MIRABEAU, VICTOR RIQUETTI, MARQUIS DE, one of the most eminent propagators of the doctrines of the French Economists in France, was born at Perthuis on the 5th of October 1715. He was the eldest surviving male descendant of a family esteemed ancient and noble even in Provence, and established there for above five centuries. This was the family of Riquetti or Arrighetti, which, hav-
ing been banished from Florence during the civil commotions which agitated that republic, settled in Provence, and there maintained themselves in the rank of the most noble families of the country. The most famous of them all was Riquetti, the author and engineer of the Languedoc Canal; but the relationship was denied by the preposterous and barbarous pride of the clan. The subject of this notice, like most of the elder branches of French noble families, was placed betimes in the army; he was made a Chevalier de Malte at three years of age, an ensign at fourteen, and soon afterwards a captain; he served with credit and distinction at the sieges of Kehl and Philippsburg, and at the battles of Dettingen and Clusen; and, in the year 1743, he received the cross of St. Louis, being then in the twenty-eighth year of his age. The death of his father having some years before placed him in a state of independence, he now quitted the army, and married the Marquise de Saulvebeuf, who, having been betrothed at twelve years of age, had been left a widow before she became a wife. But this marriage did not in the end prove fortunate. The lady was young, rich, and noble, but she was not handsome; and although her virtue was beyond all suspicion, the marquis, not satisfied with this, quarrelled with her, after she had lived with him fifteen years in peace and comfort, and had borne him eleven children; took into his house a fascinating young Swiss lady called Madame de Pailly; lived openly with the latter as his mistress; turned his unfortunate wife out of doors; and then engaged in a course of litigation with her, and of cruel as well as treacherous processes against her, which rendered both wretched, and made them the subject of universal talk, the objects of general censure, without profiting any human being except Madame de Pailly, the lawyers, and the retailers of scandalous gossip in the drawing-rooms of Paris.
The chief object of the Marquis de Mirabeau in quitting the profession of arms was to lead a life of literary retirement, and to improve the condition of his rural dependents. Towards the latter, indeed, his conduct seems to have been uniformly sensible, just, and kind; he was their real father, and they were in fact the only children who ever found in him the virtues of the paternal character. He went to reside in the family chateau in Provence; but neither the distance from Paris nor the state of the country suited his spirit or agreed with his taste. Accordingly, he purchased the estate of Bignon, fifteen miles from Sens and Nemours, and soon afterwards an hotel in Paris. He then entered upon the career of philosophy, which he pursued for half a century, and which terminated only with his life, about the beginning of the French Revolution, when he left the world with a reputation for virtue greatly exaggerated, and for talents much below his real merit. He died at Argenteuil on the 13th of July 1789, at a time when his son, the Count de Mirabeau, was rapidly rising to a supremacy of influence and power in the National Assembly.
The Marquis de Mirabeau was, after Quesnay, the chief patriarch of the sect of Economists; and was also well known and distinguished for his practical attention to economics as a considerable landowner and a patrician of high rank. But his style, which had the faults common to all the writers of the sect, was, besides, uncouth and fantastical in a remarkable degree, being deformed by an unhappy affectation of imitating the manner of Montaigne in an accumulation of trivial redundancies, which he called "his dear native exuberance," as well as by a certain false heat, and an incredible excess of pride and of dogmatism. That these defects, however, were not the result of any natural cloudiness or obliquity of mind, but of the vicious standard upon which he had formed his taste, is evident from his correspondence published in the Bio-
graphical Memoirs of his son.1 Indeed his letters form, in all respects, a perfect contrast to his more elaborate compositions, being as remarkable for their natural grace, idiomatic elegance, and perfect perspicuity, as the latter are for their rugged dulness, their pedantic extravagance, and their affected obscurity. Nothing, in truth, can be more entirely unlike than the philosopher and the man; the enlightened economist and the haughty aristocratic noble; the friend of Quesnay and the father of Mirabeau; the Ami des Hommes and the Père de Famille.
But all this is by no means without example. Such discrepancies between the public and the domestic characters of men are indeed far from being of rare occurrence. The difference here, however, is unfortunately carried farther than in almost any other instance known. The characteristic of the sect to which the Marquis belonged was a rigorous love of the strictest justice; but his treatment of his son exhibits one perpetual scene of all justice grossly outraged. To observe moderation, to regard the useful end of all things, to act as if they were born not for themselves but for all mankind, were the leading maxims of the Economists:
Secta fuit, servare modum finemque tenere,
Naturamque sequi, patrieque impendere vitam:
Nec sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo.
The predominant passion of the marquis, however, was family pride; moderation neither in this nor in any other feeling was never for an instant the inmate of his mind nor the regulator of his thoughts; he always spoke, wrote, and acted in private life, as one who never doubted that the world was made for the order, not the sect, to which he belonged, and that his first and highest duty was to keep the Mirabeau family at the head of the privileged class. To follow the dictates of nature, and devote their lives to the cause of truth, were precepts constantly inculcated by the Economists. The most inveterate prepossession against his first-born; the most refined cruelty of treatment which his ingenuity could devise for that child; even the expedient of leaving him in wretched circumstances, and restoring him to liberty, that he might either terminate his existence in despair or forfeit his life to the law; accompanied with an adulterous connection formed under his own roof, and which drove from his house a wife who had borne him eleven children, and brought an accession to his income of L.2000 a year;—such, not to mention imputed iniquities of a still darker complexion, are the traits of private character which distinguished the lover of nature and of truth, and which, in the work already referred to, are, for the most part, represented under the infallible testimony of his own hand. To the same authority we are further indebted for proofs of a difference still more marvellous, and of which there is probably no other example. The author of the dullest, and most heavy, uninteresting books, written in the most tiresome, insipid, and almost intolerable style, is the author of the very best, most lively, and most entertaining letters we have ever met with, written in a style which, for originality, raciness, force, and felicity of diction, is almost without a rival. "Les lettres familières," says the editor of the Mémoires Biographiques, "que nous avons par milliers, et qui furent toujours remarquables par un naturel abondant et facile, par une aisance spirituelle et gaie, forment le plus inexplicable des contrastes avec ses écrits destinés à la publicité, tracés pour ainsi dire en sa présence, et dans lesquels le fond toujours très-sensé des idées, est décréé par la couleur particulière de son style obscur, pesant, et baroque, mélangé de tropes bizarres, d'incohé-
rentes métaphores, en un mot, il faut le dire, de galimatias intolérable."
The works of the Marquis of Mirabeau, which have been called the Apocalypse of Political Economy, form no less than twenty-two volumes; but those alone which are now known or consulted are L'Ami des Hommes, Théorie de l'Impôt, Philosophie Rurale, and Education Civile d'un Prince. Besides these, he contributed a vast number of papers to the Journal d'Agriculture and the Ephémérides du Citoyen, the former of which reached thirty, and the latter forty volumes. The greater part of his works have been collected and published as a sequel to the Ami des Hommes, in eight vols. 12mo, or three vols. 4to. Of these, the following is nearly a complete list, viz. Ami des Hommes, Paris, 1755, in five vols. 12mo; 2. Examen des Poésies sacrées de Lefranc de Pompignan, 1755, in 12mo; 3. Mémoire sur les Etats Provinciaux, 1757, in 12mo; 4. Mémoire concernant l'Utilité des Etats Provinciaux, 1757, in 8vo; 5. Réponse du Correspondant à son Banquier, 1759, in 4to; 6. Théorie de l'Impôt, Paris, 1760, in 4to and 12mo; 7. Philosophie Rurale, ou Economie Générale et Particulièr, de l'Agriculture, Amsterdam, 1764, in three vols. 12mo; 8. Lettres sur le Commerce des Grains, 1768, in 12mo; 9. Les Economiques, Paris, 1769, in two vols. 4to, or four vols. 12mo; 10. Lettres Economiques, Amsterdam, 1770, in 12mo; 11. Les Devoirs, Milan, 1770, in 8vo; 12. La Science, ou les Droits et les Devoirs de l'Homme, Lausanne, 1774, in 12mo; 13. Lettres sur la Législation, ou l'Ordre Légal dépravé, rétabli et perpétué, Berne, 1775, in three vols. 12mo; 14. Entretiens d'un jeune Prince avec son Gouverneur, Paris, 1785, in four vols. 12mo; 15. Education Civile d'un Prince, Dourlac, 1788, in 8vo; 16. Hommes à célébrer pour avoir bien mérité de leur Siècle et de l'Humanité par leurs écrits sur l'Economie Politique; 17. Rêve d'un Goutteux, 1788, in 8vo. In his eulogy of Quesnay, inserted in the Ephémérides du Citoyen, he styles the head of the sect of the Economists Maitre de la Science, and places him above both Socrates and Confucius; and this piece is still sought for as a model of the perplexed and nonsensical style of writing (style ampligonique). (a.)