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It was at these private meetings that Buzot, Guadet, Vergniaud, Genevéive and Brissot infused into the ministers the feelings of their party and reigned unseen over the Assembly and the king. Dumouriez soon became an object of suspicion to them for his mind escaped their dominion by its greatness, and his character escaped fanaticism by its pliability.
A yell of triumph greeted the fall. The soldiers stamped on the board with their heavy boots and hacked at it with their swords. Then another man mounted the ladder with a splintered fragment in his hand. He whirled it round his head, and flung it far down the street. "There's for the rebelly sign," he shouted. "There's for Dumouriez! There's the way we treat damned French and Irish croppies."
To intimidate parties, he was to gain over his troops, march on the capital, dissolve the convention, put down popular meetings, re-establish the constitution of 1791, and give a king to France. This project, impracticable amidst the great shock between the revolution and Europe, appeared easy to the fiery and adventurous Dumouriez.
Dumouriez, at the head of the army of Belgium, forty thousand strong, advanced from Valenciennes upon Mons, supported on the right by the army of the Ardennes, amounting to about sixteen thousand men, under general Valence, who marched from Givet upon Namur; and on his left, by the army of the north, eighteen thousand strong, under general Labourdonnaie, who advanced from Lille upon Tournai.
As La Fayette had a few months before, so did Dumouriez now, appear to be the man of the sword so dreaded by Robespierre, the successful soldier ready to convert the Revolution to his own profit, or if not to his own to that of his party, the Girondins.
Dumouriez, impetuous as the volcano, instinctively felt this, and strove, in the conferences that preceded the nomination of the generals, to infuse some portion of his own fire into La Fayette.
He had now only to maintain his post till the arrival of Kellermann and Beurnonville, and the success of the campaign would be certain. The troops had become disciplined and inured, and the army amounted to about seventy thousand men, after the arrival of Beurnonville and Kellermann, which took place on the 17th. The Prussian army had followed the movements of Dumouriez.
Dumouriez offered to withdraw the French troops from the frontier, if Austria would send no more reinforcements, but at that moment the queen sent word of an intended attack on Liége. The offer seemed perfidious, and envenomed the quarrel. Marie Antoinette despatched Goguelat, the man who was not at his post on the flight to Varennes, to implore intervention.
Thus, the efforts of the Girondists to stay the execution of the king and to appeal to the provinces against the violence in Paris, coupled with the treason of Dumouriez, seemed to the Parisian proletariat to mark the alliance of the Girondists with the reactionaries.
A nervous twitching keeps him constantly moving, and he has the leprosy: this is well known. He walked straight to Dumouriez, who said disdainfully, "Ah! are you the man they call Marat?" Marat immediately demanded from him an account of military measures he had taken.
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