by the
small-pox"--caressed and neglected by his dissolute mother, disowned and
persecuted as a spurious graft in his house and home by the celebrated
"Economist," his father--his very childhood presaged the disorders of
his youth and manhood; and his father, mysteriously reverting to early
crimes and calamities as the blight of his life, made it matter of
complaint that Honore Gabriel, as a boy, had more cleverness "than all
the devils in h--l," and seemed destined from his childhood "to disturb
the monarchy, as a second Cardinal de Retz."

He was indeed _born_ a Revolutionist; and if he had not found the
elements of a _bouleversement_, was competent to have created them. But
just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the
occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and
Thyestes, the child was _trained_ into demoralization, vicissitude, and
daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most
lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious
memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and
an absconding wife, bragging of her love for her husband." The Vicomte,
his brother, "would have been a _roue_ and a wit," he tells us, "in any
family but his own," and _was_, of a dissolute noblesse, its most
dissolute member. His mother, driven with contumely from her home and
the bosom of her family, under accusations the most revolting a wife may
hear from one who is her husband and a father, addressed the world in
public recriminations for her persecutor, not less disgusting or
condemnatory. The son himself, the most infamous man of his time,
completes the picture in the boast he made to the National Assembly,
that among the tragic woes of his family he had been the witness of
fifty-four lettres-de-cachet, seventeen of them on his own account!

As in Eastern climates the abundance of degenerate man will, at some
spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which
diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful
agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which
necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself in one family, produced
the man who was to begin the catastrophe.

At seventeen, leaving a military academy, he entered the army as a
sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek,
but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a
fai