terms. The King of
Spain wrote: "At five o'clock I left St. Ildefonso, and the ren-
dezvous for the chase was at the Round of St. Anthony. ” The
same day Louis XV. wrote from Versailles: “At ten o'clock I
went to the Carrefour des Rossignols, at Compiègne, etc. ” And
this went on during twenty years.
Each monarch had his map,
and followed the route of the other, as if they had been learned
geographers studying Cook's voyages !
Let the Queen imitate her brother's example; let her travel,
and excite her husband to travel likewise, without pomp- for
pomp tends only to ruin, tire, and deceive. Let her travel.
Alas! very near the spot where the ostentation of wealth and
luxury insults the misery of the people, the King and Queen will
see, learn, and feel that which ministers and courtiers never tell
them!
The wealth of a country consists solely in its agriculture.
From it the population, and consequently the strength, of a State
are derived. Colbert, to whom so many just reproaches may be
made, was wrongfully accused when it was stated that he con-
cerned himself about nothing but manufactures. It must be
admitted that he rendered several ordinances favorable to agri-
culture. One of the most celebrated, promulgated the year
before his death, and rendered in favor of Alsace, provides that
«all persons who will occupy empty and vague lands may culti-
vate them to their own profit, and use them in full property. ”
Colbert, just before he died, contemplated making this ordinance
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MIRABEAU
general throughout the kingdom: for he perceived what is very
evident, that the King has a full quarter of his kingdom to con-
quer from enemies termed heaths, downs, and so forth; and that
it is necessary to plow with one hand whilst the other prunes,
in order soon after to cut down the parasitical and voracious tree
of fiscality.
Conventicles of monks should be established in the most
uncultivated parts of the kingdom, to do there that which they
did a thousand years ago in different places. Monks can be
.
useful to society in no other way. These conventicles must be
dispersed in the most barren spots, according to the system of
the primitive church, and there supported during the time neces.
sary, by the profits of the newly cultivated lands, which might
afterwards be added to the mass of ecclesiastical property in
the kingdom. By such means the monks would be usefully em-
ployed, the waste lands put into cultivation, the State enriched,
and no one would have a right to complain.
But not only must the lands be cultivated, but the inhabitants
ſikewise. And why should not a former measure be adopted
which time has justified ?
In 1769, married men announcing a decided capacity for a
trade were selected from different families, and sent to Paris for
a year.
The circumstance of these men being married was con-
sidered a security for their return. Thus the farrier was sent
to Alfort under Bourgelat, the miller to Corbeil, the mason to
St. Généviève, the carpenter among the machinery at the opera,
and the gardener to Montreuil. Each of these men
return obtained what he pleased; and they are now sent for
from a distance of ten leagues round. It would be very useful
if pupils were placed, in the same manner, under skillful agri-
culturists. Each would take back to his native place not only
the tools proper for his calling, but that knowledge which being
multiplied at the centre, will never reach the circumference
unless a zealous, active, and persevering government uses all
possible means to overcome indifference and routine.
on his
## p. 10095 (#523) ##########################################
MIRABEAU
10095
The
)
FROM A LETTER TO CHAMFORT, 1785
He approaches to London are of a rustic beauty of which not
even Holland has furnished models (I should rather com-
pare them to some valley in Switzerland): for – and this
very remarkable fact immediately catches an experienced eye-
this domineering people are, beyond everything, agriculturists in
their island; and it is this that has so long saved them from
their own delirium. I felt my heart strongly and deeply moved
as I passed through this highly cultivated and prosperous land,
and I said to myself, “Wherefore this emotion so new to me ? »
These country-seats compared with ours are mere country boxes.
Several parts of France, even in the worst of its provinces, and
all Normandy, through which I have just passed, are assuredly
more beautiful in natural scenery than this country. There are
to be found, here and there in France, especially in our own
province, noble edifices, splendid establishments, immense public
works, vast traces of the most prodigious efforts of man; and yet
here I am delighted much more than I was ever surprised in
my own country by the things I have mentioned. It is because
here nature is improved and not forced; it is because these roads,
narrow but excellent, do not remind me of forced or average
labor, except to lament over the country in which such labor is
known; it is because this admirable state of cultivation shows me
the respect paid to property; it is because this care, this univer-
sal cleanliness, is a speaking symptom of welfare; it is because
all this rural wealth is in nature, near to nature, and according
to nature, and does not, like splendid palaces surrounded with
hovels, betray the excessive inequality of fortunes, which is the
source of so many evils; it is because all tells me that here the
people are something — that every man enjoys the development
and free exercise of his faculties, and that I am in another order
of things.
I am not an enthusiast in favor of England, and I now
know sufficient of that country to tell you that if its constitution
is the best known, the application of this constitution is the worst
possible; and that if the Englishman is, as a social man, the
most free in the world, the English people are the least free of
any.
What then is freedom, since the small portion of it found in
one or two laws, places in the first rank a nation so little favored
.
## p. 10096 (#524) ##########################################
10096
MIRABEAU
by nature ? What may a constitution not effect, when this one,
though incomplete and defective, saves and will save for some
time to come the most corrupt people in the universe from their
own corruption ?
Will England be adduced as an objection? But that State is
constituted! The English have a country! - and this is the rea-
son why the people the most fanatic, the most ignorant, and the
most corrupt in the whole world, have a public spirit, civic vir-
tues, and incredible success, even in the midst of their delirium.
This is the reason why, despite of nature, they have assumed the
first rank among nations! .
How great must be the influence of a small number of data
favorable to the human species, since this people - ignorant,
superstitious, obstinate (for they are all this), covetous, and very
near to Punic faith — are better than most other nations known,
because they enjoy a small portion of civil liberty.
1
## p. 10097 (#525) ##########################################
10097
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
(1830-)
BY HARRIET WATERS PRESTON
RÉDÉRIC MISTRAL, the Provençal poet, will take rank among
the few highly original singers of the middle decades of
this century. Long after the fanciful philology and bardic
affectations of his school are forgotten, and his own unfinished diction-
ary of the Provençal tongue has taken its place among other massive
monuments of abortive human industry, Mistral's three very remark-
able narrative poems, Mirèio,' Calendau,'
and Nerto,' will continue to charm by the
music of their verse, the depth of their
human interest, their dramatic energy, and
the truth and splendor of their local color.
Frédéric Mistral was born on the 8th of
September, 1830, at Maillane in the Bouches-
du-Rhône; in one of those rich and quiet
farmsteads, buried amid well-tilled fields
and approached by deeply shaded avenues,
whose verdure diversifies the silvery same-
ness of the Provençal landscape. From
whatever stormy and untamable ancestor
Mistral inherited the name of that furious FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
winter wind of the Midi, which dispels, when
it arises, all the languors of the Mediterranean shore, and lashes the
soft sea of those parts into flying foam, the spirit of that free and
renovating gale was certainly in him. His father, a wealthy freehold
farmer, sent him to school at Avignon, and to college at Montpellier,
and meant to make a lawyer of him. But the youth rebelled; and
intimated instead that he had a mission to renew the glories of
ancient Provençal song. His teacher at Avignon was Joseph Rouma-
nille, who had already written verses in the dialect of the Bouches-
du-Rhône; and who was able to inspire a class of singularly apt and
brilliant pupils, of whom Frédéric Mistral and Théodore Aubanel were
the stars, with a boundless faith in its poetic possibilities and ardor
for its admission — they called it restoration — to literary honor. Ear-
lier still, by a score of years, Jacques Jasmin at Agen had made a
XVII--632
-
## p. 10098 (#526) ##########################################
10098
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
highly successful experiment with a kindred patois; but up to his day,
no Frenchman for generations had dreamed of writing in anything
but classic French. Some time in the early fifties, however, Master
Roumanille set up a publishing house at Avignon; and he and his
disciples formed themselves into a society which they called the Fili-
brige, whose members, the Félibres, agreed not merely to compose
in the rustic dialect which they were born to speak, but gravely to
combine for the purpose of formulating its etymology and grammar,
and establishing, beyond cavil, its claim to a high literary descent.
Like William Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet, who considered the
language of Shakespeare only a late and rather weak offshoot from
the primitive speech of Dorset, the Félibres claimed for their dialect
the full honors of a language. They held it to be essentially the
same as that of the mediæval Troubadours, many of whose Courts of
Love and Contests of Song had flourished within their territory; and
they also maintained that the early Provençal sprang directly from
the language of Rome, and was itself the parent of Italian, French,
and Spanish, as well as of all the other living forms of Latin speech.
Needless to say that these linguistic pretensions were never made
good; but this matters little beside the fact that works of great
freshness and distinction were actually produced under the impulse
of the so-called Provençal revival.
Among these works Mistral's were easily first; and his masterpiece,
Mirèio,' was originally printed at Avignon in 1858, in Provençal only,
and under the auspices of Roumanille. A year later it was brought
out in Paris with a very striking parallel French version of the
poet's own, which, by rendering it easily intelligible to the ordinary
reader, invited general criticism, while incidentally it revealed the
almost unparalleled wealth of the writer's vocabulary in both forms
of speech.
Mirèio,' then, was a pastoral poem of the present time, all suf-
fused with the hot sunshine of Southern France; as full as the
Georgics themselves of rustic lore and homely agricultural detail, but
embodying also, in twelve leisurely books, the tale of two very young
lovers, their innocent passion, thrilling adventures, and hapless end.
The story was told with a kind of sweet garrulity, and an affluence
of unworn imagery, that simply took the world by storm. The elab-
orate measure adopted by Mistral (apparently he did not, as was at
first claimed, invent it) was managed with consummate grace, and
gave a high idea of the musical capacities of the Provençal speech,
and its curious richness, especially in feminine rhymes. It is well
understood now that Mistral and his colleagues fashioned their new
instrument more or less to suit themselves: improvising grammati-
cal forms at need, and manipulating and modifying terminal syllables
## p. 10099 (#527) ##########################################
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
10099
with glorious license. But the Troubadours of the twelfth century
had done just the same; and these were the alleged heirs both of
their inspiration and their methods.
In 1867, after an interval of nine years, Mirèio was followed by
(Calendau, another poem of epic proportions; which naturally created
less astonishment than its predecessor, but really fell very little short
of it in vigor of conception, variety of action, and beauty of imagery.
The heroine of the new romance was a dispossessed Princess of Baux,
in whose veins ran the blood of more than one queen of love; while
her suitor was a man of humble birth, whom she inspired by reciting
legends of chivalry, and compelled to win her hand by a series of
extraordinary tests and adventures.
In 1875 M. Mistral published a collection of fugitive pieces under
the title of Lis Isclo d'Oro,' or the Golden Isles. In 1883 appeared
his third long poem, "Nerto,' a tale of the last days of the Popes at
Avignon. The florid stanza of the two previous compositions was
abandoned in Nerto for a simply rhymed octosyllabic metre, like
that employed for narrative by Chaucer, Byron, and William Morris;
and the whole tone and movement of the story were more tame and
conventional than those of the earlier ones. Here too we have for
the first time a didactic purpose plainly avowed by the author: the
singular but perfectly serious one of illustrating the personal exist-
ence and persistent activity among mankind of that formidable Being
whose name (O Lucifer, son of the morning! ) is oddly abbreviated by
the Provençaux into Cifèr.
In 1897 appeared M. Mistral's last extended poetical work up to
the date of this notice,-'Le Poème du Rhône) (The Poem of the
Rhône), eagerly expected during many years of slow completion. It
proved to be in twelve cantos; a highly romantic description and
indeed poetic romance of the great river and of sundry of its towns,
based on a narrative half mundane and half mysterious, that deals
with the humble life of the Rhodane boatmen prior to the advent
of the first steamboat that ruined the romance and industry of their
boating craft. A superb episode in the fourth canto presents Napo-
leon in his famous flight;— though it is but one passage among many
that won special praise. The whole work possesses a movement and
dramatic charm worthy of the poet.
M. Mistral writes always from the point of view of a devout
Catholic believer, whom no mysteries, whether of holy miracle or
Satanic witchcraft, can avail to stagger. Both in Mirèio) and in
Nerto' we find, by way of episode, specimens of the légende pieuse
in very beautiful modern renderings. But the plentiful lack of humor
which he shares with most of the associated Félibres —— wherein they
are, one and all, so inferior to Jasmin causes him to mingle the
## p. 10100 (#528) ##########################################
10100
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
supernatural and the matter-of-fact sometimes in a manner which is
almost grotesque. It is his one great fault as an artist.
M. Mistral has toiled heroically in his later years at a compre-
hensive lexicon of ancient and modern Provençal, two volumes of
which have appeared in print. France has awarded him all those
nominal distinctions — Academy crowns and prizes, badges of the
Legion – which she delights to bestow upon her gifted sons; but
he clings always, in his own person, to the old-fashioned rustic ways
which acquire so strong a fascination under his picturesque pen. He
lives very simply, on the farm or mas in the neighborhood of Saint
Rémy where he was born, and practices a free but homely hospi-
tality. He married, rather late in life, an exceedingly beautiful
bourgeoise of the renowned Arlesian type; and he himself has been,
from youth to old age, one of the handsomest men of his generation.
Harmet aux Prestone
THE INVOCATION, FROM MIRÈIO)
Copyright 1872, by Roberts Brothers
SING the love of a Provençal maid;
How through the wheat-fields of La Crau she strayed,
Following the fate that drew her to the sea.
Unknown beyond remote La Crau was she;
And I, who tell the rustic tale of her,
Would fain be Homer's humble follower.
What though youth's aureole was her only crown?
And never gold she wore, nor damask gown?
I'll build her up a throne out of my song,
And hail her queen in our despised tongue.
Mine be the simple speech that ye all know,
Shepherds and farmer-folk of lone La Crau.
Methinks I see yon airy little bough:
It mocks me with its freshness even now;
The light breeze lifts it, and it waves on high
Fruitage and foliage that cannot die.
Help me, dear God, on our Provençal speech,
To soar until the birds' own home I reach!
God of my country, who didst have thy birth
Among poor shepherds when thou wast on earth,
## p. 10101 (#529) ##########################################
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
JOIOI
Breathe fire into my song! Thou knowest, iny God,
How, when the lusty summer is abroad,
And figs turn ripe in sun and dew, comes he,-
Brute, greedy man,- and quite despoils the tree.
Yet on that ravaged tree thou savest oft
Some little branch inviolate aloft,
Tender and airy up against the blue,
Which the rude spoiler cannot win unto:
Only the birds shall come and banquet there,
When, at St. Magdalene's, the fruit is fair.
Translation of Harriet Waters Preston.
THE TUNNY FISHING
From "Calendau,' in the Atlantic Monthly.
Mifflin & Co.
By permission of Houghton,
B
UT when with dawn the pallid moon had set,
The whole unnumbered shoal into the net
Came pouring. Ah, but then I was elate!
Drunk with my joy, thought I had conquered fate:
“Now, love,” I said, “thou shalt have gems and gems;
I'll spoil the goldsmiths for thy diadems!
Love is the sun, the king of all this earth —
He fires, unites, fulfills with joy, gives birth,
Calls from the dead the living by the score,
And kindles war, and doth sweet peace restore.
Lord of the land, lord of the deep is he,
Piercing the very monsters of the sea
With fire-tipped arrows. Lo, the tunny yon!
Now in one silver phalanx press they on;
Anon they petulantly part and spring
And plunge and toss, their armor glittering
Steel-blue upon their crystal field of fight,
Or rosy underneath the growing light.
'Twas nuptial bliss they sought. What haste! what
fire!
With the strong rush of amorous desire
Spots of intense vermilion went and came
On some, like sparkles of a restless flame,
A royal scarf, a livery of gold,
A wedding robe, fading as love grew cold.
## p. 10102 (#530) ##########################################
IOIO2
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL
So at the last came one prodigious swell,
And the last line, that seemed invincible,
Brake with the pressure, and our boats leaped high.
«Huzza! the prey is caged! ” we wildly cry:
Courage, my lads, and don't forget the oil!
The fish we have, let not the dressing spoil!
« 'Bout ship!
