ORATORS OF FRANCE.

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY.

MIRABEAU.

As Christopher Columbus, after having traversed a vast extent of ocean, was advancing tranquilly towards the continent of America, all of a sudden the wind blows, the lightning flashes, the thunder mutters, the cordage is rent, the pilot alarmed, and the vessel is on the verge of being lost, of being engulfed in the waves. But Columbus himself, while his soldiers and sailors gave themselves up to prayer and to despair, confiding in his high destinies, seized the helm, steered through the roarings of the tempest and the horrors of the deep night, and feeling the prow of his vessel ground upon the shores of the New World, he cried with a loud. voice: "Land! land!" So, when the Revolution was losing its course with started anchors and torn sails, upon a rocky and tempestuous sea, Mirabeau taking his stand on the foredeck, bade defiance to the flashing of the thunderbolt, and cheering the trembling passengers, raised in the midst of them his prophetic voice, and pointed them out the promised land of liberty.

All things concurred to make Mirabeau the grand potentate of the tribune, his peculiar organization, his life, his studies, his domestic broils, the extraordinary times in which he appeared, the spirit and manner of deliberation of the Constituent Assembly, and the combination truly marvellous of his oratorical faculties. It is requisite, in an assembly of twelve hundred legislators, that the orator should be discernible from a distance, and Mirabeau was discernible from a distance. It is requisite that he be audible from a

distance, and Mirabeau was thus audible. It is requisite that the details of his physiognomy should disappear in the general expression, that the internal man be revealed in the features, and that the grandeur of the soul be transfused into the countenance and the discourse. But Mirabeau had this general expression, those features, that soul. Mirabeau in the tribune was the most imposing of orators: an orator so consummate, that it is harder to say what he wanted than what he possessed.

Mirabeau had a massive and square obesity of figure, thick lips, a forehead broad, bony, prominent; arched eyebrows, an eagle eye, cheeks flat and somewhat flabby, features full of pock-holes and blotches, a voice of thunder, an enormous mass of hair, and the face of a lion.

Born with a frame of iron and a temperament of flame, he transcended the virtues and the vices of his race. The passions took him up almost in his cradle, and devoured him throughout his life. His exuberant faculties, unable to work out their development in the exterior world, concentrated inwardly upon themselves. There passed within him an agglomeration, a laboring, a fermentation of all sorts of ingredients, like the volcano which condenses, amalgamates, fuses and brays its lava torrents before hurling them into the air through its flaming mouth. Greek and Latin literature, foreign languages, mathematics, philosophy, music, he learned all, retained all, was master of all. Fencing, swimming, horsmanship, dancing, running, wrestling, all exercises were familiar to him. The vicissitudes which the fortunate philosophers of the age had merely depicted, he had experienced. He had proudly looked despotism, paternal and ministerial, in the face, without fear and without submission. Poor, a fugitive, an exile, an outlaw, the inmate of a prison, every day, every hour of his youth was a fault, a passion, a study, a strife. Behind the bars of dungeons and bastilles, with pen in hand and brow inclined over his books, he stowed the vast repositories of his memory with the richest and most varied treasures. His soul was tempered and re

tempered in his indignant attacks upon tyranny, like those steel weapons that are plunged in water, while still red from the furnace.

While the rest of the aristocratic youth were dissipating their days in stupid and frivolous debauchery, he was courageously struggling against man and against fortune. His soul, fortified rather than revolted by injustice and arbitrary wrong, grew resolute in presence of obstacles; his intellect, sharpened by misfortune, abounded in expedients and contrivances. What variety of stratagems! what fertility of resources! what height of daring! what depth of sagacity! How escape from his father; from the police; from his enemies?-how fly, and by what means?-how live alone ?how above all support a companion?-how obtain an appeal from his capital sentence?-how touch his father to compassion, without the preliminary of separating from his mistress?-how avoid separating from her, if he would return to his wife ?-how execute this separation without degrading her, without driving her to despair?-how meet such a succession of ever-springing wants?-how parry so many perplexities of situation, so many exigencies, so many delicacies, so many dangers?-how plead positions the contrary of one another without flaw of logic and without breach of morality? He doubles, he multiplies himself; he defends himself and he attacks by turns; he supplicates, threatens; he writes and speaks, speaks in his own cause like a awyer, without being a lawyer, better than a lawyer, in short as Mirabeau alone could speak. Immoral defense, no doubt! situation false and sophistical; days without repose, nights without sleep; tempestuous life bestrewn with shoals and wrecks; efforts ever strained, sometimes succeeding, commonly failing! But in a single heart, what lessons of the human heart! and in that head, what elaboration of mind! what fecundation! what fruits! How well he could adapt himself, insinuate himself, rise to haughtiness, stoop to humility, take every tone of composition, whether he paints to Sophie, in lines of fire, the passionate torments of

his soul, or, at a later period, writes the people of Marseilles a letter on the high price of corn, which is a little masterpiece of popular good sense, precise calculation and expository simplicity!

Every where, in every thing, already Mirabeau reveals himself;-in his letters, in his pleadings, in his memorials, in his treatises on arbitrary imprisonments, on the liberty of the press, on the privileges of the nobility, on the inequality of distinctions, on the financial affairs and the situation of Europe: enemy of every abuse, vehement, polemic, bold reformer; more remarkable, it is true, for elevation, hardihood, and originality of thought, for sagacity of observation, and vigor of reasoning, than for the graces of form; verbose, even loose, incorrect, unequal, but rapid and picturesque in style, a spoken, not a written style, as is that of most orators. With what masculine eloquence he objurgates the King of Prussia! "Do but what the son of your slave will have done ten times a day, ten times better than you, the courtiers will tell you you have performed an extraordinary action. Give full reign to your passions, they will tell you you do well. Squander the sweat and the blood of your subjects like the water of the rivers, they will say you do well. If you descend to avenge yourself,-you so powerful,—they will say you do well. They have said so, when Alexander, in his drunkenness, tore open with his piognard the bosom of his friend. They have said so, when Nerc assassinated his mother."

Is not this in the oratorical style?

The orator is equally discovered in his letter of thanks to the Tiers-êtat of Marseilles. "O Marseilles! ancient, august city, asylum of liberty, may the regeneration which now awaits the kingdom, shed upon thee and thine all the choicest of its blessings! Language fails me to tell thee either what I feel or what I think; but a heart remains to me, that heart is inexhaustible, and you have ardently and enduringly its best wishes!"

On the other hand, is it not a marvel to find him, in tiɩneq

so backward, present already, in the name of the Commons, to the Assembly (Etats) of Provence, the basis of universal suffrage and representative government? "When a nation is too numerous to come together in a single assembly, it forms several bodies, and the individuals of each particular body delegate to one of their number the right of voting in their behalf.-Every representative is, by consequence, the result of election. The collection of representatives is the nation, and all those who are not representatives, must have been so, by the fact alone that they are represented.-There should not be an individual in the nation who is not either elector or electee, representing or represented." Would it not be said that Mirabeau had already discovered, or rather created, by an effort of his precursory genius, the form, the definitions, and the terms of political language? Let us recapitulate, for his life has several phases; let us recapitulate Mirabeau at this stage of his career.

He had lived a life of suffering and study in the bas tilles, experienced the rigors and privations of exile, written politics, framed codes, pleaded his own causes, prepared memorials, espoused the cause of the multitude, broken with his cast, frequented the ministers, visited England, studied Switzerland, resided in Holland, observed in Prussia. At once a man of study and a man of pleasure, a soldier, a prisoner of state, a victim of tyranny, a man of letters, a statesman, a diplomatist, a courtier, a demagogue; he had meditated, suffered, compared, judged, legislated, published books, pronounced orations. His parliamentary education had been completed, before the Parliament itself was in existence. He at the outset spoke fluently the political dialect, which his colleagues only lisped. He spoke it better than the advocates of the bar,-better than the preachers of the pulpit. He was an orator before any one suspected it, perhaps before even he knew it himself. He was destined to become speedily the leader, no less than the orator of the Constituent Assembly, the prince of the modern tribune, the very god of eloquence, and, to say all