"To put your signature to the preliminaries."
I started with indignation. "They shall wait long enough if they wait till I sign them. I shall not attend this council."
"Observe," said Varnhorst, "I have spoken only on conjecture. If I return without you, my candour will be rewarded by an instant sentence for Spandau."
This decided me. I shook my gallant friend by the hand, the cloud passed from his brow, and we rode together to the council. This was of a more formal nature than I had yet witnessed. Two officers expressly sent from Vienna and Berlin, a kind of military envoys, had brought the decisions of their respective cabinets upon the crisis. The duke said little. He had lost his gay nonchalance of manners, and was palpably dispirited and disappointed. His address to me was gracious as ever; but he was more of the prince and the diplomatist, and less of the soldier. Our sitting closed with a resolution, to agree upon an armistice, and to make the immediate release of the king one of the stipulations. I combated the proposal as long as I could with decorum. I placed, in the strongest light that I could, the immense impulse which any pause in our advance must give to the revolutionary spirit in France, or even in Europe--the impossibility of relying on any negotiation which depended on the will of the rabble--and, above all, the certainty that the first sign of tardiness on the part of the Allies would overthrow the monarchy, which was now kept in existence only by the dread of our arms. I was overruled. The proposal for the armistice was signed by all present but one--that one myself. And as we broke up silently and sullenly, at the first glimpse of a cold and stormy dawn, the fit omen of our future fate, I saw a secretary of the duke, accompanied by Macdonald, sent off to the headquarters of the enemy.
All was now over, and I thought of returning to my post at Paris. I spent the rest of the day in paying parting civilities to my gallant friends, and ordered my calèche to be in readiness by morning. But my prediction had been only too true, though I had not calculated on so rapid a fulfilment. The knowledge of the armistice was no sooner made public--and, to do the French general justice, he lost neither time nor opportunity--than it was regarded as a national triumph. The electric change of public opinion, in this most electric of all countries, raised the people from a condition of the deepest terror to the highest confidence. Every man in France was a soldier, and every soldier a hero. This was the miracle of twenty-four hours. Dumourier's force instantly swelled to 100,000 men. He might have had a million, if he had asked for them. The whole country became impassable. Every village poured out its company of armed peasants; and, notwithstanding the diplomatic cessation of hostilities, a real, universal, and desperate peasant war broke upon us on every side.