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LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC MEN.

and fitted up the apartments destined for his wife withsplendour. False pride caused him to load her withpresents, and to dress her richly, in spite of her remon-strances. At the same time he had projects for theimprovement of the culture of the estate, the proceedsof which, he believed, would cover all his expenses.His father still pursued the degrading plan of em-ploying hirelings as spies over him. These men, tocover their own peculations, represented that he wasselling the furniture of the chateau and injuring theproperty. Every plan Mirabeau formed to pay hisdebts, as the best foundation of retrenchment, was op-posed by his father. Feeling the storm about to break,and resolved to proceed no further on the road to ruin,he commenced a system of rigid economy ; but hisfather, deaf to all explanations, excited by the repre-sentations of his servants, and exasperated in the high-est degree, obtained a lettre de cachet, and used itto order his son to quit the chateau, and to confinehimself in the little town of Manosque . This sort ofconfinement was ill calculated to appease the spiritof Mirabeau, who ought rather to have been throwninto an arduous career, so to fill and occupy his mind.At Manosque he was reduced to a scanty income ofabout 501 . a year, to support himself, his wife, andchild ; his only employment was study, to which hegave himself up with ardour, but it was not sufficientto tame and engross him. He wrote here his “ Essayon Despotism,” a work full of passion and vigour, intowhich he poured his own impatience of control. Heleft behind him no good reputation among the people ofManosque ; and, if his wife afterwards refused to joinhim, she had the excuse that his behaviour as a husbandwas such as to disgust any young lady of feeling anddelicacy. His own conduct did not, however, preventhim from being jealous himself, and this passion,awakened toward his wife, renewed, by the actions itoccasioned, the persecutions of his father.

A girlish and innocent correspondence had been car-