[142] Mirabeau bore much of his character imprinted on his person and features. He was short, bull-necked, and very strongly made. A quantity of thick matted hair hung round features of a coarse and exaggerated character, strongly scarred and seamed. "Figure to your mind," he said, describing his own countenance to a lady who knew him not, "a tiger who has had the small-pox." When he talked of confronting his opponents in the Assembly, his favourite phrase was, "I will show them _La Hure_," that is, the boar's head, meaning his own tusked and shaggy countenance.--S. [143] "Mirabeau knew that his end was approaching. 'After my death,' said he, 'the factions will share among themselves the shreds of the monarchy.' He suffered cruelly in the last days of his life; and, when no longer able to speak, wrote to his physician for a dose of opium, in these words of Hamlet, 'to die--to sleep.' He received no consolation from religion."--M. DE STAËL, vol. i., p. 402. [144] "His funeral obsequies were celebrated with extraordinary pomp by torchlight; 20,000 national guards, and delegates from all the sections of Paris, accompanied the corpse to the Pantheon, where it was placed by the remains of Des Cartes."--LACRETELLE, tom. viii., p. 135. [145] Toulongeon, tom. i., p. 242; Mignet, tom. i., p. 132. [146] Lacretelle, tom. viii., p. 220. [147] Mignet, tom. i., p. 132; Thiers, tom. i., p. 287. [148] See Annual Register, vol. xxxiii., p. 131. [149] "To deceive any one that might follow, we drove about several streets: at last we returned to the Little Carousel. My brother was fast asleep at the bottom of the carriage. We saw M. de la Fayette go by, who had been at my father's _coucher_. There we remained, waiting a full hour, ignorant of what was going on. Never did time appear so tedious."--DUCHESS OF ANGOULÊME'S _Narrative_, p. 9. [150] Bouillé's Memoirs, pp. 275-290; Lacretelle, tom. viii., p. 258.