Whence came those births sublime and terrible, produced in the space of three or four years? Whence came that burst of genius prepared twenty-four or twenty-five years before to second political eruption? Whence came that body of superior men who closed the eighteenth and opened the nineteenth century? Whence came that phalanx more than human, and who raised the hand to swear to the constitution before the altar of their country? Let us forget the death of Mirabeau, the last upholder of the monarchy, whom heaven struck in an unexpected manner, at the moment he forsook the cause of the people; and who, in dying, counselled the flight of the king—a flight which, had it succeeded, would have saved the life of his Majesty; but successful or unsuccessful, must inevitably have brought the monarchy to the ground. All knew not the cause of that reason or corruption on the part of Mirabeau; whether it was that his aristocratic instincts, kept under for a time by his father’s severity, had sprung into light on contact with royalty, or not, seemed to be doubtful. The Queen was a great enchantress. She was a Circe, fatal to those who stopped not their ears, to avoid listening to the blandishments of her sweet voice. She had the fatal gift, which Mary Stuart possessed, of leading all her friends to death. The end of Mirabeau was announced in the provinces almost at the same time as his illness. It was on the 20th of March that the news of his illness was bruited about in Paris. It appeared that on the 27th, two days previous, being at his house at Argenteuil, he was seized with a violent cholic, accompanied with almost unendurable agony. He sent for his friend and physician, the famous Cabanis, and distinctly refused to see any other. This was wrong, perhaps; a hospital surgeon or a practised physician might have saved him. As soon as the news was received, the crowd pressed to the door of the sick man’s house. Barnave, his enemy, almost his rival, who would have died, slain by the Queen, for an interview like that which Mirabeau had had with her, came to see him conducting a deputation of Jacobins. The priest came, and would not be denied. This was exactly what Mirabeau feared—the influence of priests upon his dying volition. They refused admission to the sick man’s chamber, saying that Mirabeau wished only to see his friend M. Talleyrand, to whom, he said, he could confess, without any great fear of virtuous indignation. For some months he had been suffering, he believed, from the effects of poison. Administered by whom? He would have been puzzled to tell that himself. All the world, except the parties interested, knew about his interview with the Queen at St. Cloud, in the month of May, 1790. Whether his malady was natural, or the effects of a crime, he took no measures whatever to arrest its progress.