Thenceforward, Madame Roland formed a distinct group within the ministry, composed of her husband, Clavière, and Servan, who had just replaced De Grave as Minister of War. While Dumouriez, Lacoste, and Duranton (whom Louis XVI. called "the good Duranton") allowed themselves to be affected by the King's goodness, and sincerely wished to save him, their three colleagues, inspired by the spiteful Madame Roland, had but one idea: to destroy him. "Roland, Clavière, and Servan," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "no longer observed any moderation, not merely with their colleagues, but with the King himself. At every meeting of the Council they abused the mildness of this prince, in order to mortify and kill him with pin-pricks." It was Servan who proposed forming a camp of twenty thousand federates around Paris. He thought it would be a sort of central revolutionary army, analogous to that English parliamentary army under command of Cromwell, which had brought Charles I. to the scaffold. "Servan, a very wicked man and most inimical to the King," says Dumouriez again, "took the notion to write to the President of the Assembly, without consulting his colleagues, and propose a decree for assembling an army of twenty {161} thousand men around Paris. This was at the time when the Girondin faction was at the height of its power, having the Jacobins at their command, and governing Paris through Pétion. They wanted to destroy the Feuillants, perhaps at the sword's point, to put down the court, and probably to begin putting their republican projects into execution. Thus it was this faction which brought to Paris the federates who ended by causing every one of them to perish on the scaffold after making Louis XVI. ascend it." Dumouriez was indignant that the Minister of War should have taken it on himself to propose such a decree without even mentioning it to the sovereign. The dispute on this matter was so violent that, but for the presence of the King, the meeting of the Council might have come to a bloody close. Louis XVI., deeply grieved by such scandals, resolved to dismiss the three ministers, who, instead of supporting him, were merely conspirators who had sworn his ruin.