Absolute integrity, great knowledge of men, great firmness, a broad and upright mind, should complete his character." Dumouriez perhaps imagined that all these qualities {100} of an ideal minister were reunited in his person. However that may be, he accepted, without any mistrust of his own abilities, the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, confided to him March 15, 1792, on account of his relations with the Gironde and his popularity with the Jacobins. He had a high opinion of himself, and, even after his cruel disappointments, he was to write in his Memoirs, in 1794: "Dumouriez sometimes laughs sardonically in his retreat over the judgments passed upon him. When he arrived at the ministry, the courtiers said and published that he was only a soldier of fortune, incapable of conducting political affairs, in which he would make nothing but blunders. When he commanded an army, they told the Prussians and the German Emperor's troops that he was a mere writer, who had never made war and understood nothing about it. Since he retired with reputation from public employments, they have published that up to the date of the Revolution he had been an intriguing adventurer, a ministerial spy, an office-sweeper. Would to God, they had employed the adventures of their youth in similar espionages! They would not have begun the Revolution like factionists, they would have conducted it with wisdom, they would have preserved the esteem of the nation, they would not have been the prime authors of the King's death, either by betraying or abandoning him." 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."