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.  Gensonne, 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.

II.

History should pause a moment before this man, who, without having assumed the name of Dictator, concentrated in himself during two years all expiring France, and exercised over his country the most incontestible of dictatorships—­that of genius.  Dumouriez was of the number of men who are not to be painted by merely naming them, but of those whose previous life explains their nature; who have in the past the secret of their future; who have, like Mirabeau, their existence spread over two epochs; who have their roots in two soils, and are only known by the perusal of every detail.

Dumouriez, son of a commissioner in the war department, was born at Cambrai in 1739; and although his family lived in the north, his blood was southern by extraction.  His family, originally from Aix, in Provence, evinced itself in the light, warmth, and sensibility of his nature; there was perceptible the same sky that had rendered so prolific the genius of Mirabeau.  His father, a military and well-read man, educated him equally for war and literature.  One of his uncles, employed in the foreign office, made him early a diplomatist.  A mind equally powerful and supple,