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