Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in some crevice of man's destiny, lighted up in a single and ardent blaze all the passions of Mirabeau. In his vengeance it was outraged love that he appeased; in liberty it was love which he sought and which delivered him; in study it was love which still illustrated his path. Entering his cell an obscure man, he quitted it a writer, orator, statesman, but perverted--ripe for anything, even ready to sell himself, in order to buy fortune and celebrity. The drama of life had been conceived in his head; he wanted only the stage, and that was being prepared for him by time. During the few short years which elapsed between his leaving the keep of Vincennes and the tribune of the National Assembly, he employed himself with polemic labors which would have weighed down another man, but which only kept Mirabeau in health. Such topics as the bank of Saint Charles, the institutions of Holland, the books on Prussia, with Beaumarchais (his style and character), with lengthened pleadings on questions of warfare, the balance of European power, finance, leading to biting invectives and wars of words with the ministers of the hour, made scenes that resembled those in the Roman forum of the days of Clodius and Cicero. We discern the men of antiquity even in his most modern controversies. We may hear the first roarings or popular tumults which were so soon to burst forth, and which his voice was destined to control. At the first election of Aix, when rejected with contempt by the noblesse, he cast himself into the arms of the people, certain of making the balance incline to the side on which he should cast the weight of his daring and his genius. Marseilles contended with Aix for the great plebeian; his two elections, the discourses he then delivered, the addresses he drew up, the energy he employed commanded the attention of all France. His sonorous phrases became the proverbs of the Revolution. Comparing himself, in his lofty language, to the men of antiquity, he placed himself already in the public estimation in the elevated position he aspired to reach. Men became accustomed to identify him with the names he cited; he made a loud noise in order to prepare minds for great commotions; he announced himself proudly to the nation, in that sublime apostrophe in his address to the Marseillais: "When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust toward heaven, and from this dust sprang Marius!--Marius, who was less great for having exterminated the Cimbri than for having prostrated in Rome the aristocracy of the nobility."