Mirabeau's Love Letters

At the height of the French revolution, and the prelude to the reign of terror, Mirabeau, upon hearing of Sophie’s death, left the National Assembly and disappeared for multiple days.

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Of happy and unhappy love I know.
O heart, sweet-heart,
how much now in the midst of our unrest
you seem to me indelible and pure.
How often now I think to those grand days
when I, a humble prisoner in rags,
would beg for everything a pen could ask.
Oh Sophie, dear beloved, please come back;
for still alas I wake and search for you
beside me in my bed as morning comes
to ambush me with daggers and demands,
for who could not but weep for one so young.

Come see by light of freshly minted dawn
our pockmarked revolution has prevailed.
While your prodigious lover found his post
between these men of reason and the royal.
Both pay for genius though neither have
the wit to understand a single word.
Yet singing for my supper, as I must,
I puff the scruffy plumage of each bird.
Don’t judge me harshly darling, fate has cut
my deck with spades and kings so now I play
my weary hand for everything there is.
Is it so wrong to ask for minor gain?

Stability is treason now they say,
staunch mummery abounds in ratskin cloaks,
Ideas have spread, infecting prose and verse,
the sun king has absconded with our god.
My heart contracts one moment swells the next,
so much is now at stake you understand;
a child of two, this nation cries, it’s lost,
in need of love while anger chokes it still.

So there! (the most important news of all)
Your lover, bare-breasted, struggles still
against cruel fate. Oh darling, my Sophie
I write and feel that death has come again.
Slow wings and gentle breath when left alone
I hear the noise of something coming near.
Oh Sophie, darling, who will save me now
from all the love that politics can wield.

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