20 6 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC MEN.

him to visit Paris, and pay his court at Versailles : —“He behaves very well,” the marquis writes; “hisiEtat. manners are respectful without servility — easy, but not22. familiar. The courtiers look on him as half mad, but saythat he is cleverer than any of them, which is not dis-creet on his part. I do not intend that he shall livethere, nor follow, like others, the trade of robbingor cheating the king: he shall neither haunt the dirtypaths of intrigue, nor slide on the ice of favour; buthe must learn what is going on : and if I am asked whyI, who never would frequent Versailles , allow him togo so young, I reply that ‘ he is made of other clay.’For the rest, as, for 500 years, Mirabeaus, who werenever like the rest of the world, have been tolerated,he also will be endured, and he will not alter the repu-tation of the race.”

This gleam of paternal favour was soon clouded over.Mirabeau himself accuses those around his ftither ofinspiring him with distrust; but there was something inthe young man’s character that jarred with the father’s,and produced a perpetual state of irritation and dis-satisfaction. The self-will, pedantry, economy, and self-sufficiency of the marquis were in perpetual contradic-tion with the genius, activity, recklessness, the winningfrankness and plausible fascinations of his son. In vainthe youth transacted some troublesome business for hisfather with diligence and success — in vain he enteredinto his agricultural projects — the father writes bitterly,“ His infancy was monstrous, his adolescence turbulent,and both seem the worthy exordium of his life, which isnow a mixture of indiscretion, misconduct, and gar-rulity ; and at the same time so turbulent, so pre-sumptuous, and so heedless, that the enterprise ofsaving him from the dangers which his years andhis character present, is enough to fatigue and deterthirty Mentors, instead of one.” At length, tiredof the young man’s society, and urged by those abouthim, he sent him (December, 1770 £o Mirabeau, toendeavour to pacify and regulate the dissensions sub-