star and his last louis-d'or at faro; a Samson who tears down the pillars of the state to bury in the ruins his threatening creditors; a Hercules who at the parting roads of life accommodates himself to both ladies, and who recreates and refreshes himself in the arms of Vice from the exertions of Virtue; "an Ariel-Caliban, flashing with genius and ugliness," whom the poetry of love sobered when the poetry of reason had intoxicated him; a transfigured, glorified profligate of Freedom, worthy of great worship, a thing of doubtful nature (Zweiterwesen), whom only Jules Janin could depict.
And it is by the very same moral contradictions of his nature and life that Mirabeau was the representative of his age, which was just as reprobate and sublime, so deeply in debt and rich, who while in prison wrote the most lascivious romances,[1] yet at the same time the noblest books of freedom, and who afterwards, though
- ↑ The work chiefly referred to is the Erotika Biblion, a kind of cyclopedia or general account of all the aberrations of sensual passion, and not a romance. From a scientific-historical point of view it is not without value, as, for its time, it was a bold protest against the intolerable petty tyranny of the Church in matters which should be left to physicians. Mirabeau is said to have written this with no other work of reference except the Bible, but it certainly appears to have been modelled on that rare work, the Brevis Delineatio, &c., of Johann Georg Simon, Jena, 1682.—Translator.
