XIII.

Paris was in consternation at this news; the Assembly greatly troubled, the Girondists trembled, the Jacobins were vociferous in their imprecations against the traitors.  Foreign courts and the emigrants had no doubt of an easy triumph in a few marches over a revolution which was afraid of its very shadow.  La Fayette, without having been attacked, fell back, very prudently, on Givet.  Rochambeau sent in his resignation as commandant of the army of the north.  Marshal Luckner was nominated in his place.  La Fayette, much dissatisfied, kept the command of the central army.

Luckner was upwards of seventy years of age, but retained all the fire and activity of the warrior; he only required genius to have been a great general.  He had a reputation for complaisance, which sufficed for every thing.  It is a great advantage for a general to be a stranger in the country in which he is serving.  He has no one jealous of him:  his superiority is pardoned, and presumed if it do not exist, in order to crush his rivals:  such was old Luckner’s position.  He was a German,—­pupil of the great Frederic, with whom he had served with eclat during the seven years’ war as commandant of the vanguard, at the moment when Frederic changed the war, and commenced its tactics.  The Duc de Choiseul was desirous of depriving Prussia of a general of this great school, to teach the modern art of battles to French generals.  He had attracted Luckner from his country by force of temptations, fortune, and honours.  The national Assembly, from respect to the memory of the philosopher king, had preserved to Luckner the pension of 60,000 francs which had been paid to him during the Revolution.  Luckner, indifferent to constitutions, believed himself a revolutionist from gratitude.  He was almost the only one amongst the ancient general officers who had not emigrated.  Surrounded by a brilliant staff of young officers of the party of La Fayette, Charles Lameth, du Jarri, Mathieu de Montmorency, he believed he had the opinions which they instilled into him.  The king caressed, the Assembly flattered, the army respected, him.  The nation saw in him the mysterious genius of the old war coming to give lessons of victory to the untried patriotism of the Revolution, and concealing its infinite resources under the bluntness of his exterior, and the obscure Germanism of his language.  They addressed to him, from all sides, homage as though he were an unknown God.  He did not deserve either this adoration, or the outrages with which he was soon after overwhelmed.  He was a brave and coarse soldier, as misplaced in courts as in clubs.  For some days he was an idol, then the plaything of the Jacobins, who, at last, threw him to the guillotine, without his being able to comprehend either his popularity or his crime.

XIV.