Vigorous of body, perhaps more vigorous in imagination, he had passed the night of the 15th of March in an orgie, the component parts of which were women and flowers, perhaps the sole two things that he loved. He used money simply to gratify his tastes in those respects. On the morning of the 2nd of April, after a night of agony, which inspired the famous prophecy, “I carry with me the mourning of monarchy; its remains will be the prey of factions,”—awakened from the bosom of grief, if one can use the term, by a cannon-shot, he cried. He summoned his valet, was shaved, washed, and perfumed all over his body. After his last toilette was completed, opening his window to admit the young April sun, which was brightening the first blossoms on the trees, he murmured, smiling, “Oh, sun, if thou art not God himself, thou art his cousin german!” Afterwards, his last insupportable suffering seized him. He could not speak, but snatched a pen, and wrote plainly the one word _Dormir_—“Sleep.” Did he ask for death, like Hamlet, or only for opium to soothe his passage from one world into the other? At about half-past eight, he moved, lifted his eyes to heaven, and heaved a sigh. It was his last! In the evening, the theatres were closed, as if some great national calamity had occurred. The mask was taken from that immobile face; from that powerful head which Camille Desmoulins called a magazine of ideas exploded by death. His placid brow expressed the serenity of his soul, and his face bore no trace of either grief or remorse. There is no doubt but that Mirabeau, when he promised the Queen all his support, fully intended to keep that promise, not only as a gentleman but as a citizen. The funeral ceremony took place on the 4th of April; four hundred thousand persons followed in the procession. Two instruments were heard for the first time on that occasion, filling the breasts of the spectators with their vibrating notes: they were the trombone, and the tom-tom. At eight in the evening, he was placed in the temporary tomb provided for him in the Pantheon. We say temporary, because his body remained there only three years. It was removed at the time when the Convention, having slain the Jacobins, and slain itself, having no more living to slay, determined to dishonor the dead. It was ordered that the corpse of Honoré Riquette de Mirabeau, traitor to the people, traitor to his country, and sold to royalty, should be removed from the Pantheon. The order was executed, and the corpse of Mirabeau was thrown into the criminals’ cemetery, at Clamart. It is there that he now sleeps the sleep of hope, waiting the day when France, an indulgent—nay, let us rather say an impartial mother, will give him, not a Pantheon, but a tomb; not a temple, but a _mausoleum_. CHAPTER XXIII. THE ARRIVAL OF THE DRAGOONS. During the ten months that I stayed with M. Gerbaut, my life was monotonous in the extreme.