In his leisure he studied natural sciences, and kept up a correspondence with two Swiss, whose systems of physics then occupied the learned world--M.

de Saussure and Marat.

But science was not sufficient for his mind, which overflowed with sensitiveness, and which Barbaroux poured forth in elegiac poetry as burning as the noonday, and vague as the horizon of the sea beneath his view.

There is felt that southern melancholy whose languor, is closer allied to pleasure than weakness, and which resembles the songs of man seated in the broad sunshine, before or after labour.

Mirabeau had thus begun his life.