The new Minister of Foreign Affairs began to play his rôle of leader of French diplomacy in a { 101} singular fashion. Repairing to the Jacobin Club, he described himself as their liegeman, assumed the red bonnet in their presence, and, with it on his head, announced that as soon as war should be declared, he would throw away his pen in order to resume his sword. Let us add that he was simultaneously trying to conciliate the good graces of Louis XVI. and to persuade him that if he leaned upon the Jacobins, it was solely in the hope of serving the King and consolidating the throne. At the same time he appointed as director of foreign affairs that Bonne-Carrère whose portrait has been traced in this wise by Brissot: "Falling with all his vices and perverse habits into the midst of a revolution whereby the people had recovered sovereignty, he merely changed his idol without changing his idolatry. He caressed the people instead of caressing the great, made the hall of the Jacobins his OEil-de-Boeuf, played valet to the successful parties one after another, the Lameths and the Mirabeaus, and succeeded in raising himself from the secretaryship of the Jacobins to the embassy of Liège, by the aid of that very Montmorin who detested the Jacobins, and could but advance a man who betrayed them."
Dumouriez then, following the example of Mirabeau, was about to play a double game; to be revolutionary with the Revolution and a courtier with the court. As to Madame Roland, he never placed himself at her feet. The despotism of this female minister, the pretentious of this demagogic bluestocking, { 102} her affectation of puritan rigor, her mania for directing everything, shocked the good sense of a man who believed that woman is made to please, not to reign. It was repugnant to this soldier to take his orders from the Egeria of the Girondins. On the other hand, Dumouriez was displeasing to Madame Roland. She found him too dissolute and not sentimental enough. She could not pardon his having Madame de Beauvert for mistress and Bonne-Carrère for confidant. She admitted neither his free-and-easy tone, his Gallic humor, nor his natural gaiety, so unlike the declamatory tone and pretentious jargon of the disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Moreover, she found him too much of a royalist, too accustomed to the old régime. The ministry, apparently so homogeneous, was soon to be divided against itself.