five rays," is still to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti _un_chain
so much, and set it drifting--which also shall be seen?

Destiny has work for that swart, burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny has
watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his Grandfather,
stout Col-d'Argent (Silver-Stock, so they named him), shattered and
slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one fell day, lie sunk together
on the Bridge at Casano, while Prince Eugene's cavalry galloped and
regalloped over him--only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle
over that loved head; and Vendome, dropping his spy-glass, moaned out,
"Mirabeau is _dead_, then!" Nevertheless he was not dead; he awoke to
breath and miraculous surgery--for Gabriel was yet to be. With his
_silver stock_ he kept his scarred head erect, through long years,
and wedded, and produced tough Marquis Victor, the _friend of men_.
Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this long-expected,
rough-hewn Gabriel Honore did likewise see the light; roughest
lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the old lion (for
our old Marquis, too, was lion-like, most unconquerable,
kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on his offspring, and
determined to train him as no lion had yet been! It is in vain, O
Marquis! This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn
to draw in dog-cart of Political Economy, and be a _friend of men_; he
will not be Thou, but must and will be Himself, another than Thou.
Divorce law-suits, "whole family save one in prison, and threescore
_lettres-de-cachet_" for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.

Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle
of Rhe, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the Castle of If,
and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in the Fortress
of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in
the Dungeon of Vincennes;--all by _lettre-de-cachet_, from his lion
father. He has been in Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner);
was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight
from the face of men. He has pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get
back his wife), the public gathering on roofs, to see, since they
could not hear: "The clatter-teeth (_claque-dents_)!" snarls singular
old Mirabeau; discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing
but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum
species.

But as f