The Cardinal de Retz sold off everything to pay his debts, but he did not recover his liberty.  He described the perpetual anguish of the debtor.  He even preferred confinement in the Castle of Vincennes, to being exposed to the annoyances of his creditors.  Mirabeau’s life was one of perpetual debt; for he was a dreadful spendthrift.  The only mode by which his father could keep him out of scrapes, was by obtaining a lettre de cachet, and having him-safely imprisoned.  Though Mirabeau wielded the powers of the State, when he died he was so poor, or had been so extravagant, that he was still indebted to the tailor for his wedding suit.

Lamartine ran through half-a-dozen fortunes, and at the end of his life was “sending round the hat.”  Lamartine boldly proclaimed that he hated arithmetic, “that negative of every noble thought.”  He was accordingly driven to very shabby shifts to live.  The Cours de Litterature alone brought him in 200,000 francs a year, yet ’the money ran through his hands like quicksilver.  His debts are said to have amounted to three millions of francs; yet his style of living remained unchanged.  One of his enthusiastic admirers, having stinted himself in subscribing towards the repurchase of the Lamartine estates, went into a fishmonger’s one day to purchase a piece of turbot.  It was too dear for his means.  A distinguished-looking personage entered, paused for a moment before the turbot, and without questioning the price, ordered the fish to be sent to his house.  It was M. de Lamartine.

Webster, the American statesman, was afflicted with impecuniosity, arising from his carelessness about money matters, as well as from his extravagance.  If we are to believe Theodore Parker, Webster, like Bacon, took bribes.  “He contracted debts and did not settle, borrowed and yielded not again.  Private money sometimes clove to his hands....  A senator of the United States, he was pensioned by the manufacturers of Boston.  His later speeches smell of bribes.”  Monroe and Jefferson were always in want of money, and often in debt; though they were both honest men.

The life which public men lead nowadays, is often an incentive to excessive expenditure.  They may be men of moderate means; they may even be poor; but not many of them moving in general society have the moral courage to seem to be so.  To maintain their social position, they think it necessary to live as others do.  They are thus drawn into the vortex of debt, and into all the troubles, annoyances, shabby shifts, and dishonesties, which debt involves.