"Mirabeau" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stand-point the absolute necessity of the separation of Church and State. His excellent work is entitled, The Church and the French Revolution; a History of the Relations of Church and State from 1789 to 1802. The motto upon the title-page, derived jointly from Mirabeau and Cavour, will indicate the spirit of the book: "Remember that God is as necessary as liberty to the French people—The Free Church in the Free State." We trust the day is distant when M. de Pressense will be compelled to lay aside the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... call ourselves men," said Mirabeau, "unless it be to succeed in everything, everywhere. Say of nothing: 'This is beneath me,' nor feel that anything is beyond your power, for nothing is impossible to the man ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... and factory girls in masturbation; a lady living near Vichy told Pouillet that she had often heard (and had herself been able to verify the fact) that the young peasant women commonly used turnips, carrots, and beet-roots. In the eighteenth century Mirabeau, in his Erotikca Biblion gave a list of the various objects used in convents (which he describes as "vast theatres" of such practices) to obtain solitary sexual excitement. In more recent years the following ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... never for a moment had any illusions with regard to his own popularity. He knew that at any time, and for any trivial cause, the love which the mob bore him would readily turn to hate. He had seen Mirabeau's popularity wane, La Fayette's, Desmoulin's—was it likely that he alone would survive the inevitable death of so ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... heart, bowed, and assured the municipality that his life should be devoted to their service. In the evening, the club held a meeting in the Salle des Minimes. The hall was jammed. Paine was seated beside the President, under a bust of Mirabeau, surmounted by the flags of France, England, and the United States. More addresses, compliments, protestations, and frantic cries of Vive Thomas Paine! The sance was adjourned to the church, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the Mirabeau of the social revolution of Rome, and had his measures been carried Rome might have been spared the most ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... "debtors are liars," is justified by experience. Shaftesbury somewhere says that a restlessness to have something which we have not, and to be something which we are not, is the root of all immorality. [1514] No reliance is to be placed on the saying—a very dangerous one—of Mirabeau, that "LA PETITE MORALE ETAIT L'ENNEMIE DE LA GRANDE." On the contrary, strict adherence to even the smallest details of morality is the foundation of all manly ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... sighs for morning, Thro' the ranks, silent, walk'd the Ambassador back to the Nation's Assembly, and told The unwelcome message. Silent they heard; then a thunder roll'd round loud and louder; Like pillars of ancient halls and ruins of times remote, they sat. Like a voice from the dim pillars Mirabeau rose; the thunders subsided away; A rushing of wings around him was heard as he brighten'd, and cried out aloud: 'Where is the General of the Nation?' The walls re-echo'd: 'Where is the General of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... had all fled;—fiercely volleying, charging, dexterously wheeling and manoeuvring; sticking to his ground with a mastiff-like tenacity,—till Marlborough, and victory from the left, relieved him and others. He was at the Bridge of Cassano; where Eugene and Vendome came to hand-grips;—where Mirabeau's Grandfather, COL-D'ARGENT, got his six-and-thirty wounds, and was "killed" as he used to term it. [Carlyle's Miscellanies, v. ? Mirabeau.] "The hottest fire I ever saw," said Eugene, who had not seen Malplaquet at that time. While Col-d'Argent sank collapsed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... fecerunt sibi praeputia et recesserunt a Testamento Sancto. Thus making prepuces was called by the Hebrews Meshookimrecutitis, and there is an allusion to it in 1 Cor. vii. 18, 19, {Greek} (Farrar, Paul ii. 70). St. Jerome and others deny the possibility; but Mirabeau (Akropodie) relates how Father Conning by liniments of oil, suspending weights, and wearing the virga in a box gained in 43 days 71/4 lines. The process is still practiced by Armenians and other Christians who, compelled to Islamise, wish to return ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... merely employed for the bath in Poppea's palace: the unctores, the fricatores, the alipilarili, the dropacistae, the paratiltriae, the picatrices, the tracatrices, the swan whiteners, and all the rest. —Talk to her about this multitude of slaves whose names are given by Mirabeau in his Erotika Biblion. If she tries to secure the services of all these people you will have the fine times of quietness, not to speak of the personal satisfaction which will redound to you yourself from the introduction into your house of the system invented ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... instance, of some unscrupulous commercial figure, and say that he would do anything for money, we use quite an inaccurate expression, and we slander him very much. He would not do anything for money. He would do some things for money; he would sell his soul for money, for instance; and, as Mirabeau humorously said, he would be quite wise "to take money for muck." He would oppress humanity for money; but then it happens that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in; they are not his ideals. But he has his own dim and ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called, who formed a definite school before 1760—Quesnay the master, Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest—envisaged their special subject from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory was equivalent to a theory of human society. They laid down the doctrine of a Natural Order in political communities, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... possible legal advice regarding the validity of the company's royal charter. Five of the foremost lawyers in the land were asked for their opinion upon this matter. Chief of those who were approached was Sir Samuel Romilly, the friend of Bentham and of Mirabeau. The other four were George Holroyd and James Scarlet, both distinguished pleaders, and William Cruise and John Bell. The finding of these lawyers put the question out of doubt. The charter, they said, was flawless. Of all the lands which were drained by ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... The aristocracy of France paid back tenfold each drop of innocent blood that was shed, but while the unreasoning world recalls the French Revolution with horror, the student of history thinks more of the evils which made it a natural result. Mirabeau in vain sought to restrain his aroused countrymen, just as he had vainly pleaded with the aristocrats to end their excesses. Rizal, who held Mirabeau for his hero among the men of the French Revolution, knew the historical lesson and sought to sound a warning, but he was unheeded by the Spaniards ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... wildest and most turbulent hordes, Burbach makes the statement that, in all probability, women are fitter for politics than men.[132] For the rest, many a great man in history would shrink considerably, were it only known What he owes to himself, and what to others. Count Mirabeau, for instance, is described by German historians, von Sybel among them, as one of the greatest lights of the French Revolution: and now research has revealed the fact that this light was indebted for the concept of almost all of his speeches to the ready ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... bored him, but later, little by little, he felt himself carried away by what he was reading. First he was enthusiastic about Mirabeau; then about the Girondins; Vergniau Petion, Condorcet; then about Danton; then he began to think that Robespierre was the true revolutionary; afterwards Saint Just, but in the end it was the gigantic figure of Danton ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... And Mirabeau knew (see Kadisah) "qu'ils mordent les femmes et les liment avec une precieuse continuite." (Compare my vol. ii. 90; v. 46.) The men also used them as catamites (Horace ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Provence, received a scanty education, served in the army during more than ten years, retired with broken health and found no other employment, lived on modest resources, enjoyed the acquaintance of the Marquis de Mirabeau and the friendship and high esteem of Voltaire, and died in 1747, at the early age of thirty-two. His knowledge of literature hardly extended beyond that of his French predecessors of the seventeenth century. The chief influences that reached him came from Pascal, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... feeling continue. When utterly disheartened, I have encouraged the boy by the anecdote of Newton, where he attributes the difference between him and other men, mainly to his own patience; or of Mirabeau, when he ordered his servant, who had stated something to be impossible, never again to use that blockhead of a word. Thus cheered, the boy has returned to his task with a smile, which perhaps had something of doubt in it, but which, nevertheless, evinced a resolution to try again. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Yes, those whom Mirabeau calls "fairy cucumbers" and who are composed of atoms exactly like those of strawberry and water-lily roots. Nevertheless, we need not ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... had it. If a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what name is given to the government under which he lives. The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous tribune of that name, wrote in 1771: "The English are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agitated and more unfortunate than the very Algerines themselves, because they do not know and will not know till ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Lord Chatham. "Why," asked Mirabeau, "should we call ourselves men, unless it be to ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... the ruins of the republic. His soldiers were in the Crimea, fighting as desperately as if great wealth or fame could be won by their valor and death. But it was all for the glory of the French throne! A French monarchy again, after the struggles of Mirabeau, after the agony of Marat, and after the rise of republican principles which Douglas had hailed with delight! If these things could be done with honor and applause, did Douglas deserve the hostility which was rising up against him? Was America so immaculately free ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... MIRABEAU, the great revolutionist, is the subject of a new work just published at Vienna, from the pen of Franz Ernst Pipitz, a native of that city, but now a teacher at the University of Zurich. It is in great part the result ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... know what made the Revolution and changed conditions in France? It was not poverty. Not a single poor man was a leader in that Revolution. Every one of them was well fed, had a well- nourished brain—Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Desmoulins, Mirabeau—every one a well-fed ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... Pontecoulant, who does not boast of it in his "Memoires,"—have been the themes of several tales, romances and novels, wherein fancy plays too great a part, and whose misinformed authors, Hippolyte Bonnelier, Comtesse de Mirabeau, Chennevieres, etc., have taken great advantage of the liberty used in works of imagination. There is only one reproach to be made—that they did not have the genius of Balzac. But we may criticise more severely the so-called historical writings about Mme. de Combray, her family and residences, ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... niece, Blanche, who had a chance of being queen of part of Spain. Still Arthur lived at the French King's court, and when he was sixteen years old, Philip helped him to raise an army and go to try his fortune against his uncle. He laid siege to Mirabeau, a town where his grandmother, Queen Eleanor, was living. John, who was then in Normandy, hurried to her rescue, beat Arthur's army, made him prisoner and carried him off, first to Rouen, and then to the strong castle of Falaise. Nobody quite knows what was ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with men who had attracted the public esteem by their learning, eloquence, and piety, and above all, by their known moderation in the state. With you, in your purifying revolution, whom have you chosen to regulate the Church? M. Mirabeau is a fine speaker, and a fine writer, and a fine—a very fine man; but, really, nothing gave more surprise to everybody here than to find him the supreme head of your ecclesiastical affairs. The rest is of course. Your Assembly addresses a manifesto to France, in which they tell the people, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Nicholas Chamfort, b. 1741, d. 1794, was a French novelist and dramatist of the Revolution, who contrary to his real wishes became entangled in its meshes. He exercised a considerable influence over certain of its leaders, notably Mirabeau and Sieyes. He is said to have originated the title of the celebrated tract from the pen of the latter. "What is the Tiers Etat? Nothing. What ought it to be? Everything." He ultimately experienced ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... other things) to find 690 In what odd sets the ghosts combined, Happy forthwith to thump any Piece of intelligence inspired, The truth whereof had been inquired By some one of the company; For instance, Fielding, Mirabeau, Orator Henley, Cicero, Paley, John Ziska, Marivaux, Melancthon, Robertson, Junot, 699 Scaliger, Chesterfield, Rousseau, Hakluyt, Boccaccio, South, De Foe, Diaz, Josephus, Richard Roe, Odin, Arminius, Charles le gros, Tiresias, the late James Crow, Casabianca, Grose, Prideaux, Old Grimes, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... treaty of peace with England, September 3, 1783. He was governor of Pennsylvania, 1786-1788; and died in Philadelphia, April 17, 1790. Congress ordered a mourning of four months, and the National Assembly of France, on the proposal of Mirabeau, seconded by Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld and General de la Fayette, went into mourning for three days. Turgot composed in his honor the celebrated latin verse: Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrum ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... grew out of it, when the Bastille was stormed, when the King was throwing away his prerogatives like confetti. Never did the gardens of the Trianon seem more beautiful, or more sad. Sometimes the Queen would laugh even then when I mimicked Bailly, Des Moulins, Mirabeau. I was with her Majesty in the gardens on that dark, rainy day when the fishwomen came to Versailles. The memory of that night will haunt me as long as I live. The wind howled, the rain lashed with fury against the windows, the mob tore through the streets of the town, sacked ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... while in all parts of the chamber, on the floor, tables and chairs, and in the deep embrasures of the windows, were scattered huge masses of papers, pamphlets, manuscripts and charts. Over the bookcases stood marble busts of Danton, Mirabeau, Napoleon, Armand Carrel, the Duc de St. Simon and other great men whose names are identified with France; between the windows looking out on the garden, shrouded in shrubs and creeping plants, hung a full-length and magnificent picture of Fourier. Near the centre of the apartment stood ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses around him becomes not merely representative, but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every good word, that was spoken in France. Dumont relates that he sat in the gallery of the Convention, and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration, which he wrote ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Christophe was lost, drowned, submerged under such a deluge of poetry and turned to prose. He found Gustave de Molinari, Flechier, Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, Merimee, Malte-Brun, Voltaire, Lame-Fleury, Dumas pere, J.J. Bousseau, Mezieres, Mirabeau, de Mazade, Claretie, Cortambert, Frederic II, and M. de Voguee. The most often quoted of French historians was Maximilien Samson-Frederic Schoell. In the French anthology Christophe found the Proclamation of the new German Empire; and he read a description of the Germans by Frederic-Constant ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... See Mirabeau on his death-bed. "Crown me with flowers," said he, "intoxicate me with perfumes, let me die with the sound of delicious music." Not one word of God, or of his soul! A sensual philosopher, he asks of death only a supreme sensualism; he desires ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... French Revolution was effected by a few distinguished people or a few heroes. . . . I believe that in the whole history of the period included between 1789 and 1799 not a single person stands out who led or shaped events: neither Louis XVI. nor Mirabeau nor Danton nor Robespierre. Must we say that it was the French people that was the real hero of the French Revolution? Yes—provided we see the French people not as a multitude but as a ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... greatest pains that every outward arrangement should bear the marks of composure and decency,—a care which may certainly incline one to fancy, that the heroism of his last moments may have had effect, in part, for its aim, and that, as Talleyrand said of Mirabeau, "he dramatized his death." But, it must be remembered, that in those days, it was the custom and the aim of the state prisoners to go to the scaffold gallantly; and thus virtuous men and true penitents walked to their doom attired with the precision of coxcombs. Lord Lovat, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... of our own country. Finally, there was a Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing in the necessity of a thorough remodelling of every institution and most of the usages of the country. 'Silence, you thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau one day, when he was interrupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This was the original measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was to wield the destinies of France. In our own time we have wondered at the rapidity with which a Chamber that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Europe," which, in book-form, are so well known to every civilized nation. Benjamin Constant, another Genevese, was a kindred spirit, who shared with Madame de Stael a delightful and profitable intimacy. Dumont; (so highly eulogized by Lord Macaulay,) the friend of Mirabeau and of Jeremy Bentham, was also of Geneva. De Candolle and his son gave to science their arduous labors. De la Rive in Chemistry, Pictet in Electrology, and Merle d'Aubigne in History, Gaussen and Malan in Theology, and many others, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... impression of a human dynamo suddenly let loose. His face is keen and sharp: his mouth thin: his cheeks are shrunken: his arms and legs are long and he has a curious way of stuffing his clenched fists into his trousers pockets. Some one has called him the Mirabeau of the Australian Proletariat. Certainly he looks it. He has a nervous energy almost beyond belief. By birth, temperament, experience and point of view he is a firebrand, but with this difference: he is a Human Flame ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... language. The creation of money by unlimited issues of paper secured by the national possessions was tried on the grandest scale at the French Revolution. The "assignats" were secured on the national domains, and their security seemed absolute to the revolutionaries. The great Mirabeau had stated on September 27, 1790: "Our assignats are not ordinary paper money. They are a new creation for which there is no precedent. What constitutes the value of metal money? Its intrinsic value. Now I ask you: Does paper which represents ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... going home—on my sacred honour I was! Ask Jacques, else. But as we went down the Rue de l'Eveque we saw two men in front of us. As they reached the wall by M. de Mirabeau's garden a gang of footpads fell on them. The two drew blades and defended themselves, but the ruffians were a dozen—a score. We ran for ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... fruit. It came not out of mine own garden, But all the way from Henly in Arden, - Of an uncommon fine old tree, Belonging to John Asbury. And if that of it thou shalt eat, 'Twill make thy breath e'en yet more sweet; As a translation here doth shew, ON FRUIT-TREES, BY JEAN MIRABEAU. The frontispiece is printed so. But eat it with some wine and cake, Or it may give the belly-ache. {153a} This doth my worthy clerk indite, I ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... division of France, corresponding loosely to an English county. Previous to the French Revolution, the local unit in France was the province, but this division was too closely bound up with the administrative mismanagement of the old rgime. Accordingly, at the suggestion of Mirabeau, France was redivided on entirely new lines, the thirty-four provinces being broken up into eighty-three departments (see FRENCH REVOLUTION). The idea was to render them as nearly as possible equal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... showed away on our left, and by the time we reached Sisterton the sun had risen. At an auberge we pulled up, and got two big bowls of steaming cafe au lait, and then without much adventure continued our way down to Mirabeau, whence we turned sharp to the left for Draguignan and Les Arcs. At the last-mentioned place she resumed her seat at my side, and with the exception of her hair being slightly disarranged, she seemed quite as fresh and merry as on the ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... Mirabeau was a collector of another type. The 'friend of mankind' intended to gather together the best and largest library in the world. He cared nothing for the scarcity or the external adornments of a volume; but he had a huge appetite for knowledge, and he longed to have ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... Hell in motion," said Napoleon. "The woman who lives there has a petticoat full of arrows that could hit a man were he seated on a rainbow. She combines in her active head and strong heart Rousseau and Mirabeau; and then shields herself behind a shift and screams if you approach. To attract attention to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... they do no harm, but they are even worthy of respect. With many of the nobles the title of the estate covers the family name, the former alone being made use of. If one were substituted for the other, the public would have difficulty in discovering M. de Mirabeau, Lafayette, and M. de Moutmorency, under the new names Riquetti, M. Mottie, and M. Bouchard. Besides, it would be wrong to the bearer of it, to whom the abolished title is a legitimate possession, often precious, it being a certificate of quality and descent, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... love of country, and possessed the power of reincarnating with each succeeding cycle of its history. So luminous was his mind, so profound and far-reaching his sympathy, that he understood the obscure workings of the mediæval mind as clearly as he appreciated Mirabeau’s transcendent genius. He believed that humanity, like Prometheus, was self-made; that nations modelled their own destiny during the actions and reactions of history, as each one of us acquires a personality through the struggles and temptations ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... forced and characterized the third stage of slavery in Mauritius. These cruelties were mitigated largely by the agitation of Les Amis des Noirs, among whom were some of the most distinguished actors in the grand drama of the French Revolution. The leading reformers were the brilliant orators Mirabeau and Madam de Poivre, the wife of the deceased Intendant of the Isle of France. At a much earlier date, even under Labourdounais, under whose economic development of Mauritius slavery flourished, much was said about improving the condition of the slaves.[7] Yet it ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... one case a factor in the process of consolidation served in the other as a cause of further disturbance. This was even recognized at the time by sharp-sighted men, such as Lally-Tollendal[47] and, above all, Mirabeau.[48] ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... upon a political career as an aristocrat Liberal. His rise to position was swift, and after the death of Mirabeau he followed him as President of the Assembly. Before his fall came, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Rhine, and at the head of sixty thousand men failed to relieve Mayence and ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... be naturally wild, she is all the more wonderful in these wild moments of generosity and real greatness. Something of this was later seen in the earliest triumphs of Mirabeau, when he had a million of men gathered round him at Marseilles. But here already was a great revolutionary scene, a vast uprising against the stupid Government of the day, and Fleury's pets the Jesuits: a unanimous uprising in behalf of humanity, of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... nonsense. No oppressed class has ever yet been emancipated by its own members. It was always by high-minded men of wider views out of the upper classes. Catilina was an aristocrat, and put himself at the head of the populace. Mirabeau belonged to the Court, and overthrew the monarchy. Wilberforce, the defender of the negro, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that "a soldier who fights ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... nomenclature than "Mud Magazine." Excessive praise of any one's talents drives him into admiration of the parts of his own learned pig, now wallowing in the stye. The best thing he knew about America was that there a man could have meat for his labor. He did not read Plato, and he disparaged Socrates. Mirabeau was a hero; Gibbon the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. It is interesting also to hear that "Tristram Shandy" was one of the first books he read after "Robinson Crusoe," and that Robertson's "America" was an early favorite. Rousseau's "Confessions" had discovered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... land." Some of the most distinguished men of the time were shut up by the king's order, often on account of books or pamphlets written by them which displeased the king or those about him. The distinguished statesman, Mirabeau, was imprisoned several times through lettres de cachet obtained by his father as a means ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Mirabeau, in the tribune of the National Assembly of France, "if the powers who have formed alliances with the States have dared to read that manifesto, or to interrogate their consciences after the perusal? I ask whether there be at this day one government in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Mirabeau was something longer. He lived with popularity, was fortunate enough to die before his reputation was exhausted, was deposited in the Pantheon, apotheosised in form, and his bust placed as a companion to that of Brutus, the tutelary genius of the Assembly.—Here, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... This unquestionably had a disastrous effect upon the eloquence of Congress, which no longer hung upon the accents of its leading members, and rarely read what appeared in the report of the debates. Imitating Demosthenes and Cicero, Chatham and Burke, Mirabeau and Lamartine, the Congressmen of the first fifty years of the Republic poured forth their breathing thoughts and burning words in polished and elegant language, and were listened to by their colleagues and by spectators so alive to the beauties of eloquence that they were entitled ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... dialogues which a youth, leaving his gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in any of Demosthenes' harangues which did not readily find a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose the thought; you will be led to find for the same thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete experience; a flood of light will heighten the prominence of all the truths ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... really an outcome of the 'principles of 1789,' or of any principles at all. But it was nothing of the kind. It was simply a carnival of incapacities, ending naturally in an orgie of crime. It was in the order of Nature that it should deify Mirabeau in the Pantheon, only to dig up his dishonoured remains and trundle them under an unmarked stone at the meeting of four streets, that it should set Bailly on a civic throne, only to drag him forth, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... in the opportunity this incident affords me of especially recommending the Hotel de Mirabeau, Rue de la Paix, to any of my countrymen who are really gentlemen, and will not disgrace my recommendation. It is certainly the best caravansera in the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before Toepffer, reverie before "Rene," literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure. He made music the fashion, and created the taste for confessions to the public. He formed a new French style—the close, chastened, passionate, interwoven ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his wife were both of them notable people. He had been elected deputy for the noblesse to the States-General in 1789, and had taken at first the popular side; but as time went on he became estranged from Mirabeau, and was among the earliest to emigrate in 1790. For the rest of his life he was engaged in plotting to restore the Bourbons. His wife had been the celebrated Madame St. Hubert of the Paris opera-house, and was the only woman ever known ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... inevitable that since time began not one violator of any law of life has ever escaped the penalty. He has paid the price of his word or his deed on the instant in its reaction upon his character. God does not punish men; they punish themselves in their own natures and in the work of their hands. When Mirabeau, in the consciousness of the possession of the most masterful genius of his time, rose to speak in the States General, he became aware that his dissolute past was standing beside him and mocking him. His ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... States-General, the constitution of the Tiers-Etat in the National Assembly, the oath of the Jeu-de-Paume, the royal council of the 23rd of June, and the junction of the clergy and nobility in the Tiers-Etat. The court, now yielding, now attempting to resist, allowed itself to be browbeaten by Mirabeau. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... preliminary essay of his history of the revolutions of Corsica to Raynal for examination. This renowned savant of his day warmly congratulated the young author on his work, and asked him to send a copy that he might show it to Mirabeau. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... education. He had an unbounded passion for glory and for display. He had great tact in the management of party, and was intent on the aggrandizement of his country. His morality was reckless, but his intelligence was great—a sort of Mirabeau: with his passion, his eloquence, and his talents. His unfortunate end—a traitor and an exile—shows how little intellectual pre-eminence will avail, in the long run, without virtue, although such talents as he exhibited will be found useful in ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord |
