Honore Count of Mirabeau, the hero of the French Revolution, author of Essay on Despotism, who had told the royal emissary carrying the order of the King that the three chambers of the Parliament would meet separately: “You, who have neither a place nor a vote here, tell those who send you that we are here by the will of the people and that we shall not leave except by the force of bayonets”, fell in love only once.
Heir to an old and extremely rich family, he was a philanderer and a spendthrift. He married the only daughter of a very rich noble through stratagem. But he fell out with his father, the Marquis, because of his spending and with his wife over his and her affairs. His father had him restricted to a village by royal order. There, he beat up an old noble who he thought had spread rumours about his affairs. The noble complained to the king. But the old Mirabeau intervened to have the punishment mitigated. Honore was thus first confined to one prison and then to another, but with full freedom to get out to the town.
It was in the second town, Pontarlier, with two thousand inhabitants nestling in the hills near the Swiss frontier that he had the only and famous love affair, whose account fills three volumes of his works. It shook 18th Century France. In fact, the French had more interest in Mirabeau’s affair than in the heroes of the popular novels of the period, such as Des Grieux of Prevost’s Story of Chevalier Des Grieux and Madame de Manon.
Pontarlier had a few noble families. They all welcomed the count, the son of the Marquis of Mirabeau. One couple, the Marquis of Mounir, aged seventy and his wife of twenty-two, Sophie, took a particular liking to him. Their marriage had been an arranged one, as was the custom among the French nobility. Her tranquil conjugal life provided no occasion for her to express her education or exercise her intelligence.
Mirabeau and Sophie fell in love slowly. As the historian, Manfred, puts it: “From the manner in which Sophie’s face lit up and became lively when he entered the room and the slow darkening of her eyes, Mirabeau understood that this was not going to be one of those passing little infatuations. Mirabeau felt it and was afraid. Perhaps, for the first time in his life, he attempted to avoid a love offering itself.”
He tried to flee by writing to his estranged wife, inviting her to join him. But her reply was evasive and cold. He could resist his own deep attraction to Sophie no more and he surrendered to her. But he had to flee the country almost immediately afterwards because he fell out with his jailer.
The reason for that quarrel was not his affair with Sophie but the jailer’s shock upon hearing that Mirabeau had another life too, in which he wrote against the established order, advocating revolution.
When he fled to Switzerland, Sophie left her husband’s house and went to live with her mother. But the latter was even more assiduous than the insulted husband in preventing Sophie’s attempts to join Honore in Geneva. Finally, after a few months, she succeeded in evading surveillance and crossing into Switzerland. There Mirabeau could write openly in favour of a liberal democracy in France, though he still wanted to preserve a constitutional monarchy.
Still feeling constricted in Calvinist Geneva, they went to Netherlands, then the most bourgeois and the freest country in Europe. They managed to set up a small house where Sophie spent the happiest months of her life. However, the French police was after them in pursuance of her husband’s complaint.
First of all, 18 Century France accepted endless adultery, but a married woman leaving her husband’s home was inadmissible. And a lover abducting a woman was punishable by death. Secondly, the police of a country could, apparently, arrest its nationals in another country.
The French police was shadowing Honore and Sophie in Netherlands and he had arranged that they hide in a friend’s house. But Sophie could not bring herself to leave the little house, where she had known the only happiness in life. She kept postponing the move, until they were arrested and brought to France. There, he was sentenced to death and she sent to a convent. Honore’s father, the old Marquis, again used his influence at the court to have the execution stopped but Honore was imprisoned. For the first three years, Honore wrote furiously against arbitrariness and injustice and refused to bend. And, at the same time, he and Sophie wrote ardent love letters to each other. These have been collected in three volumes and are still read not only for the expression of overpowering love in them but also for the language and style of Honore’s letters.
However, Honore broke down in the fourth year and begged his father to have him released. By now, his ardour for Sophie had also cooled. He spent a few months after being freed at his father’s house and, when his condition improved, went to see Sophie at the convent. She was still only twenty-eight but had paid dearly for every moment of happiness that the world had conceded to her. She had not been content with adultery but had actually abandoned the sacred hearth of marriage to elope with the man she loved.
Honore saw her after four years of separation at the convent. She had grown older and heavier. The grey of the hair was mixed with white. He had also changed. They repeated that they still loved each other. But the fire had gone out and they knew it. Separation had killed their love.
Honore never saw her again nor did he write to her. She chose to stay in the convent, where the abbes found her dead one morning. She had asphyxiated herself with charcoal gas.
Honore cleared his name by refighting his case. He pleaded for himself in court and there discovered his talent for oratory. Later, winning election to the parliament, he went on to become an eminent tribune of the Third Estate, and a courageous leader of the revolution during its first two years, when he died of an illness. France remembers him as the father of its revolution, but also as a man in whose breast the flame of true love burnt for a few years, when he threw up all for the woman he adored.
