Mirabeau obtained in the tribune the same ascendancy as Sieyès in the committees. He was a man who only waited the occasion to become great. At Rome, in the best days of the republic, he would have been a Gracchus; in its decline, a Catiline; under the Fronde, a cardinal de Retz; and in the decrepitude of a monarchy, when such a being could only find scope for his immense faculties in agitation, he became remarkable for the vehemence of his passions, and for their punishment, a life passed in committing excesses, and suffering for them. This prodigious activity required employment; the revolution provided it. Accustomed to the struggle against despotism, irritated by the contempt of a nobility who were inferior to him, and who excluded him from their body; clever, daring, eloquent, Mirabeau felt that the revolution would be his work, and his life. He exactly corresponded to the chief wants of his time. His thought, his voice, his action, were those of a tribune. In perilous circumstances, his was the earnestness which carries away an assembly; in difficult discussions, the unanswerable sally which at once puts an end to them; with a word he prostrated ambition, silenced enmities, disconcerted rivalries. This powerful being, perfectly at his ease in the midst of agitation, now giving himself up to the impetuosity, now to the familiarities of conscious strength, exercised a sort of sovereignty in the assembly. He soon obtained immense popularity, which he retained to the last; and he whom, at his first entrance into the legislature, every eye shunned, was, at his death, received into the Pantheon, amidst the tears of the assembly; and of all France. Had it not been for the revolution, Mirabeau would have failed in realizing his destiny, for it is not enough to be great: one must live at the fitting period. The duke of Orleans, to whom a party has been given, had but little influence in the assembly; he voted with the majority, not the majority with him. The personal attachment of some of its members, his name, the fears of the court, the popularity his opinions enjoyed, hopes rather than conspiracies had increased his reputation as a factious character. He had neither the qualities nor the defects of a conspirator; he may have aided with his money and his name popular movements, which would have taken place just the same without him, and which had another object than his elevation. It is still a common error to attribute the greatest of revolutions to some petty private manoeuvring, as if at such an epoch a whole people could be used as the instrument of one man.