was the sentiment of
her party.

This party was joined about this time by a man unconnected with the
Gironde; but his youth, his remarkable beauty, and his energy naturally
threw him into this faction of illusion and love, controlled by a woman.
This young man was Barbaroux.

At this time he was only twenty-six years of age. Born at Marseilles, of
a sea-faring family, who preserved in their manners and features
something of the boldness of their life and the agitation of their
element. The elegance of his stature, the poetic grace of his
countenance, recalled the accomplished forms which antiquity adored in
the statues of Antinous. The blood of that Asiatic Greece of which
Marseilles is a colony revealed itself in the purity of the young
Phocian's profile.[21] As richly endowed with the gifts of the mind as
those of the body, Barbaroux early used himself to public oratory, that
gift of the men of the south. He became a barrister, and pleaded several
causes with success; but the power and honesty of his mind revolted from
that exercise of eloquence, so often mercenary, which simulates
earnestness. He required a national cause, to which a man should give
with language his soul and blood. The Revolution with which he was born
offered this to him. He awaited with impatience the occasion and the
hour to make use of it.

His youth still kept him away from the scene into which he ardently
longed to cast himself. He passed his time near the village of
Ollioules, on a small family estate, concealed beneath tall cork-trees,
which threw their slight shade over the calcined declivities of this
valley. He there attended to the cultivated patches which the aridity of
the soil and the burning sun dispute with the rocks. In his leisure he
studied natural sciences, and kept up a correspondence with two Swiss,
whose systems of physics then occupied the learned world--M. de Saussure
and Marat. But science was not sufficient for his mind, which overflowed
with sensitiveness, and which Barbaroux poured forth in elegiac poetry
as burning as the noonday, and vague as the horizon of the sea beneath
his view. There is felt that southern melancholy whose languor, is
closer allied to pleasure than weakness, and which resembles the songs
of man seated in the broad sunshine, before or after labour. Mirabeau
had thus begun his life. The most energetic lives frequently open in
gloom, as if they had in their very germ presentiments of their contrar