The emperor and the king of Prussia, informed of the secret leaning of the Duke of Brunswick to France, and of the offer of the crown made to him by the factions, caused him to undertake the responsibility of this proclamation either as a vengeance or a disavowal.  This imperious defiance of the kings to freedom threatened with death every national guard taken with arms in his hand, protecting the independence of his country, and that in case the least outrage was offered by the factions to the king, Paris should be razed to the ground.

BOOK XV.

I.

Whilst a war to the death impended over the people, and menaced the king, discord continued to reign in the councils of the ministers.  The minister of war, Servan, was accused by Dumouriez with obeying with servility, which resembled love rather than complaisance, the influence of Madame Roland, and of having wholly defeated the plans for the invasion of Belgium.  The friends of Madame Roland, on their side, threatened Dumouriez that they would make the Assembly demand of him an account of the six millions of secret expenses, whose destination they suspected.  Already Guadet and Vergniaud had prepared discourses and a project of a decree to demand a public reckoning for these sums.  Dumouriez, who had bought friends and accomplices with this gold amongst the Jacobins and the Feuillants, revolted against the suspicion, refused, in the name of his outraged honour, to make any return of this expenditure, and boldly offered his resignation.  Upon this a great number of members of the Assembly, Feuillants and Jacobins, Petion himself, called at the residence of the insulted minister, and conjured him to return to his post.  He consented, on condition that they would leave the disposal of these funds to his conscience alone.  The Girondists themselves, intimidated by his retirement, and feeling that a man of his character was indispensable to their weakness, withdrew their motion, and passed a vote of public confidence in him.  The people applauded him as he quitted the Assembly.  These applauses sounded gloomily in the council-chamber of Madame Roland.  The popularity of Dumouriez renders her jealous.  It was not in her eyes the popularity of virtue, and she coveted it all for her husband and her party.  Roland and his Girondist colleagues, Servan, Claviere, redoubled their efforts to influence the mind of the king, and used threats in order to acquire it.  To flatter the Assembly, court the people; irritate the Jacobins against the court; beset the king by the imperious demand of sacrifices which they knew were impossible; to injure him silently in opinion as the cause of all evil, or the obstacle to all good; to compel him, in fact, by insolence and outrage, to dismiss them that they might afterwards accuse him of betraying in them the Revolution:  such were their tactics, resulting from their weakness rather than from their ambition.