It was at this crisis that Mirabeau first appeared upon the stage, as a pamphleteer, writing bitter and envenomed attacks on the government, and exposing with scorching and unsparing sarcasms the evils of the day, especially in the department of finance.  He laid bare to the eyes of the nation the sores of the body politic,—­the accumulated evils of centuries.  He exposed all the shams and lies to which ministers had resorted.  He was terrible in the fierceness and eloquence of his assaults, and in the lucidity of his statements.  Without being learned, he contrived to make use of the learning of others, and made it burn with the brilliancy of his powerful and original genius.  Everybody read his various essays and tracts, and was filled with admiration.  But his moral character was bad,—­Was even execrable, and notoriously outrageous.  He was kind-hearted and generous, made friends and used them.  No woman, it is said, could resist his marvellous fascination,—­all the more remarkable since his face was as ugly as that of Wilkes, and was marked by the small-pox.  The excesses of his private life, and his ungovernable passions, made him distrusted by the Court and the Government.  He was both hated and admired.

Mirabeau belonged to a noble family of very high rank in Provence, of Italian descent.  His father, Marquis Mirabeau, was a man of liberal sentiments,—­not unknown to literary fame by his treatises on political economy,’—­but was eccentric and violent.  Although his oldest son, Count Mirabeau, the subject of this lecture, was precocious intellectually, and very bright, so that the father was proud of him, he was yet so ungovernable and violent in his temper, and got into so many disgraceful scrapes, that the Marquis was compelled to discipline him severely,—­all to no purpose, inasmuch as he was injudicious in his treatment, and ultimately cruel.  He procured lettres de cachet from the King, and shut up his disobedient and debauched son in various state-prisons.  But the Count generally contrived to escape, only to get into fresh difficulties; so that he became a wanderer and an exile, compelled to support himself by his pen.

Mirabeau was in Berlin, in a sort of semi-diplomatic position, when the Assembly of Notables was convened.  His keen prescience and profound sagacity induced him to return to his distracted country, where he knew his services would soon be required.  Though debauched, extravagant, and unscrupulous, he was not unpatriotic.  He had an intense hatred of feudalism, and saw in its varied inequalities the chief source of the national calamities.  His detestation of feudal injustices was intensified by his personal sufferings in the various castles where he had been confined by arbitrary power.  At this period, the whole tendency of his writings was towards the destruction of the ancien regime, He breathed defiance, scorn, and hatred against the very class to which he belonged.  He was a Catiline,—­an aristocratic demagogue, revolutionary in his spirit and aims; so that he was mistrusted, feared, and detested by the ruling powers, and by the aristocracy generally, while he was admired and flattered by the people, who were tolerant of his vices and imperious temper.