MIRABEAU, Victor Riquetti, Marquis de, the father of the great Mirabeau, and one of the most eminent teachers of the doctrines of the Economists in France, was born at Perthuis on the 5th of October 1715. He was the heir of an ancient Italian family of the name of Arrighetti, afterwards corrupted into Riquetti, who had been expelled from Florence during some civil broil in 1267, and had found a refuge and a home in Provence. His ancestors had bequeathed to him a lawless, stormy, and imperious temperament, that sought its proper element in some all-engrossing action or in the prosecution of some arduous project. This restless energy first found vent in the pursuit of war. He entered the army at an early age, fought bravely at the sieges of Kehl and Philippsburg, at the battles of Dettingen and Clusen; and won the Cross of St. Louis in 1743. By this time his father had died, and had left him an independent fortune. The new Marquis now appeared in the character of a complete aristocrat, swelling with hereditary importance, stiff with haughty affectation, and enveloped in an atmosphere of contemptuous indifference, which was ever liable to be dispersed by storms of lurking passion. Quitting the army, he married the Marquise de Saulvebeuf, and taking up his abode in the old family castle of Mirabeau, on the banks of the Durance, he thought to lead on his tenantry to his ideal standard of improvement, to exact from them in return the most reverential respect, and to reign a despotic sovereign on his own estate. But all his ardent and benevolent exertions could not bend his stiff-necked peasantry into that pliability of submission upon which his imperious soul was so intent. He therefore abandoned his hereditary castle for ever, and settled in his newly-bought estate of Bignon, about 15 miles from Paris. Here his restless mind found a new crotchet in the political economy of Quesnay. Becoming a thorough-going disciple of that philosopher, he commenced to advocate his peculiar views in a work entitled Ami des Hommes, and in several other books and tracts. The only prominent result was, that he was lodged for some time in the Bastille. Nevertheless, on his release he continued pertinaciously to write on, indulging in strange and whimsical speculations, entangling his thoughts in hopelessly-complicated sentences, venting his pent-up passion in covert satire and bursts of eloquence, and sinning against all good taste by his egotisms, mannerisms, and forced metaphors. At the same time his whole parental authority was kept perpetually on the strain in endeavouring to mould his rising family into a conformity with his own educational theory. But the young Mirabeaus, rigid with the self-will of their race, could not be bent by the paternal efforts, persistent though they were. The result was an endless series of domestic broils, waxing hotter and hotter. The employment of confidential servants exasperated the turmoil, and the introduction into the household of an artful Swiss lady, Madame Pailly, brought it to a crisis. The wronged wife abandoned for ever the home in which she had lived for fifteen years. It was shortly after this that the Marquis directed the full torrent of his educational fury against his eldest surviving boy, Gabriel Honoré, and began that merciless system of tutorage which, however well meant, only resulted in bringing into play the wild irregularities of his great son's character. After the boarding-school and the army had failed to tame the fiery young spirit, the exasperated father did not hesitate to employ harsh imprisonment. Then his eye was ever on the watch to detect any attempts to escape from the imposed punishment, and his hand was always ready to thrust his culprit into severer bondage, if occasion required. He even thought upon banishment to the unhealthy climate of Surinam as an ultimate cure. At the same time the Marquis was instituting a series of law-suits against his wife, which made him the subject of the gossip and scandal of the entire country. He was also ruling the rest of his
children with a rod of iron, and was issuing against them numerous lettres de cachet. Once, it is said, he held his entire family under confinement, and sat alone by his household hearth in stubborn resignation, consoling himself with his political economy. Yet, like all his other projects, this project of subduing his family proved impracticable. The law-suits, after lasting for fifteen years, were decided against him to the almost utter ruin of his fortune. His son Gabriel Honoré turned out to be the most daring despiser of those very conventionalities which he had been so long forcing him to respect. The rest of his children went their own several ways in spite of him. These disappointments seem to have combined with advancing old age to soften down the asperities of the Marquis's character. His imperious temper became subdued into a perverse censoriousness. His philanthropy assumed the more definite form of a morality, grim, austere, and pompous, as became the nature of the man. He called his children together, was reconciled to them, and declared himself only fit now for sitting in the chimney-nook, and "patching his brains together again." Yet scarcely had he ceased from his lifelong and ineffectual struggles, when the aggrandizement of his family name,—that object at which he had so long aimed,—was suddenly achieved by a stroke of destiny. The French revolution opened up for his gifted son a path to the highest influence and renown. The hereditary pride of the old Marquis was at length gratified. He died on the 13th July 1789, when the name of Mirabeau had already become famous throughout Europe.