This choice being made, the Girondists cast their eyes on Lacoste, an active commissioner of the navy, a working man, his mind limited by his duties, but honest and upright; his very candour of nature preserving him from faction. Put into council to watch over his master, he naturally became his friend. Duranton, an advocate of Bordeaux, was called to the bureau of justice. The Girondists, who knew him, boasted of his honesty, and relied on his plasticity and weakness. Brissot intended for the finance department Clavière, a Genevese economist, driven from his native land, a relation and friend of his own; used to intrigue; rival of Necker; brought up in the cabinet of Mirabeau, in order to bring forward a rival against this finance minister, so hateful to Mirabeau: a man without republican prejudices or monarchical principles, only seeking in the Revolution a part, and with whom the great aim and end was—to get on. His mind, indifferent to all scruples, was on a level with every situation, and at the height of all parties. The Girondists, new to state affairs, required men well conversant in the details of war and finance departments, and who yet were the mere tools of their government: Clavière was one of these. In the war office they had De Grave, by whom the king had replaced Narbonne. De Grave, who from the subaltern ranks of the army had been raised to the post of minister of war, had declared relations with the Girondists. The friends of Gensonné, Vergniaud, Guadet, Brissot, and even Danton, hoped, through their instrumentality, to save at the same time the constitution and the king. Devoted to both, he was the link by which he hoped to unite the Girondists to royalty. Young, he had the illusions of his age: constitutional, he had the sincerity of his conviction; but weak, in ill health, more ready to undertake than firm to execute, he was one 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, cognisant 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 opportunities 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.
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 himself. It 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 anatomise 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.