ROSSEL REPLACES CLUSERET--THE RIVALRIES--THE DEFENCE OF THE FORT OF ISSY. The last act of the second Executive Commission was to name Rossel delegate at War. On the same evening (the 30th April) it sent for him. He came at once, recited the history of famous sieges, and promised to make Paris impregnable. No one asked him for a written plan, and there and then, as on the stage, his nomination was signed. He forthwith wrote to the Council, "I accept these difficult functions, but I want your entire support in order not to succumb under the weight of these circumstances." Rossel knew these circumstances through and through. For twenty-five days chief of the general staff, he was the best-informed man in Paris as to all her military resources. He was familiar with the members of the Council, of the Central Committee, the officers, the effective forces, the character of the troops he undertook to lead. At the outset he struck a wrong chord in his answer to the Versaillese officer who had summoned the fort of Issy to surrender. "My dear comrade, the first time you permit yourself to send us such an insolent summons, I shall have your flag of truce shot. Your devoted comrade." The cynical levity smacked of the condottiere. Certainly he who threatened to shoot an innocent soldier, and bestowed his _dear_, his _devoted comrade_ upon a collaborator of Gallifet, was foreign to the great heart of Paris and her civil war. No man understood Paris, the National Guard, less than Rossel. He imagined that the _Pere Duchesne_ was the real mouthpiece of the workmen. Hardly raised to the Ministry, he spoke of putting the National Guard into barracks, of cannonading the runaways; he wanted to dismember the legions and form them into regiments, with colonels named by himself. The Central Committee, to which the _chefs-de-legion_ belonged, protested, and the battalions complained to the Council, which sent for Rossel. He set forth his project in a professional way in sober, precise words, so different from the Pyatical declamations, that the Council believed it beheld a man and was charmed. Still his project was the breaking-up of the National Guard, and the Council no more than the Executive Commission got a general plan of defence from him. He certainly demanded that the municipalities should be charged with concentration of arms, the horses, and prosecution of the refractory, but he made no condition _sine qua non_.