The Girondist leaders, still undecided between the republic and the monarchy, thus felt the pulse of power—­sometimes of the Assembly, sometimes of the king; ready to seize it wherever they should find it; but discovering it on the side of the king, they judged that there was more certainty in sapping than in consolidating the throne, and they inclined more than ever to a factious policy.

XVIII.

Still, half-masters of the council through Roland, Claviere, and Servan, who had succeeded De Grave, they bore to a certain extent the responsibility of these three ministers.  The Jacobins began to require from them an account of the acts of a ministry which was in their hands, and bore their name.  Dumouriez, placed between the king and the Girondists, saw daily the increasing want of confidence between his colleagues and himself; they suspected his probity equally with his patriotism.  He had profited by his popularity and ascendency over the Jacobins to demand of the Assembly a sum of 6,000,000 (240,000_l._) of secret service money on his accession to the ministry.  The apparent destination of this money was to bribe foreign cabinets, and to detach venal powers from the coalition, and to foment revolutionary symptoms in Belgium.  Dumouriez alone knew the channels by which this money was to flow.  His exhausted personal fortune, his costly tastes, his attachment to a seductive woman, Madame de Beauvert, sister to Rivarol; his intimacy with men of unprincipled character and irregular habits,—­reports of extortion charged on his ministry, and falling, if not on him on those he trusted, tarnished his character in the eyes of Madame Roland and her husband.  Probity is the virtue of democrats, for the people look first at the hands of those who govern them.  The Girondists, pure as men of the ancient time, feared the shadow of a suspicion of this nature on their characters, and Dumouriez’s carelessness on this point annoyed them.  They complained.  Gensonne and Brissot insinuated their feelings to him on this point at Roland’s.  Roland himself, authorised by his age and austerity of manners, took upon himself to remind Dumouriez that a public man owes respect to decorum and revolutionary manners.  The warrior turned the remonstrance into pleasantry, replied to Roland that he owed his blood to the nation, but neither owed it the sacrifice of his tastes nor his amours; that he understood patriotism as a hero, and not as a puritan.  The bitterness of his language left venom behind, and they separated with mutual ill-feeling.

From this day forth he no longer visited at Roland’s evening meetings.  Madame Roland, who understood the human heart by the superior instinct of her genius and her sex, was not deceived by the general’s tactics.  “The hour is come to destroy Dumouriez,” she said boldly to her friends.  “I know very well,” she added, addressing Roland, “that you are incapable of descending either to intrigue