of refinement. He
thought that the possession of such a dwelling would be something
towards the realisation of happiness. In the very conception of that
ignoble thought, however, he received a solemn and effectual admonition.
Before him, in the silent chamber, on either side of it groups of
attendants and men robed in the costumes of the court and the barracks,
was a deathbed. It was the deathbed of an extraordinary being, the owner
of all this grandeur. It was the deathbed of Honore-Gabriel de Mirabeau.

The patrician demagogue reposed upon the pillows in the final stage of
dissolution, and his broad forehead was already damp with the sweat of
his last agony. Cagliostro surveyed the dying tribune with emotion, for
in the very hideousness of his countenance there was a subtle and
indefinable fascination. The gigantic stature which had so often awed
the tumults of the National Assembly was prostrate. The voice, whose
brazen tones had sounded like a trumpet over the land, was hushed--that
voice which had exclaimed with such sublime significance to the
Marseillais,--"When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust
towards heaven, and from this dust sprang Marius!"--that voice which had
conquered the aversion of Mademoiselle de Marignan with its seductive
melody--that voice which had been at once the oracle of the king and the
law of the rabble. Mirabeau lay before the Rosicrucian, with his natural
ugliness rendered yet more repulsive by the tokens of a terrible malady.
The touch of death imparted additional horror to the massive deformity
of his skull, to the coarseness of his pockmarked features, to his
sunken eyeballs, to his cheeks scared by disease, to his hair bristling
and dishevelled like that of a gorgon. Still, through all these
unsightly and almost loathsome peculiarities, there was perceptible a
sort of masculine susceptibility. It was that susceptibility which gave
zest to his debaucheries, and occasionally subdued into pathos the
storms of his dazzling and sonorous eloquence.

Never was a solitary life prized by so many millions, as that which was
then ebbing from the breast of Mirabeau. He seemed to be the only
guarantee for the solid adjustment of the Revolution. With his
disappearance, all hope of tranquillity and good government was prepared
to vanish. His was the intellect in which the extremes of that momentous
epoch were united. He was the antithesis of public opinion. Noble by
birth and plebeian b