n relation to the now well-certified worthlessness of his
contemporaries, to realize to the imagination the full extent of his
infamy. "You dare," said his former friend Rulhiere, in a pamphlet that
had a wide circulation, "_You_ dare to speak of a country, Count
Mirabeau! If your brow were not trebly bronzed, how must you have
blushed at its very name! Have you one quality of father, friend,
brother, husband, or relative? An honorable vocation? Any one attribute
that constitutes the citizen? Not one! You are without a refuge, without
a relative. I seek your most ordinary domiciles, and I find them but in
the prison of Vincennes, the Chateau d'If, the fortress of Ioux, the
jail of Pontarlier!"[8]

Dumont, coming over to Paris, was so moved by the discredit attached,
in respectable circles, to his acquaintance, that he visited him with
repugnance and as a duty, but records the characteristic incident, that
on his first call he was so won by the magic of his host's conversation,
as to depart resolved on retaining, at all hazards, so agreeable a
friendship. The mention of his name, with the sight of his person, at
the opening of the States General, elicited groans and hisses on all
sides. The _Tiers-Etat_--whom he had honored by his aristocratic
adoption--were unanimous in refusing him a hearing the two or three
occasions on which he first sought to address them. The queen, whose
life, family, and regal heritage were at stake, received the assurance,
that such a person was willing to assist the views of the court, with
"the contempt due to vice;"[9] and "assassin!" "robber!" "slanderer!"
were the epithets almost daily applied to him in the senate of the
nation! Society, expiring under the weight of its own vices, saw in him
that well-defined excess that entitled it to the merits of purgation in
his extruism, of atonement in his martyrdom, and to place the hand of
menace and malediction on his head, as the scape-goat of its redemption!

Thus detested by all parties, his low character keeping him low,
Mirabeau, with all his marvelous power, found himself placed, by public
contempt, more even than by private need, at the mercy of circumstances.
Befoulment had so far eaten into his name, that, with occasionally the
best of desires, and always the greatest of energies, there stood a
blight over both. He felt that a moral leprosy incrusted him, which
repelled the good, and kept aloof the prudent. The contemned inferior,
in mora