Mr. Hurricane

MIRABEAU (542 pp.)--Antonina Vallentin--Viking ($5).

Mirabeau lives in history as the nobleman whose defiance of the king did much to bring on the French Revolution. When Louis XVI ordered the Third Estate to vote separately from the other orders, it was Mirabeau who said: "Go and tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, and that we shall not leave except by force of bayonets."

He lives in this book as a powerful, eloquent, ugly, passionate, courageous spokesman of the Revolution in the days before the Terror. The great moment that made him historic is scarcely more than an episode. His life was full of them. Author Antonina Vallentin (Leonardo da Vinci) has written a long, detailed work, half a psychological study, half an account of the Revolution, drawn with rough and scratchy pen strokes, all laid against a dark and ominous background that recalls Goya's grim drawings of war.

His father hated Mirabeau. "He is crossgrained, fantastic, fiery, awkward, with a drift to evil before he knows of it or is capable of it. ... I shall go on dragging my son along without knowing what river to throw him into." Mirabeau almost died of smallpox at three, was disfigured by it. All the children (his parents had eleven) were caught in the cross fire of their family quarrels. His father brought his mistress into their home. His mother gave "her lover, an officer, a certificate of her full satisfaction"--a document which fell into her husband's hands. He wanted to commit her to an insane asylum, finally succeeded in imprisoning her in a convent. And so on and so on, through libelous pamphlets, lawsuits, threatening letters, dirty verses pinned on doors, pornographic memoirs, in such detail that readers may find themselves longing for Little Women and A Girl of the Limberlost.

His father sent Mirabeau to schools where he had little chance of succeeding, calculating that he could thus make his ultimate destination the reformatory. Mirabeau became a first-rate orator. He also fought, went into debt, seduced his tutor's daughter at 13. When he was 16 his father secured a lettre de cachet for him, applied it two years later.*

In one of his rare friendly moments, his father nicknamed him "Mr. Hurricane." The simple outline of Mirabeau's doings becomes a kind of epic of frustration whose misery Madame Vallentin, engrossed in her psychological analyses, does not seem to appreciate. He was ugly, and so he was the butt of the brilliant nobility, and a burden to his father who was at first ashamed of him and then, as Mirabeau developed as a writer, jealous of him.

Prisoner & Rake. He served well as a captain of dragoons, but was forever in & out of prison because of his gambling debts, or because he was pursued by his revengeful father. He seduced an heiress, and contrived to be discovered with her, so as to marry her. They lived in a gloomy old castle infested with bugs. Mirabeau bankrupted himself trying to bring it up to the standard of luxury his wife had always known. Cuckolded, he forgave his wife. Meanwhile his sister had quarreled with her husband, who took to printing obscene verses about her, and Mirabeau took her part.

Imprisoned again with 30 others in the Chateau d'lf, he seduced the canteen attendant, was moved to another prison, finally fled over the frontier (leaving still another mistress behind him). His sister and her lover, accompanied by a girl engaged to be married, joined him in Switzerland. Mirabeau seduced the other girl. A queer conflict developed with his sister --he wrote to his mistress of her in detail that admitted of incestuous relations; the letter fell into the hands of her father; she became the most rabid of all the enemies who pursued him.

He had written an Essay on Despotism; now, living in Amsterdam, he wrote, translated, and, as a member of the Freemasons, planned to make them an instrument of world reform. Arrested again, imprisoned in the gloomy fortress at Vincennes, he was, at 28, ruined, his health destroyed, his mind preserved only by the works he wrote (14 or 15 hours a day) so as to keep from brooding on his plight.

Secret Adviser. Such was the background and preparation of the man who, in a crisis, was called upon to save France. He nearly did it. Author Vallentin makes it very plain that in the last moments before the Terror there was nobody in the Assembly except Mirabeau who had the confidence of the people. He became a secret adviser of the king. It was then too late; Mirabeau's strength was gone, and his advice was not followed, or was accepted only in part. The queen, with "her superficial and malicious intelligence, which excelled in seizing on slight slips and ridiculing them," disregarded his warnings. Readers may feel that it would not have been so tragic had it merely cost her her life, but that with it went the dream of the Rights of Man and the triumph of the Revolution which had been, until then, almost bloodless.

Mirabeau is strong, not altogether pleasant, reading. Mirabeau's true greatness emerges in his courage and vitality, and in the tenacity with which he held to his ideal of justice through the terrific injustices of his own life and age. Despite the memorable phrases of the Rights of Man, and his orations, readers will be most moved by his little forlorn admissions of the sickness of the age in which he lived, a sickness he recognized dimly that he shared. He seems not to have been driven by a clear vision of a better order; he had simply, like the mobs that were forming, seen too much of evil, and suffered too much under its unchecked rule.

* Lettres de cachet were one of the causes of the Revolution. Under them a husband could lock up his wife, a father his son, or the state could exile or imprison a dissenter, without judicial processes. Theoretically, the king signed each order. Actually, they were filled out, with the space for the name left blank, and clerks could issue them when needed, confining an enemy indefinitely. An estimated 150,000 lettres de cachet were issued during the reign of Louis XV.

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