He was born a gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugee and established in Provence, but of Italian origin:  the progenitors were Tuscan.  The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and persecutions.  The blood of Machiavel and the earthquake genius of the Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race.  The proportions of their souls exceed the height of their destiny:  vices, passions, virtues are all in excess.  The women are all angelic or perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as emphatic and lofty as their aspirations.  There is in their most familiar correspondence the colour and tone of the heroic tongues of Italy.

The ancestors of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of the quarrels of Marius and Sylla, of Caesar and Pompey.  We perceive the great men descending to trifling matters.  Mirabeau inspired this domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle.  I dwell on these details, which may seem foreign to this history, but explain it.  The source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the prophecy of destiny.

III.

Mirabeau’s education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father, who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of all his family.  The only virtue he was taught was honour, for by that name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanour which was too frequently but the show of probity and the elegance of vice.  Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military habits except a love of licentiousness and play.  The hand of his father was constantly extended not to aid him in rising, but to depress him still lower under the consequences of his errors:  his youth was passed in the prisons of the state; his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect being rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, where his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments.

Released from gaol, in order, by his father’s command, to attempt to form a marriage beset with difficulties with Mademoiselle De Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of policy in the small theatre of Aix.  Cunning, seduction, courage, he used every resource of his nature to succeed, and he succeeded; but he was hardly married, before fresh persecutions beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him.  A love, which his Lettres a Sophie has rendered immortal, opened its gates and freed him.  He carried off Madame de Monier