If Louis was unable to forecast the future, so too was the great mass of his subjects. Amongst the throng of deputies who met together at Versailles, there was but one, the Marquis of Mirabeau, who comprehended the real meaning of the revolution, and foresaw with accuracy the course which events would take. This remarkable man was endowed by nature with enormous energy, mental and physical. While still a youth, he had left his mark for good or for ill wherever he went. He had incurred debts, fought duels, kept order amongst hungry peasants, eating, drinking, and working with them, obtained the good-will of men prejudiced against him, and won the hearts of women. His father, according to the fashion of the time, supported paternal authority by obtaining _lettres de cachet_ from the government, ordering the imprisonment of his son. Mirabeau was imprisoned, now in one fortress, now in another, for months at a time. In early manhood, at the age of twenty-eight, he entered the donjon of Vincennes, a state fortress, where he inhabited a dark, barely-furnished room, and had converse with none but his gaoler. His offences against social order had not been light, for he had deserted his own wife for the wife of another man. But in his vices Mirabeau was but a type of the generation to which he belonged, and the real ground of his imprisonment lay elsewhere. Books and paper were as a favour allowed him. ‘Without books,’ he wrote, ‘I should be dead or mad.’ He read and wrote for fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. After a confinement of more than three years, the quarrel between him and his father was patched up. In 1780 he was released, broken in health, harassed by debts, and blackened in fame, but possessed of a large store of knowledge, a ready pen, a fluent tongue, and a genius for statesmanship which no man in France could rival. Genius was, however, no ground for advancement. A man who had sufficiently powerful interest at court might rise to the highest dignities in Church or State, whatever his incapacity, or whatever the stains on his past life. Mirabeau had no interest at court, while by Louis and his councillors talent was distrusted, and the one statesman that France possessed occupied the position of an unscrupulous adventurer, seeking by whatever means came first to hand to force his way into the ministry. It was no matter of surprise that so signal a victim of arbitrary government should prove an inveterate enemy to the existing order. But Mirabeau did not, through resentment for personal injuries, desire to weaken or degrade the royal authority. He possessed too strong a capacity for the exercise of power. He saw, moreover, too directly into the heart of the situation. He comprehended what no man but himself comprehended at that time, that the real aim of the French people was the sweeping away of all class distinctions, and that the monarchy might be immensely strong if only the King could