Roland, whose ambition had soured in obscurity, had smiled at the power which came to avenge his old age.  Brissot, himself, had gone to Madame Roland on the 21st of the same month, and repeating the same words, had requested from her the formal consent of her husband.  Madame Roland was ambitious, not of power but of fame.  Fame lightens up the higher places only, and she ardently desired to see her husband elevated to this eminence.  She spoke like a woman who had predicted the event, and whom fortune does not surprise.  “The burden is heavy,” she said to Brissot, “but Roland has a great consciousness of his own powers, and would derive fresh strength from the feeling of being useful to liberty and his country.”

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 Claviere, 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:  Claviere 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 Gensonne, 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.