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 Gensonne, 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.  Gensonne 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 Gensonne 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.