At the age of three he suffered from the smallpox, which disfigured him for life and completely transformed his features. His father was a bigoted Jansenist, despotic, harsh, and cruel to his son, whose ardent nature and genius he did not in the least understand. He compelled Honoré, at the age of fifteen, to enter the army. After five years with his regiment, the young man had shown such aptitude for military study that he was about to receive promotion, when his father discovered that he had lost forty louis at play; was in debt, and engaged in an amorous intrigue with a young woman of the people. The old marquis, therefore, obtained a _lettre de cachet_, by which his son was imprisoned in the fort of the _Ile de Rê_. Here Mirabeau wrote his famous “Essay upon Despotism.” After his release he went with his regiment to Corsica, where he conducted himself with so much distinction as to be recommended for a captaincy of dragoons. But his arbitrary old father would not consent to this, as he now wished his son to leave the army and to embrace a rural life. The result was a breach between father and son, though a reconciliation was effected a few months later. The maternal grandmother of young Mirabeau died in 1770, and left a vast fortune, which her daughter attempted to secure entirely for herself by obtaining a separation from her tyrannical husband. The result was a lawsuit lasting fifteen years, during the whole of which time Mirabeau was in the painful position of a son between two parents who furiously hated one another. In 1772 Mirabeau married, under pressure from his father, the only daughter of the Marquis de Mariguana, a plain girl of eighteen, reputed to be a great heiress. He never received any fortune with her, beyond an annuity of 3000 francs, for her father survived his son-in-law twelve years, dying in 1803. The young couple lived for some time quietly together in the Château of Mirabeau, but Mirabeau’s fortune was not in any way equal to his rank, and he soon contracted heavy debts; this again excited his father’s anger, and he caused him to be arrested in 1774. Mirabeau was therefore reimprisoned, this time in the Château d’If, in the Gulf of Marseilles. From the Château d’If he was transported to Fort de Jaux in the Jura. The governor, who sympathised with him, accorded him semi-liberty, and he was able to make acquaintances in the town of Portarlier, where he was hospitably received by the leading families. One of these was that of the Marquis de Monnier, an old man of seventy, with a young, beautiful and intelligent wife. Mirabeau became her lover, and he and she eloped, first to Switzerland, and then to Holland, where they took up their abode in Amsterdam. The two fugitives were arrested, and Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Castle of Vincennes, where he remained for four years, his lengthy incarceration being the result of the efforts of his implacable father.