Mirabeau's ugliness, laid on over the substratum of beauty special to his race, produced a sort of powerful figure from the "Last Judgment" of Michael Angelo, the fellow-countryman of the Arrighettis[363]. The scars dug into the orator's face by the small-pox had rather the semblance of gaps left by the fire. Nature seemed to have moulded his head for empire or the gallows, and to have hewn his arms to clasp a nation or carry off a woman. When he shook his mane as he looked at the mob, he stopped it; when he raised his paw and showed his claws, the plebs ran furiously. I have seen him in the tribune, amid the awful disorder of a sitting, sombre, ugly and motionless: he reminded one of Milton's Chaos, shapeless and impassive in the centre of his own confusion. [Sidenote: The Comte de Mirabeau.] Mirabeau took after his father[364] and his uncle[365], both of whom, like Saint-Simon[366], wrote, off-hand, pages that became immortal. Speeches were written for him to deliver from the tribune: he took from them what his mind was able to amalgamate with its own substance. If he adopted them in their entirety, he delivered them badly; his hearers perceived that they were not his own, through words which he inserted at random and which betrayed him. He derived his energy from his vices; those vices did not spring from a chilly temperament, but were supported by deep, burning, tempestuous passions. Cynicism of manners, by annihilating the moral sense, brings back into society a sort of barbarians; these barbarians of civilisation, while equipped for destruction, like the Goths, have not their power of creating: the latter were the enormous children of a virgin nature, the former are the monstrous abortions of a nature that is depraved. I twice met Mirabeau at a banquet, once at the house of Voltaire's niece, the Marquise de Villette[367], and on another occasion at the Palais-Royal, with some members of the Opposition to whom Chapelier[368] had introduced me: Chapelier went to the scaffold in the same tumbril with my brother and M. de Malesherbes. Mirabeau talked much, and, above all, much of himself. This lion's whelp, himself a lion with a chimera's head, this man so positive where facts were concerned, was all romance, all poetry, all enthusiasm in imagination and language: one recognized the lover of Sophie[369], exalted in sentiment, capable of sacrifice. "I discovered her," he said, "that adorable woman.... I knew what her soul was, that soul shaped by nature's hands in a moment of magnificence." Mirabeau delighted me with stories of love, with desires for retirement, among which he interspersed barren discussions. He interested me, moreover, in another direction: like myself, he had been treated sternly by his father, who, like mine, had kept up the inflexible tradition of absolute paternal authority.