Stormy Mirabeau

THE STORMY LIFE OF MIRABEAU-- Henry de Jouvenel--Houghton, Mifflin ($3.50).

How can one do without love?

I'm willing to bet that at my age

Mama didn't know how to say no.

Each season has its rage;

Some day I too will be sage,

But why must you hurry me so?

The singer was Gabriel Mirabeau, a boy of 15 with a stocky figure and a face that bore marks of the pox in puffy profusion. His audience was his tutor, to whose reprovals he was retorting. Indignant, the tutor reported the cause of the reproval to Mirabeau Sr.: "Must I confess to you, Monsieur, that his ways have already forced me to dismiss two maids?"

Out of boarding-school went Gabriel, into the army. Jailed by his father, shot at by his profligate mother, seduced by his sister, married by a good girl, Gabriel's troubles seemed only to begin when he met Sophie de Monnier. The 21-year-old wife of a rich but devout sexagenarian, Sophie had large, black, red-rimmed eyes. When Gabriel eloped with her, his head was declared forfeit, for rape. Yet when she was captured he returned to her side just in time to prevent her taking the poison he knew she always carried with her. After four years in separate cells he stole to her one night, to find the long separation had made her a stranger, convent-grey and dull, while for him, a man, the four years' con- finement among books had served to unshackle his mind. Nevertheless, he passed up his chance of escape to fight, as their own lawyer, for reversal of his death sentence, for her freedom and separation from her husband. He won.

He was now 33. Spending less time with more women, he began an active public life. He wrote pamphlets and books on finance and history. One such opus, well-worded, eclectic, seditious, got him appointed "out of harm's way" as diplomat-at-large to the Court of Berlin where he nearly succeeded in embroiling Germany and France, at a time when there was "not a cent in the French treasury." France's poverty, he found, was due to the predatory habits of nobility and clergy. Against them he, a people's deputy in Paris, attempted to unite King and People. Of the despised People's deputies he made a National Assembly and, when the Revolution of 1789 occurred, tried to get the King to recognize the People as France's new governing power. The King, unfortunately for himself, would not listen. Most of the clergy, shrewd, did listen. The Revolution was a success.

Called "Voice of the Revolution," Mirabeau, with his loud tongue and sense of drama, was an incendiary orator who said daring things at crucial moments. To Louis XVI. snubbing his assembly, Mirabeau grimly retorted: "It is thus that kings are led to the scaffold."

In 1791's stormy April, Mirabeau, 42, died, begging doctors for opium.

The Significance. Many Frenchmen have written about Mirabeau--notably Louis Barthou whom Author Jouvenel, generous, believes "almost conclusive." Orderly, perceptively, amusedly, with a good eye for a subject's public-private proportions, Author Jouvenel renders this portrait as a biography in the tradition, though not the manner, of Plutarch, Suetonius, Maurois.

The Author. Able editor of the Paris Matin from 1905 to 1924, Henry de Jouvenel entered French politics actively via the Senate in 1921. He was made a delegate to the League of Nations, and in 1924 became Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts under Premier Poincare. In 1925 he did a brilliant six-months' job as French High Commissioner for Syria. Returning to Paris in 1926, he later began La Revue des Vivants with the help of other War survivors (his Croix de Guerre is for Verdun). Now aged 53, he continues in the French Senate, a potent member of the foreign affairs committee. His book about France's Mirabeau might be in a measure paralleled in the U.S. if Senator Borah should break the tradition of inartisticness in U. S. politics and write a frank, intelligent, amusing life of Tom Paine.