History of the Girondists, Volume I / Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution

by Alphonse de Lamartine

VI.

He returned to Paris. The king and M. d'Argenson, to save appearances with Russia and Prussia, threw him and Favier into the Bastille, and he there passed a year in cursing the ingratitude of courts and the weakness of kings, and recovered his natural energy in retreat and study. The king changed his prison into exile to the citadel of Caen; there Dumouriez found again, in a convent, the cousin he had loved. Free, and weary of a monastic life, she became softened on again beholding her former lover, and they were married. He was then appointed commandant of Cherbourg, and his indefatigable mind contended with the elements as if it were opposing men. He conceived the plan of fortifying this harbour, which was to imprison a stormy sea in a granite basin, and give the French navy a halting place in the channel. Here he passed fifteen years in domestic life, much troubled by the ill humour and ascetic devotion of his wife; in military studies constant, but without application, and in the dissipation of the philosophic and voluptuous society of his time.

The Revolution, which was drawing nigh, found him indifferent to its principles, and prepared for its vicissitudes. The justness of his penetration enabled him at a glance to measure the tendency of events. He soon comprehended that a revolution in ideas must undermine institutions, unless institutions modelled themselves on the new ideas. He gave himself to the constitution without enthusiasm; he desired the maintenance of the throne, had no faith in a republic, foresaw a change in the dynasty; and was even accused of meditating it. The emigration, by decimating the upper ranks of the army, left space for him, and he was named general, by length of service. He preserved a firm and well-devised conduct, equi-distant from the throne and the people, from the counter-revolutionist and the malcontent, ready to go with the opinion of the court or of the nation, according as events might transpire. By turns he was in communication with all parties, as if to sound the growing power of Mirabeau and de Montmorin, the Duc d'Orleans and the Jacobins, La Fayette and the Girondists. In his various commands during these days of crises, he maintained discipline by his popularity, was on terms with the insurgent people, and placed himself at their head, in order to restrain them. The people believed him certainly on their side; the soldiery adored him; he detested anarchy, but flattered the demagogues. He applied very skilfully to his popularity those able tactics which Favier had taught him. He viewed the Revolution as an heroic intrigue. He manœuvred his patriotism as he would have manœuvred his battalions on the field of battle. He considered the coming war with much delight, knowing already all of a hero's part. He foresaw that the Revolution, deserted by the nobility, and assailed by all Europe, would require a general ready formed to direct the undisciplined efforts of the masses it had excited. He prepared himself for that post. The long subordination of his genius fatigued him. At fifty-six years of age he had the fire of youth with all the coolness of age; his earnest desire was advancement; the yearning of his soul for fame was the more intense in proportion to the years he had already unavailingly passed. His frame, fortified by climates and voyages, lent itself, like a passive instrument, to his activity: all was young in him except his amount of years; they were expended, but not by energy. He had the youth of Cæsar, an impatient desire for fortune, and the certainty of acquiring it. With great men, to live is to rise in renown; he had not lived, because his reputation was not equivalent to his ambition.

VII.

Dumouriez was of that middle stature of the French soldier who wears his uniform gracefully, his havresac lightly, and his musket and sabre as if he did not feel their weight. Equally agile and compact, his body had the cast of those statues of warriors who repose on their expanded muscles, and yet seem ready to advance. His attitude was confident and proud; all his motions were as rapid as his mind. He vaulted into the saddle without touching the stirrup, holding the mane by his left hand. He sprung to the ground with one effort, and handled the bayonet of the soldier as vigorously as the sword of the general. His head, rather thrown backwards, rose well from his shoulders, and turned on his neck with ease and grace, like all elegant men. These haughty motions of his head made him look taller under the tricoloured cockade. His brow was lofty, well-turned, flat at the temples, and well displayed; his muscles set in play by his reflection and resolution. The salient and well-defined angles announced sensibility of mind beneath delicacy of understanding and the most exquisite tact. His eyes were black, large, and full of fire; his long lids, beginning to turn grey, increased their brilliancy, though sometimes they were very soft; his nose, and the oval of his countenance, were of that aquiline type which reveals races ennobled by war and empire; his mouth, flexible and handsome, was almost always smiling; no tension of the lips betrayed the effort of this plastic mind—this master mind, which played with difficulties, overcame obstacles; his chin, turned and decided, bore his face, as it were, on a firm and square base, whilst the habitual expression of his countenance was calm and expansive cheerfulness. It was evident that no pressure of affairs was too heavy for him, and that he constantly preserved so much liberty of mind as enabled him to jest alike with good or bad fortune. He treated politics, war, and government with gaiety. The tone of his voice was sonorous, manly, and vibrating; and was distinctly heard above the noise of the drum, and the clash of the bayonet. His oratory was straightforward, clever, striking; his words were effective in council, in confidence, and intimacy: they soothed and insinuated themselves like those of a woman. He was persuasive, for his soul, mobile and sensitive, had always in its accent the truth and impression of the moment. Devoted to the sex, and easily enamoured, his experience with them had imbued him with one of their highest qualities—pity. He could not resist tears, and those of the queen would have made him a Seid of the throne; there was no position or opinion he would not have sacrificed to a generous impulse; his greatness of soul was not calculation, it was excessive feeling. He had no political principles; the Revolution was to him nothing more than a fine drama, which was to furnish a grand scene for his abilities, and a part for his genius. A great man for the service of events, if the Revolution had not beheld him as its general and preserver, he would equally have been the general and preserver of the Coalition. Dumouriez was not the hero of a principle, but of the occasion.

VIII.

The new ministers met at Madame Roland's, the soul of the Girondist ministry: Duranton, Lacoste, Cahier-Gerville received there, in all passiveness, their instructions from the men whose shadows only they were in the council. Dumouriez affected, like them, at first, a full compliance with the interests and will of the party, which, personified at Roland's by a young, lovely, and eloquent woman, must have had an additional attraction for the general. He hoped to rule by ruling the heart of this female. He employed with her all the plasticity of his character, all the graces of his nature, all the fascinations of his genius; but Madame Roland had a preservative against the warrior's seductions that Dumouriez had not been accustomed to find in the women he had loved—austere virtue and a strong will. There was but one means of captivating her admiration, and that was by surpassing her in patriotic devotion. These two characters could not meet without contrasting themselves, nor understand without despising each other. Very soon, therefore, Dumouriez considered Madame Roland as a stubborn bigot, and she estimated Dumouriez as a frivolous presuming man, finding in his look, smile, and tone of voice that audacity of success towards her sex which betrayed, according to her estimation, the free conduct of the females amongst whom he had lived, and which offended her decorum. There was more of the courtier than the patriot in Dumouriez. This French aristocracy of manners displeased the engraver's humble daughter; perhaps it reminded her of her lowly condition, and the humiliations of her childhood at Versailles. Her ideal was not the military, but the citizen; a republican mind alone could acquire her love. Besides, she saw at a glance that this man was too great to remain long on the level of her party; she suspected his genius in his politeness, and his ambition beneath his familiarity. "Have an eye to that man," she said to her husband after their first interview; "he may conceal a master beneath the colleague, and drive from the cabinet those who introduced him there."

IX.

Roland, too happy at being in power, did not foresee his disgrace, and encouraging his wife, trusted more and more to the admiration which Dumouriez feigned for him. He thought himself the statesman of the cabinet, and his gratified vanity lent itself credulously to the advances of Dumouriez, and even made him better disposed towards the king. On his entry to the ministry Roland had affected in his costume the bluntness of his principles, and in his manners the rudeness of his republicanism. He presented himself at the Tuileries in a black coat, with a round hat, and nailed shoes covered with dust. He wished to show in himself the man of the people, entering the palace in the plain garb of the citizen, and thus meeting the man of the throne. This tacit insolence he thought would flatter the nation and humiliate the king. The courtiers were indignant; the king groaned over it; Dumouriez laughed at it. "Ah, well then, really, gentlemen," he said to the courtiers, "since there is no more etiquette there is no more monarchy." This jocose mode of treating the thing had at once removed all the anger of the court, and all the effect of the Spartan pretensions of Roland.

The king no longer regarded the discourtesy, and treated Roland with that cordiality which unlocks men's hearts. The new ministers were astonished to feel themselves confiding and moved in the presence of the monarch. Having arrived suspicious and republican to their seats in the cabinet, they quitted it almost royalists.