12 Fred Morroio Fling 



them as prisoners to Paris. Mirabeau, a victim of a fifth lettfe 

 de cachet^ was placed in the dungeon of Versailles; Mme. de 

 Monnier became an inmate of a reformatory. For more than 

 three years Mirabeau was shut out from the world, ^ suffering, 

 for a larger part of the time, from lack of proper food, clothing 

 and recreation. 2 It was during these years that he produced 

 his work upon "Des lettres de cachet et des prisons d'etat." 

 In 1780, Mirabeau was at length released from confinement. 

 He was broken in health and by constant use of his eyes in a 

 dimly lighted cell he had brought on chronic inflamation from 

 , which he suffered severly during the remainder of his life.^ 

 Immediately after leaving Versailles, he made public the work 

 already mentioned.'^ While bearing a less ambitious and also 

 less ambiguous title than his maiden treatise, it was little more 

 than a sequel to it, a second essay upon despotism. 



These are the chief events in Mirabeau's life up to the year 

 1780, when he was thirty-one years of age. During the whole 

 period he had suffered from paternal tyranny and during the 

 last eleven years he had felt the despotic power of the govern- 

 ment placed at the disposal of a father relentless in the perse- 

 cution of a son whom he neither loved nor understood. What 

 more natural than that Mirabeau should become an opponent 

 of despotism, whether of the family or of the state? When 

 in 1775 he published his "Essai sur le despotisme," when in 

 1782 he gave to the world his work on "Des lettres de cachet," 

 he was pleading his own cause. But his cause was also the 



» June 7, 1777, to December 13, 1780. 



2 "II est cependant vrai. Monsieur, que je suis presque nud, reduit a 

 deux culottes de basin, a vin habit qui tombe en loques, et que je n'aurais 

 point de bas, si M. de Rougemont n'avait bien voulu m'en faire donner."' 

 Lettres de Mirabeau, I, 167. Further particulars in vol. I, p. 43 ; vol. Ill, 

 p. 35; vol. Ill, p. 46. 



^ "lis deviennent si mauvais, que je crains de les perdre." Lettres de 

 Mirabeau, III, 133. 



'^ "A Hambourg, MDCCLXXXII." 



56 



