he stood recognized the unquestioned head, was now beyond all danger of
royal aggression, except by his own treacherous agency. In a campaign of
unimaginable brevity, he had not only vindicated the first place as an
orator in a senate now omnipotent, and become out of it the most potent
demagogue of his time, but as _un homme d'etat_, surrounded by a
brilliant staff of the most active spirits and practical thinkers of the
day, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Volney, Champfort, Lamourette, Cabanis,
Reybaz, Dumont, Duroverai, Claviere, Servan, De Caseaux, Panchaud,
Pellenc, Brissot, and others, was understood by every party to hold the
future destinies of France in his hand Emerging from two insurrections,
possessing, by his power, all their profits, and by his adroitness, none
of their responsibility, he found it now worth his while to break terms
with the Duke of Orleans, by a public expression of his contempt for
him as a scoundrel not worth the trouble that might be taken for him;
and excluded from the ministry, that lay open to him, by a self-denying
ordonnance of the Assembly, directly leveled at his pretensions, he
accepted a large subsidy from the king's brother--the Comte de
Provence--and formed with him, for the restoration or upholding a
monarchical authority, a mysterious and ineffective conspiracy, the
character and extent of which may be conjectured from its involving the
assassination of the Marquess de Lafayette.

The hate of Mirabeau for this worthy but feeble nobleman--his diligent
colleague in the struggle for liberty--was as intense as, at first
sight, it seems incredible. He was his Mordecai at the king's gate, for
whom he could neither sleep nor eat. Remembering that Mirabeau's passion
for complicated intrigue and daring adventure, even in politics, was
extravagant to disease, it seems possible that, as he advanced in his
rapid greatness, he secretly nursed projects or hopes as incompatible
with a constitutional monarchy, and an organized public force, in
respectable hands, as with the despotism with which he had originally
battled; and that, in his successive conspiracies, now with the
Republicans and Orleanists, now with the Count de Provence and the
queen, he had no fixed intention of ultimately benefiting those he
professed to serve, but proposed to use them as ladders to that exalted
position of a Sylla or a Caesar, which, as Bonaparte subsequently proved,
was no more, perhaps, beyond his grasp tha