and believes in, me.  Those cries of alarm and fury, that you take for words in the air, are the most simple and sincere expression of the passions which devour my mind.  Yes, if I had had in my hand the arms of the people after the decree against the garrison of Nancy, I would have decimated the deputies who confirmed it.  After the information of the events of the 5th and 6th October, I would have immolated every judge on the pile; after the massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, had I but had 2000 men, animated with the same resentment as myself, I would have gone at their head to stab La Fayette in the midst of his battalion of brigands, burnt the king in his palace, and cut the throats of our atrocious representatives on their very seats!’ Robespierre listened to me with affright, turned pale, and was for a long time silent.  I left him.  I had seen an honest man, but not a man of the state.”

Thus the wretch had excited horror in the fanatic:  Robespierre had obtained Marat’s pity.

IV.

The first struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondists gave the skilful Dumouriez a double point d’appui for his policy.  The enmity of Roland, Claviere, and Servan no longer disturbed him in council.  He balanced their influence by his alliance with their enemies.  But the Jacobins demanded wages; he proffered them in war.  Danton, as violent but more politic than Marat, did not cease to repeat that the revolutionists and the despots were irreconcileable, and that France had no safety to expect except from its audacity and despair.  War, according to Danton, was the baptism or the martyrdom which liberty was to undergo, like a new religion.  It was necessary to replunge France into the fire, in order to purify it from the stains and shame of its past.

Dumouriez, agreeing with La Fayette and the Feuillants, was also anxious for war; but it was as a soldier, to acquire glory, and thus crush faction.  From the first day of his ministry he negotiated so as to obtain from Austria a decisive answer.  He had removed nearly all the members of the diplomatic body; he had replaced them by energetic men.  His despatches had a martial accent, which sounded like the voice of an armed people.  He summoned the princes of the Rhine, the emperor, the king of Russia, the king of Sardinia, and Spain, to recognise or oppose the constitutional king of France.  But whilst these official envoys demanded from the various courts prompt and categorical replies, the secret agents of Dumouriez insinuated themselves into the cabinets of princes, and compelled some states to detach themselves from the coalition that was forming.  They pointed out to them the advantages of neutrality for their aggrandisement:  they promised them the patronage of France after victory.  Not daring to hope for allies, the minister at least contrived for France secret understanding:  he corrupted by ambition the states that he could not move by terror:  he benumbed the coalition, which he trusted subsequently to crush.