oughts or
witnessed his actions. Gensonne, on his return from his mission, had
desired to enrich his party with this unknown man, whose eminence he
foresaw from afar. He presented Dumouriez to his friends of the
Assembly, to Guadet, Vergniaud, Roland, Brissot, and De Grave:
communicated to them his own astonishment at, and confidence in, the
twofold faculties of Dumouriez as diplomatist and soldier. He spoke of
him as of a concealed saviour, whom fate had reserved for liberty. He
conjured them to attach to themselves a man whose greatness would
enhance their own.

They had scarcely seen Dumouriez before they were convinced. His
intellect was electrical: it struck before they had time to anatomise
it. The Girondists presented him to De Grave, and De Grave to the king,
who offered him the temporary management of foreign affairs, until M. de
Lessart, sent before the _Haute Cour_, had proved his innocence to his
judges, and could resume the place reserved for him in the council.
Dumouriez refused the post of minister _pro tempore_, which would injure
and weaken his position before all parties by rendering him suspected
by all. The king yielded, and Dumouriez was appointed.

II.

History should pause a moment before this man, who, without having
assumed the name of Dictator, concentrated in himself during two years
all expiring France, and exercised over his country the most
incontestible of dictatorships--that of genius. Dumouriez was of the
number of men who are not to be painted by merely naming them, but of
those whose previous life explains their nature; who have in the past
the secret of their future; who have, like Mirabeau, their existence
spread over two epochs; who have their roots in two soils, and are only
known by the perusal of every detail.

Dumouriez, son of a commissioner in the war department, was born at
Cambrai in 1739; and although his family lived in the north, his blood
was southern by extraction. His family, originally from Aix, in
Provence, evinced itself in the light, warmth, and sensibility of his
nature; there was perceptible the same sky that had rendered so prolific
the genius of Mirabeau. His father, a military and well-read man,
educated him equally for war and literature. One of his uncles, employed
in the foreign office, made him early a diplomatist. A mind equally
powerful and supple, he lent himself equally to all--as fitted for
action as for thought, he passed from one to the other