The Mirabeaus were an old Provençal family which had migrated from Florence through some of the civic broils in the twelfth century. The patronymic was Arrigheti, which got by degrees Frenchified into Riquetti. The estate and title of Mirabeau were only acquired in 1568, by Jean Riquetti, who was first consul of Marseilles.
The Mirabeaus were a race of men singularly energetic, independent, and audacious. They boasted that they were all hewn out of one block, without joints. They were proud, rude, with original and strongly marked features, free-and-easy morals, and violent tempers. Jean Antoine de Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau, brigadier of infantry, was wounded in defending a bridge in the battle of Cassans. He fell, and all the hostile army passed over him. His old sergeant, seeing him down, put an iron pot over his master’s head, and fled. This pot saved Mirabeau’s life, but his right arm was broken, and he was so damaged that he was obliged to wear a silver collar to keep his head upright. He was presented by the Duke de Vendôme, under whom he had fought, to Louis XIV., who received him with some commonplace remark; to which the old crippled soldier replied rudely, “If in quitting the Colours he had come to Court _payer quelque catin_ he would have received more honour and less words.” Vendôme was so scared at his audacity, that he said, “Henceforth, Riquetti, I will present you to the enemy, and never again to the king.”
The son of this man was Victor de Riquetti, who called himself “l’Ami des Hommes,” a fantastic hodge-podge of contradictions. He was a philanthropist and a despot, a feudalist, but also a reformer, a professed friend of mankind, but a tyrant in his own family. He hated superstition, but scoffed at “la canaille philosophique.” Separated from his wife, he was engaged in lawsuits with her for years, which published to all Provence the scandals of the domestic hearth of the House of Mirabeau. The eldest son of this man was Gabriel Honoré, the great orator, and the youngest daughter was Louise, Marchioness de Grasse-Cabris. The feudal castle of the Cabris is on the way to Draguignan. Cabris occupies a conical hill in a dreary limestone district, where the soil is so sparse that even the olive cannot flourish there—it exists, that is all. The place is supplied with water from cisterns that receive the rain from the roofs. Honoré was disfigured by smallpox at the age of three, and he retained thenceforth an extraordinary hideousness of aspect which struck his contemporaries, but which does not seem in the slightest to have impeded his success with women. His father declared that physically and morally he was a monster. The romance of his life begins when he was aged seventeen, when, owing to a love intrigue, and to debts, his father obtained a _lettre de cachet_ and had him imprisoned in the isle of Ré. From that time ensued a pitiless struggle, a veritable duel, between the imperious father and the ungovernable son. In 1772 Honoré married Emilie de Marignane at Aix; she was a wealthy heiress, but he speedily dissipated her fortune. His father obtained an order that he should be interned at Manosque. But he broke bounds and came to Grasse to visit his sister. Two days later an indecent pasquinade appeared placarded over the walls of Grasse, containing aspersions on the characters of the principal ladies of rank who spent the winter there.