Added to this error was the unfortunate circumstance of an amour, the first outbreak of his passionate nature on emerging from boyhood, in which he was the successful rival of his superior officer, who thus became his enemy, and joined with the father to crush the young man's spirit. Mirabeau, in after years, always spoke with great bitterness of M. de Lambert's discipline. He escaped from it on this occasion, and took refuge in Paris with his father's intimate friend, the duke de Nivernois. His brother-in-law, husband of his sister, the marquis du Saillant, mediated between him and his father: he defended himself against accumulated accusations. His father speaks of his defence as a mass of falsehood and ingratitude: he meditated, or, rather, was instigated, to send him to the Dutch colonies in India, but milder thoughts prevailed;--he would not kill, but only tame, as with blows, the fiery-spirited boy; so he caused him to be imprisoned in the fortress of the Isle de Rhé; and the youth felt that all the world was his enemy, and the chief his harsh implacable parent. In his eloquent letter to the marquis, written some years after, in the prison of Vincennes, he alludes with bitterness to this period of his existence. "I may say," he writes, "that from my earliest years, and on my first entrance into life, I enjoyed few marks of your kindness; that you treated me with rigour before I could have merited it; and yet that you might have soon perceived that my natural impetuosity was excited, instead of repressed, by such treatment; that it was as easy to soften as to irritate me; that I yielded to the former, and rebelled against the latter. I was not born to be a slave; and, in a word, that, while Lambert ruined, Vioménil would have preserved me. Allow me also to remind you, that, before you restored me to your favour, you confessed in one of your letters that you had been on the point of sending me to one of the Dutch colonies. This made a profound impression, and influenced prodigiously the rest of my life. What had I done at eighteen to merit a fate the thought of which makes me tremble even now?--I had loved."