In 1792 he was prosecuted for publishing an edition of the Lettres de Mirabeau et Sophie, but was acquitted.
He found that his Sophie was an idealized version of a rather common and ill-educated woman, and she consoled herself with the affection of a young officer, after whose death she committed suicide.
About this time began his connexion with Mme de Nehra, the daughter of Zwier van Haren, a Dutch statesman and political writer, and a woman of a far higher type than Sophie, more educated, more refined, and more capable of appreciating Mirabeau's good points.
Sophie has always had a fairly definite ideas about who she wanted to be.
Her birth itself was romantic. Her father was playing a country dance at the house of a fellow officer, the future husband of Sophie's sister, when he was told that his wife, who had not long left the room, had borne him a daughter.
