ider: these, in their several
dialects, will say of him and sing of him,--till the right thing be
said; and so the Formula that can judge him be no longer an undiscovered
one.

Here then the wild Gabriel Honore drops from the tissue of our History;
not without a tragic farewell. He is gone: the flower of the wild
Riquetti or Arrighetti kindred; which seems as if in him, with one last
effort, it had done its best, and then expired, or sunk down to the
undistinguished level. Crabbed old Marquis Mirabeau, the Friend of Men,
sleeps sound. The Bailli Mirabeau, worthy uncle, will soon die forlorn,
alone. Barrel-Mirabeau, already gone across the Rhine, his Regiment
of Emigrants will drive nigh desperate. 'Barrel-Mirabeau,' says a
biographer of his, 'went indignantly across the Rhine, and drilled
Emigrant Regiments. But as he sat one morning in his tent, sour of
stomach doubtless and of heart, meditating in Tartarean humour on the
turn things took, a certain Captain or Subaltern demanded admittance on
business. Such Captain is refused; he again demands, with refusal; and
then again, till Colonel Viscount Barrel-Mirabeau, blazing up into a
mere burning brandy barrel, clutches his sword, and tumbles out on this
canaille of an intruder,--alas, on the canaille of an intruder's sword's
point, who had drawn with swift dexterity; and dies, and the Newspapers
name it apoplexy and alarming accident.' So die the Mirabeaus.

New Mirabeaus one hears not of: the wild kindred, as we said, is gone
out with this its greatest. As families and kindreds sometimes
do; producing, after long ages of unnoted notability, some living
quintescence of all the qualities they had, to flame forth as a man
world-noted; after whom they rest as if exhausted; the sceptre passing
to others. The chosen Last of the Mirabeaus is gone; the chosen man of
France is gone. It was he who shook old France from its basis; and, as
if with his single hand, has held it toppling there, still unfallen.
What things depended on that one man! He is as a ship suddenly shivered
on sunk rocks: much swims on the waste waters, far from help.

BOOK 2.IV.

VARENNES

Chapter 2.4.I.

Easter at Saint-Cloud.

The French Monarchy may now therefore be considered as, in all human
probability, lost; as struggling henceforth in blindness as well as
weakness, the last light of reasonable guidance having gone out. What
remains of resources their poor Majesties will waste still furt