As he was leaving, he met his friend Laporte, intendant of the civil list. The two, who were meeting for the last time, went into another room and closed the door. "You advised me to resign," said Laporte, "and I meant to do so, but I have changed my mind. My master is in danger, and I will share his fate."—"If I were in the personal service of the King, as you are," replied Dumouriez, "I would think and act the same; I esteem your devotion, and love you the more for it; each of us is faithful in his own way; you, to Louis; I, to the King of the French. May both of us felicitate him some day on his happiness!" Then the two friends separated, after embracing each other with tears.
The sole thought of Dumouriez now was to escape from the city where he had witnessed so many intrigues and been so often deceived. He was very sorrowful at heart. Ordinarily so gay, so brilliant, so full of Gallic and Rabelaisian wit, power had made him melancholy. His ministerial life left on him an abiding impression of bitterness and repugnance. "One needs," he has said, "either a patriotism equal to any test, or else an insatiable ambition, to aspire in any way whatever after those difficult positions where one is surrounded with snares and calumnies. One learns only too soon that men are not worth the trouble one takes to govern them." June 19, he wrote to the Assembly, asking an authorization to repair to the Army of the North. "I have spent thirty-six years in military and diplomatic service, and have twenty-two wounds," said he in this letter; "I envy the fate of the virtuous Gouvion, and should esteem myself happy if a cannon-ball could put an end to all differences concerning me." He never again returned either to the palace, the Assembly, or any other place where he might encounter either ministers, deputies, or persons belonging to the court. He started for the army, June 26, regarding it as "the only asylum where an honest man might still be safe. At least, death presents itself there under the attractive aspect of glory." He left in the capital "consternation, suspicion, hatred, which pierced through the frivolity of the wretched Parisians." With an intuition worthy of a man of genius, he foresaw the vicious circle about to be described by French history, and divined that by plunging into license men return inevitably to servitude, because "it is impossible to sustain liberty with an absurd government, founded on barbarity, terror, and the subversion of every principle necessary to the maintenance of human society." Two years later, in 1794, he wrote in his Memoirs: "The serpent will recoil upon itself. His tail, which is anarchy, will re-enter his throat, which is despotism."
[[1]] The advanced republican party in the Assembly.
XVII.
THE PROLOGUE TO JUNE TWENTIETH.
On retiring from the ministry, Dumouriez left his successors a burden far too heavy for their shoulders, and under which they were to succumb. The new ministers, Lajard, Terrier de Montciel, and Chambonas, were almost unknown men who had no definite, decided opinions, and offered no resistance to disorder: for that matter, they had no means of doing so. The political system then in power had left Paris a helpless prey to sedition. By the new laws, the executive power could take no direct action looking to the preservation of public order in any French commune. Any minister or departmental administration that should adopt a police regulation or give a commander to armed forces, would be guilty of betraying a trust. The power to prevent or repress disorder belonged exclusively to the municipal authority, which, in Paris, was composed of a mayor, sixteen administrators, thirty-two municipal councillors, a council-general of ninety-six notables, an attorney-general and his two substitutes. This body of 148 members was the redoubtable power known as the Commune of Paris. It was not composed entirely of seditious persons, and in the National Guard, also, there were still battalions fervently devoted to the constitutional monarchy. But Pétion was mayor of Paris; Manuel, the attorney-general, and Danton his substitute. Seditious movements were sure to find instigators and accomplices in these three men.
Moreover, the insurrection was regularly organized. It had its muster-rolls, its officers, sergeants, soldiers; its strategy and plans of battle. It utilized wineshops as guard-houses, the faubourgs as barracks, the red bonnet and the carmagnole, or revolutionary jacket, as a uniform. Its agitators distributed wine, beer, and brandy gratuitously. The Jacobins or the Cordeliers had but to give the signal for a riot, and a riot sprang out of the ground. The mine was loaded; the only question was when to fire the train. The Girondins were of one mind with the Jacobins. Exasperated by the dismissal of three ministers who shared their opinions, they wanted to intimidate the court by means of a popular tumult, and thus force the unhappy sovereign to sanction the two decrees, concerning the deportation of priests and the camp of twenty thousand men. The populace already manifested their restlessness by threats and strange rumors. At the Jacobin Club the most violent propositions were mooted. Some wanted to establish a minority, on the ground of the King's mental alienation; some, to send the Queen back to Austria; the more moderate talked of suppressing the army, dismissing the staff-officers of the National Guard, depriving the King of the right of veto, and electing a Constituent Assembly. Revolutionary conventicles multiplied beyond all measure. The division of Paris into forty-eight sections became an exhaustless source of confusion. The assembly of each section transformed itself into a club.
Meanwhile, the moderate party rested all its hopes on Lafayette, who was friendly not only to liberty, but to order. He considered himself the founder of the new monarchy, of constitutional royalty; but, for that very reason, he felt that he had duties toward the King. Despising the reactionists, whose hopes were more or less enlisted on behalf of the foreign armies, he also detested the Jacobins who were dishonoring and compromising the new order of things. He expresses both sentiments in a letter addressed to the National Assembly, and written from the intrenched camp of Maubeuge, June 16, 1792, the Fourth Year of Liberty: "Can you conceal from yourselves," he says in it, "that a faction, and to use plain terms, the Jacobin faction, has caused all these disorders? I make the accusation boldly. Organized like a separate empire, with its capital and its affiliations blindly directed by certain ambitious chiefs, this sect forms a distinct body in the midst of the French people, whose powers it usurps by subjugating its representatives and agents. In its public meetings, attachment to the laws is named aristocracy, and disobedience to them patriotism; there the assassins of Desilles are received in triumph, and Jourdan's insensate clamor finds panegyrists; there the story of the assassinations which defiled the city of Metz is still greeted with infernal applause."