rivileges, and the Court would curtail none of its unnecessary
expenses. Things went on from bad to worse, and the financiers were
filled with alarm. National bankruptcy stared everybody in the face.

If the King had been a Richelieu, he would have dealt summarily with the
nobles and rebellious mobs. He would have called to his aid the talents
of the nation, appealed to its patriotism, compelled the Court to make
sacrifices, and prevented the printing and circulation of seditious
pamphlets. The Government should have allied itself with the people,
granted their requests, and marched to victory under the name of
patriotism. But Louis XVI. was weak, irresolute, vacillating, and
uncertain. He was a worthy sort of man, with good intentions, and
without the vices of his predecessors. But he was surrounded with
incompetent ministers and bad advisers, who distrusted the people and
had no sympathy with their wrongs. He would have made concessions, if
his ministers had advised him. He was not ambitious, nor unpatriotic;
he simply did not know what to do.

In his perplexity, he called together the principal heads of the
nobility,--some hundred and twenty great seigneurs, called the Notables;
but this assembly was dissolved without accomplishing anything. It was
full of jealousies, and evinced no patriotism. It would not part with
its privileges or usurpations.

It was at this crisis that Mirabeau first appeared upon the stage, as a
pamphleteer, writing bitter and envenomed attacks on the government, and
exposing with scorching and unsparing sarcasms the evils of the day,
especially in the department of finance. He laid bare to the eyes of the
nation the sores of the body politic,--the accumulated evils of
centuries. He exposed all the shams and lies to which ministers had
resorted. He was terrible in the fierceness and eloquence of his
assaults, and in the lucidity of his statements. Without being learned,
he contrived to make use of the learning of others, and made it burn
with the brilliancy of his powerful and original genius. Everybody read
his various essays and tracts, and was filled with admiration. But his
moral character was bad,--Was even execrable, and notoriously
outrageous. He was kind-hearted and generous, made friends and used
them. No woman, it is said, could resist his marvellous
fascination,--all the more remarkable since his face was as ugly as
that of Wilkes, and was marked by the small-pox. The excesses of