Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/249

Mirabcaii s Secret JMission to Bcrli}i 239 public and even the lawyers with their venom, violence and turpi- tude ; but furthest of all carried the Titan voice of young Mirabeau, and the loud and brazen speechifying that made of him, with his family, the public nuisance of France, revealed him to the world as her most splendid and masterful orator. It was then, while he stood at the bar of astonished and scandal- ized public opinion, the most notorious character of France, his vices written large on his distorted, bloated, pock-marked face, that Henriette van Haren, better known as Madame de Nehra, met him. She was only nineteen and knew little of the world. With all the spontaneous courage of her age, and after conquering the first natural movement of repulsion, she fell under the irresistible spell of the monster and determined to throw in her lot with his. It was with this young girl, of whom her contemporaries never spoke but with respect and regard, that Mirabeau spent the next few years of his tempestuous life, — they were to be those in which his excesses were least conspicuous, and his manners and thought least extrava- gant. From the uproar and resentments he had aroused in his native land, the unrestrainable pamphleteer sought a refuge in England ; there he met many prominent men, assisted at sittings of the House of Commons, continued to publish, and voraciously to read what- ever came to hand, especially the works of the economists. From what Mirabeau saw, heard, and read on this visit, may be traced many of the political, financial and administrative ideas that] he turned to such good use afterwards as a member of the Assemblee Nationale. Expatriation, however, soon proved irksome ; Madame de Nehra crossed the channel and succeeded in obtaining an assur- ance from Breteuil that Mirabeau would be unmolested if he went back to Paris. He accordingly returned and became engaged in a new series of events that were to culminate in the mission to Berlin. Among the pamphlets published by Mirabeau during his stay in England was one dealing with the stock -jobbing that was a prevalent mania of his time. Having returned to Paris, he con- tinued to devote much of his attention to things financial, and in 1785 brought out La Libcrtc dc f Escomptc (" on the non-restraint of discount"). This attracted the attention of the well-known Swiss bankers, Panchaud and Claviere ; they soon made the acquaintance of the pamphleteer. Panchaud was the biggest operator in stocks of Paris, and, like his successors of the present day, placed much re- liance on secret and exclusive information and on the influencing of public opinion through the press ; he was surrounded by a large