Part 28 (1/2)

He soon comprehended that a revolution in ideas must undermine inst.i.tutions, unless inst.i.tutions modelled themselves on the new ideas.

He gave himself to the const.i.tution without enthusiasm; he desired the maintenance of the throne, had no faith in a republic, foresaw a change in the dynasty; and was even accused of meditating it. The emigration, by decimating the upper ranks of the army, left s.p.a.ce for him, and he was named general, by length of service. He preserved a firm and well-devised conduct, equi-distant from the throne and the people, from the counter-revolutionist and the malcontent, ready to go with the opinion of the court or of the nation, according as events might transpire. By turns he was in communication with all parties, as if to sound the growing power of Mirabeau and de Montmorin, the Duc d'Orleans and the Jacobins, La Fayette and the Girondists. In his various commands during these days of crises, he maintained discipline by his popularity, was on terms with the insurgent people, and placed himself at their head, in order to restrain them. The people believed him certainly on their side; the soldiery adored him; he detested anarchy, but flattered the demagogues. He applied very skilfully to his popularity those able tactics which Favier had taught him. He viewed the Revolution as an heroic intrigue. He manoeuvred his patriotism as he would have manoeuvred his battalions on the field of battle. He considered the coming war with much delight, knowing already all of a hero's part. He foresaw that the Revolution, deserted by the n.o.bility, and a.s.sailed by all Europe, would require a general ready formed to direct the undisciplined efforts of the ma.s.ses it had excited. He prepared himself for that post. The long subordination of his genius fatigued him. At fifty-six years of age he had the fire of youth with all the coolness of age; his earnest desire was advancement; the yearning of his soul for fame was the more intense in proportion to the years he had already unavailingly pa.s.sed. His frame, fortified by climates and voyages, lent itself, like a pa.s.sive instrument, to his activity: all was young in him except his amount of years; they were expended, but not by energy. He had the youth of Caesar, an impatient desire for fortune, and the certainty of acquiring it. With great men, to live is to rise in renown; he had not lived, because his reputation was not equivalent to his ambition.

VII.

Dumouriez was of that middle stature of the French soldier who wears his uniform gracefully, his havresac lightly, and his musket and sabre as if he did not feel their weight. Equally agile and compact, his body had the cast of those statues of warriors who repose on their expanded muscles, and yet seem ready to advance. His att.i.tude was confident and proud; all his motions were as rapid as his mind. He vaulted into the saddle without touching the stirrup, holding the mane by his left hand.

He sprung to the ground with one effort, and handled the bayonet of the soldier as vigorously as the sword of the general. His head, rather thrown backwards, rose well from his shoulders, and turned on his neck with ease and grace, like all elegant men. These haughty motions of his head made him look taller under the tricoloured c.o.c.kade. His brow was lofty, well-turned, flat at the temples, and well displayed; his muscles set in play by his reflection and resolution. The salient and well-defined angles announced sensibility of mind beneath delicacy of understanding and the most exquisite tact. His eyes were black, large, and full of fire; his long lids, beginning to turn grey, increased their brilliancy, though sometimes they were very soft; his nose, and the oval of his countenance, were of that aquiline type which reveals races enn.o.bled by war and empire; his mouth, flexible 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 s.e.x, 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 pa.s.siveness, 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 surpa.s.sing 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 a frivolous presuming man, finding in his look, smile, and tone of voice that audacity of success towards her s.e.x which betrayed, according to her estimation, the free conduct of the females amongst whom he had lived, and which offended her decorum.

There was more of the courtier than the patriot in Dumouriez. This French aristocracy of manners displeased the engraver's humble daughter; perhaps it reminded her of her lowly condition, and the humiliations of her childhood at Versailles. Her ideal was not the military, but the citizen; a republican mind alone could acquire her love. Besides, she saw at a glance that this man was too great to remain long on the level of her party; she suspected his genius in his politeness, and his ambition beneath his familiarity. ”Have an eye to that man,” she said to her husband after their first interview; ”he may conceal a master beneath the colleague, and drive from the cabinet those who introduced him there.”

IX.

Roland, too happy at being in power, did not foresee his disgrace, and encouraging his wife, trusted more and more to the admiration which Dumouriez feigned for him. He thought himself the statesman of the cabinet, and his gratified vanity lent itself credulously to the advances of Dumouriez, and even made him better disposed towards the king. On his entry to the ministry Roland had affected in his costume the bluntness of his principles, and in his manners the rudeness of his republicanism. He presented himself at the Tuileries in a black coat, with a round hat, and nailed shoes covered with dust. He wished to show in himself the man of the people, entering the palace in the plain garb of the citizen, and thus meeting the man of the throne. This tacit insolence he thought would flatter the nation and humiliate the king.

The courtiers were indignant; the king groaned over it; Dumouriez laughed at it. ”Ah, well then, really, gentlemen,” he said to the courtiers, ”since there is no more etiquette there is no more monarchy.”

This jocose mode of treating the thing had at once removed all the anger of the court, and all the effect of the Spartan pretensions of Roland.

The king no longer regarded the discourtesy, and treated Roland with that cordiality which unlocks men's hearts. The new ministers were astonished to feel themselves confiding and moved in the presence of the monarch. Having arrived suspicious and republican to their seats in the cabinet, they quitted it almost royalists.

”The king is not known,” said Roland to his wife: ”a weak prince, he is one of the best of men; he does not want good intentions, but good advice: he does not like the aristocracy, and has strong affection for the people: perhaps he was born to serve as the medium between republic and monarchy. By rendering the const.i.tution easy to him we shall make him like it, and the popularity he will re-acquire by following our counsels will render government easy to ourselves. His nature is so great that the throne has been unable to corrupt it, and he is equally remote from the silly brute which has been held up to the laughter of the people as from the sensitive and highly accomplished man his courtiers pretend to adore in him; his mind, without being superior, is expansive and reflecting; in a humble position his abilities would have provided for him; he has a general and occasionally sound knowledge, knows the details of business, and acts towards men with that simple but persuasive ability which gives kings the precocious necessity of governing their impressions; his prodigious memory always recalls to him at the right time things, names, and faces; he likes work, and reads every thing; he is never idle for a moment; a tender parent, a model of a husband: chaste in feeling, he has done away with all those scandals which disgraced the courts of his predecessors; he loves none but the queen, and his condescension, which is occasionally injurious to his politics, is at least a weakness 'which leans to virtue's side.' Had he been born two centuries earlier his peaceable reign would have been counted amongst the number of happy years of the monarchy. Circ.u.mstances appear to have influenced his mind. The Revolution has convinced him of its necessity, and we must convince him of its possibility. In our hands the king may better serve it than any other citizen in the kingdom; by enlightening this prince we may be faithful alike to his interests and those of the nation--the king and Revolution must be with us as one.”

X.

Thus said Roland in the first dazzling of power; his wife listened with a smile of incredulity on her lips. Her keener glance had at the instant measured a career more vast and a termination more decisive than the timid and transitory compromise between a degraded royalty and an imperfect revolution. It would have cost her too much to renounce the ideal of her ardent soul; all her wishes tended to a republic; all her exertions, all her words, all her aspirations, were destined, unconsciously to herself, to urge thither her husband and his a.s.sociates.

”Mistrust every man's perfidy, and more especially your own virtue,” was her reply to the weak and vain Roland. ”You see in this world but courts, where all is unreal, and where the most polished surfaces conceal the most sinister combinations. You are only an honest countryman wandering amongst a crowd of courtiers,--virtue in danger amidst a myriad of vices: they speak our language, and we do not know theirs. Would it be possible that they should not deceive us? Louis XVI., of a degenerate race, without elevation of mind, or energy of will, allowed himself to be enthralled early in life by religious prejudices, which have even lessened his intellect; fascinated by a giddy queen, who unites to Austrian insolence the enchantment of beauty and the highest rank, and who makes of her secret and corrupt court the sanctuary of her pleasures and the focus of her vices, this prince, blinded on the one hand by the priests, and on the other by love, holds at random the loose reins of an empire which is escaping from his grasp.

France, exhausted of men, does not give to him, either in Maurepas, Necker, or Calonne, a minister capable of supporting him. The aristocracy is barren, and produces nothing but to its shame; the government must be renewed in the holier and deeper fount of the nation; the time for a democracy is here,--why delay it! You are its men, its virtues, its characters, its intelligence. The Revolution is behind you, it hails you, urges you onward, and would you surrender it to the first smile from the king because he has the condescension of a man of the people? No: Louis XVI., half dethroned by the nation, cannot love the nation that fetters him; he may feign to caress his chains, but all his thoughts are devoted to the idea of how he can spurn them. His only resource at this moment is to protest his attachment to the Revolution, and to lull the ministers whom the Revolution empowers to watch over his intrigues. But this pretence is the last and most dangerous of the conspiracies of the throne. The const.i.tution is the forfeiture of Louis XVI., and the patriot ministers are his superintendents. Fallen greatness cannot love the cause of its decadence; no man likes his humiliation. Trust in human nature, Roland--that alone never deceives, and mistrust courts. Your virtue is too elevated to see the snares which courtiers spread beneath your feet.”

XI.

Such language amazed Roland. Brissot, Condorcet, Vergniaud, Gensonne, Guadet, and especially Buzot, the friend and most intimate confidant of Madame Roland, strengthened at their evening meetings the mistrust of the minister. He armed himself with fresh distrust from their conversations, and entered the council with a more frowning brow and more resolute determination: the king's frankness disarmed him--Dumouriez discouraged him by his gaiety--power softened him by its influence. He wavered between the two great difficulties of the moment, the double sanction required from the king for the decrees which were most repugnant to his heart and conscience, the decree against the emigrants, and the decree against the nonjuring priests; and he wavered as to war.

During this tergiversation of Roland and his colleagues, Dumouriez acquired the favour of the king and the people, the secret of his conduct being comprised in what he had said a short time before to M. de Montmorin, in a secret conversation he had with that minister. ”If I were king of France, I would disconcert all parties by placing myself at the head of the Revolution.”

This sentence contained the sole line of policy capable of saving Louis XVI. In a time of revolution every king who is not revolutionary must be inevitably crushed between the two parties: a neutral king no longer reigns--a pardoned king degrades the throne--a king conquered by his own people has for refuge only exile or the scaffold. Dumouriez felt that his first step was to convince the king of his personal attachment, and take him into his confidence, or indeed make him his accomplice in the patriotic part he proposed to play; const.i.tute himself the secret mediator between the will of the monarch and the exactions of the cabinet, to control the king by his influence over the Girondists, and the Girondists by his influence over the king; the part of the favourite of misfortune and protector of a persecuted queen pleased alike his ambition and his heart. A soldier, diplomatist, gentleman, there was in his soul a wholly different feeling for degraded royalty than the sentiment of satisfied jealousy which filled the minds of the Girondists. The _prestige_ of the throne existed for Dumouriez; the _prestige_ of liberty only existed for the Girondists. This feeling, revealed in his att.i.tude, language, gestures, could not long escape the observation of Louis XVI. Kings have twofold tact, misfortune makes them more nice; the unfortunate perceive pity in a look; it is the only homage they are allowed to receive, and they are the more jealous of it.

In a secret conversation the king and Dumouriez came to an understanding.

XII.

Dumouriez's restless conduct in his commands in Normandy, the friends.h.i.+p of Gensonne, the favour of the Jacobins for him, had prejudiced Louis XVI. against his new minister. The minister, on his side, expected to find in the king a spirit opposed to the const.i.tution, a mind trammelled by routine, a violent temper, an abrupt manner, and using language imperious and offensive to all who approached him. Such was the caricature of this unfortunate prince. It was necessary to disfigure him in order to make the nation hate him.