o the
cause, and talent that the Girondists required, and yet, until then, a
second-rate man, and almost unknown, had no fortune to hope for but as
theirs culminated. His name would not give umbrage to their genius, and
if he proved incompetent, or rebelled against their projects, they would
remove him without fear, or crush him without pity. Brissot, the
diplomatic oracle of the Gironde, was evidently to be the minister who
was one day to control our foreign relations, and who _en attendant_ was
to govern for the moment under the name of Dumouriez.

The Girondists had discovered Dumouriez in the obscurity of an
existence, until then very insignificant, through Gensonne, whose
colleague Dumouriez had been in the mission which the Constituent
Assembly had given him to visit and examine the position of the western
departments, already agitated by the secret presentiment of civil war
and the early religious troubles. During this inquiry, which lasted
several months, the two commissioners had frequent opportunities for an
interchange of their most private thoughts on the great events which at
this moment agitated men's minds. They became much attached to each
other. Gensonne detected with much tact in his colleague one of those
intellects repressed by circumstances, and weighed down by the
obscurity of their lot, which it is enough to expose to the open
daylight of public action, in order to shine forth with all the
brilliancy with which nature and study had endowed it: he had too found
in this mind the spring of character strong enough to bear the movements
of a revolution, and sufficiently elastic to bend to all the
difficulties of affairs. In a word, Dumouriez had on the first contact
exercised over Gensonne that influence, that ascendency, that empire
which superiority, when it displays and humbles itself, never fails to
acquire over minds to which it condescends to disclose itself.

This attractive power, the confidence of genius, was one of the
characteristics of Dumouriez, and by that he subsequently made a
conquest of the Girondists, the king, the queen, his army, the Jacobins,
Danton,--Robespierre himself. It was what great men call their star,--a
star which precedes them, and prepares their way. Dumouriez's star was
fascination of manner; but this fascination was but the attraction of
his just, rapid, quick ideas, into whose orbit the incredible activity
of his mind carried away the mind of those who heard his th