But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who possessed the genius of a great statesman united with the gifts of an incomparable orator. Born in 1749, of the old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his conduct, the passionate foe of his father, the passionate lover of his Sophie and of her child, he had conceived, and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long before the explosion came. Already he was a copious author on political subjects. He knew that France needed individual liberty and individual responsibility; he divined the dangers of a democratic despotism. He hoped by the decentralisation of power to balance Paris by the provinces, and quicken the political life of the whole country; he desired to balance the constitution by playing off the King against the Assembly, and the Assembly against the King, and to control the action of each by the force of public opinion. From Montesquieu he had learnt the gains of separating the legislative, the executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred of aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which might have assisted in the equilibration of power. As an orator his ample and powerful rhetoric rested upon a basis of logic; slow and embarrassed as he began to speak, he warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correctness, disdainful of the conventional classical decorations, magnificent in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, and passion. His speech, said Madame de Stael, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful artist, and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the Assembly on April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il est mort," which anticipated his words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was dead. "The 18th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. For fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent.... Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators." As he advanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, and condensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, now simple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, now grandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleon was a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whom he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched with sentimentality; _Ossian_ and _Werther_ were among his favourite books; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empire was of the decaying classical or neo-classical tradition.