lood of descent is
sometimes the prophecy of destiny.

Mirabeau's education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father,
who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and
selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant
of all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honor, for by
that name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanor which
was too frequently only the show of probity and the elegance of vice.
Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military
habits except a love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his
father was constantly extended not to aid him in rising, but to
depress him still lower under the consequences of his errors. His
youth was passed in the prisons of the state, where his passions,
becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect rendered more acute
by contact with the irons of his dungeon, his mind lost that modesty
which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments.

Released from jail, in order, by his father's command, to attempt to
form a marriage beset with difficulties with Mademoiselle de Marignan,
a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he
displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes
of policy in the small theater of Aix. Not only cunning, seduction,
and courage, but every resource of his nature was used to succeed, and
he succeeded; but he was hardly married before fresh persecutions
beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him. A
love, which his "Lettres a Sophie" has rendered immortal, opened its
gates and freed him. He carried off Madame de Monier from her aged
husband. The lovers, happy for some months, took refuge in Holland;
they were seized there, separated and shut up, the one in a convent
and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes.

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,