378

DUMOURIEZ'S TALENT,

of those men of the moment who help events to their accomplishment, and do not disturb them when they are accomplished.

The principal minister, however, he to whose hands was to be confided the fate of his country, and who was to comprise in himself all the policy of the Girondists, was the minister for foreign affairs, destined to replace the unfortunate De Lessart. The rupture with Europe was the most pressing matter with the party, and they required a man who would control the king, detect the secret intrigues of the court, cognizant of the mysteries of European cabinets, and who knew how, by his skill and resolution, at the same time to force our enemies into a war,-our dubious friends into neutrality, our secret partisans to an alliance. They sought such a man: he was close at hand.

BOOK XIII.

I.

DUMOURIEZ Combined all the requisites of boldness, devotion to the cause, and talent, that the Girondists required, and yet, until then, a second-rate man, and almost unknown, had no fortune to hope for but as theirs culminated. His name would not give umbrage to their genius, and if he proved incompetent, or rebelled against their projects, they would remove him without fear, or crush him without pity. Brissot, the diplomatic oracle of the Gironde, was evidently to be the minister who was one day to control our foreign relations, and who en attendant was to govern for the moment under the name of Dumouriez.

The Girondists had discovered Dumouriez in the obscurity of an existence, until then very insignificant, through Gensonné, whose colleague Dumouriez had been in the mission which the Constituent Assembly had given him to visit and examine the position of the western departments, already agitated by the secret presentiment of civil war and the early religious troubles. During this inquiry, which lasted several months, the two commissioners had frequent oppor

tunities for an interchange of their most private thoughts on the great events which at this moment agitated men's minds. They became much attached to each other. Gensonné detected with much tact in his colleague one of those intellects repressed by circumstances, and weighed down by the obscurity of their lot, which it is enough to expose to the open daylight of public action, in order to shine forth with all the brilliancy with which nature and study had endowed it: he had too found in this mind the spring of character strong enough to bear the movements of a revolution, and sufficiently elastic to bend to all the difficulties of affairs. In a word, Dumouriez had on the first contact exercised over Gensonné that influence, that ascendency, that empire which superiority, when it displays and humbles itself, never fails to acquire over minds to which it condescends to disclose itself.

self.

This attractive power, the confidence of genius, was one of the characteristics of Dumouriez, and by that he subsequently made a conquest of the Girondists, the king, the queen, his army, the Jacobins, Danton,-Robespierre himIt was what great men call their star,-a star which precedes them, and prepares their way. Dumouriez's star was fascination of manner; but this fascination was but the attraction of his just, rapid, quick ideas, into whose orbit the incredible activity of his mind carried away the mind of those who heard his thoughts or witnessed his actions. Gensonné, on his return from his mission, had desired to enrich his party with this unknown man, whose eminence he foresaw from afar. He presented Dumouriez to his friends of the Assembly, to Guadet, Vergniaud, Roland, Brissot, and De Grave communicated to them his own astonishment at, and confidence in, the twofold faculties of Dumouriez as diplomatist and soldier. He spoke of him as of a concealed saviour, whom fate had reserved for liberty. He conjured them to attach to themselves a man whose greatness would enhance their own.

They had scarcely seen Dumouriez before they were convinced. His intellect was electrical: it struck before they had time to anatomize it. The Girondists presented him to De Grave, and De Grave to the king, who offered him the temporary management of foreign affairs, until M. de Lessart, sent before the Haute Cour, had proved his innocence to his judges, and could resume the place reserved for him in the council. Dumouriez refused the post of minister pro tempore,

which would injure and weaken his position before all parties by rendering him suspected by all. The king yielded, and Dumouriez was appointed.

II.

History should pause a moment before this man, who, without having assumed the name of Dictator, concentrated in himself during two years all expiring France, and exercised over his country the most incontestible of dictatorships —that of genius. Dumouriez was of the number of men who are not to be painted by merely naming them, but of those whose previous life explains their nature; who have in the past the secret of their future; who have, like Mirabeau, their existence spread over two epochs; who have their roots in two soils, and are only known by the perusal of every detail.

Dumouriez, son of a commissioner in the war department, was born at Cambrai in 1739; and although his family lived in the north, his blood was southern by extraction. His family, originally from Aix, in Provence, evinced itself in the light, warmth, and sensibility of his nature; there was perceptible the same sky that had rendered so prolific the genius of Mirabeau. His father, a military and well-read man, educated him equally for war and literature. One of his uncles, employed in the foreign office, made him early a diplomatist. A mind equally powerful and subtle, he lent himself equally to all-as fitted for action as for thought, he passed from one to the other with facility, according to the phases of his destiny. There was in him the flexibility of the Greek mind in the stirring periods of the democracy in Athens. His deep study early directed his mind to history, that poem of men of action. Plutarch nourished him with his manly diet. He moulded on the antique figures drawn from life by the historian the ideal of his own life, only all the parts of every great man suited him alike: he assumed them by turns, realized them in his reveries, as suited to reproduce in him the voluptuary as the sage, the malcontent as the patriot; Aristippus as Themistocles; Scipio as Coriolanus. He mingled with his studies the exercises of a military life, formed his body to fatigue, at the same time that he fashioned his mind to lofty ideas; equally skilled in handling a sword, and daring in subduing a horse.

Demosthenes, by patience, formed a sonorous voice from a

stammering tongue. Dumouriez, with a weak and ailing constitution in his childhood, inured his body for war. The stirring ambition of his soul required that the frame which encased it should be of endurance.

III.

Opposing the desires of his father, who destined him for the war office, the pen was his abhorrence, and he obtained a sub-lieutenancy in the cavalry. As aide-de-camp of Marshal d'Armentières, he made the campaign of Hanover. In a retreat he seized the standard from the hands of a fugitive, rallied two hundred troopers round him, saved a battery of five pieces of cannon, and covered the passage of the army. Remaining almost alone in the rear, he made himself a rampart of his dead horse, and wounded three of the enemy's hussars. Wounded in many places by gun-shot and sabre wounds-his thigh entangled beneath a fallen horse-two fingers of his right hand severed—his forehead cut openhis eyes literally singed by a discharge of powder, he still fought, and only surrendered prisoner to the Baron de Beker, who saved his life, and conveyed him to the camp of the English.

His youth and good constitution restored him to health at the end of two months. Destined to form himself to victory by the example of defeats, and want of experience in our generals, he rejoined Marshal de Soubise and Marshal de Broglie; and was present at the routs which the French owe to their enmity and rivalry.

At the peace he went to rejoin his regiment in garrison at Saint Lô. Passing by Pont Audemer, he stopped at the house of his father's sister. A passionate love for one of his uncle's daughters kept him there. This love, shared by his cousin, and favored by his aunt, was opposed by his father. The young girl, in despair, took refuge in a convent. Dumouriez swore to take her thence, and went away. On his road, overcome by his grief, he bought some opium at Dieppe, shut himself up in his apartment, wrote his adieus to his beloved, a letter of reproaches to his father, and took the poison. Nature saved him, and repentance ensued-he went, and, throwing himself at his father's feet, they were reconciled.

At four and twenty years of age, after seven campaigns, he brought from the wars, only twenty-two wounds, à deco

a

ration, the rank of captain, a pension of 600 livres, debts contracted in the service, and a hopeless love, which preyed upon his mind. His ambition, spurred by his love, made him seek in politics that success which war had hitherto refused him.

There was then in Paris one of those enigmatic men who are at the same time intriguers and statesmen. Unknown and unconsidered, they play under some name parts hidden, but important in affairs. Men of police, as well as of politics, the governments that employ and despise them pay their services, not in appointments but in subsidies. Manoeuvrers in politics, they are paid from day to day-they are urged onwards, compromised, and then disavowed, and sometimes even imprisoned. They suffer all, even captivity and dishonor, for money. Such men are things to buy and sell, and their talent and utility stamp their price. Of this class were Linguet, Brissot, even Mirabeau in his youth. Such at this period was one Favier.

This man, employed in turns by the Duc de Choiseul and M. d'Argenson, to draw up diplomatic memoranda, had an infinite knowledge of Europe; he was the vigilant spy of every cabinet, knew their back-games, guessed their intrigues, and kept them in play by counter-mines, of which the minister for foreign affairs did not always know the secret. Louis XV., a king of small ideas and petty resources, was not ashamed to take into his confidence Favier, as an instrument in the schemes he contemplated against his own ministers. Favier was the go-between in the political correspondence which this monarch kept up with the Count de Broglie, unknown to, and against the policy of, his own ministers. This confidence, suspected by, rather than known to, his ministers, talent as a very able writer, deep knowledge of national eras, of history, and diplomacy, gave Favier a credit with the administration, and an influence over affairs very much beyond his obscure position and dubious character; he was, in some sort, the minister of the intrigues of high life of his time.

IV.

Dumouriez seeing the high roads to fortune closed before him, resolved to cast himself into them by indirect ways; and with this view attached himself to Favier. Favier attached himself to him, and in this connection of his earlier