"We have now," said he, "the finest army in line that Europe has ever seen; little less than 200,000 men are under the command of the prince. If he is suffered to move them in a mass, they must break through any part of the French territory which they choose. If they divide, they will be beaten. It will now take only three pitched battles to reach Paris--for the three covering armies fight with the guillotine in their rear. But a single unlucky skirmish may bring every peasant in France upon us; and it takes but fifteen days to make the French peasant a soldier. Blows, and those straightforward, are our true policy. If we negotiate, we shall be beaten; if beaten here, we shall be beaten on the Rhine, and perhaps even on the Danube." The news of Dumourier's attempt to overthrow his government had reached us, but in the usual way of mystification. The answer of Guiscard was prompt and plain. "Dumourier," said he, "is one of those men who has a one-sided understanding. He is a capital soldier, but a childish statesman; and, with an absurdity by no means limited to himself, he thinks that his talent lies in statesmanship. The result has been, that the factions have always managed him as they do all men of his calibre. When he attempted to act for himself, they crushed him without mercy; when he ceased to be a tool, he necessarily became a victim. The army is now in retreat. To the French retreat is always ruin; the horseman sells his horse; the foot-soldier sells his musket; and the artilleryman sells his powder and ball, breaks up his gun-carriage for a fire, and throws his gun into the next ditch. The peasantry then fall on them all, repay their plunder with the pike and the pitchfork, and in three days the army is dissolved." "But will Cobourg follow up his blow?" was the question on all sides. "The commander-in chief," was the answer, "is intelligent and brave. He has learned his profession under the greatest soldier whom Russia has produced, or perhaps ever will produce--Suwarrow. But he is himself under orders. If he were a republican general he would instantly march, and within a week he would be in the Tuileries. But as an Austrian commander, he must wait for the opinion of men too far off to know a single fact of the campaign, too blind to know them if they were on the spot, and too jealous even of their own general to suffer him to beat the enemy if victory would throw their own nothingness into the shade."