him, to prepare and stimulate
his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him
at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his
English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other
correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no
other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over
the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious
sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of popular action
for France, in which he is to play a leading part--a faith so early
ripened that, in 1782, meeting at Neufchatel certain State Deputies of
Geneva, he based on the inevitable meeting of the States General the
prediction, or rather the promise, that he would become a deputy, and in
that character restore their country to freedom.

Returning to Paris at a moment when the increasing and unmanageable
_deficit_ brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of
the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance,
while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence,
willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced
on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of
the great question of the times.

His ministerial spyship in Prussia, which, subsequently divulged by his
own audacious publication of his secret correspondence, won from M. de
Montesquieu the remark, that "the infamy of the person might be
estimated by the infamy of the thing," was not without its compensations
in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him
the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the
principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the
death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity;
habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if
disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and
secured him--I could wish to say honestly--those historic and
statistical _data_ which, published in his elaborate work on the
Prussian monarchy, countenanced some serious claims to statesmanship.

Misfortune, passion, solitude, suffering, travel, extraordinary
adventures, extensive readings, varied studies, innumerable writings
thus admirably endowing his mind, so disposed, too, by nature, for the
daring and stormy struggles of the revolution, the