cavalry; you are stained with crimes, and I do not tolerate here assassins or executioners. I know that there are scoundrels among you charged to excite you to crime. Drive them from among you, or denounce them to me, for I shall hold you responsible for their conduct." The battalions trembled and at once assumed the same spirit that pervaded the army. The ancient feelings of honor were associated in the camps with patriotism, and Dumouriez encouraged it among his troops. Every day he received from Paris threats of dismissal, to which he replied in terms of defiance. "I will conceal my dismissal," he wrote, "until the day when I behold the flight of the enemy: I will then show it to my soldiers, and return to Paris, to suffer the punishment my country inflicts on me for having saved her in spite of herself." Three commissioners of the Convention, Sillery, Carra, and Prieur, arrived at the camp on the 24th, to proclaim the Republic, and Dumouriez did not hesitate. Although a royalist, he yet felt that at present it was not a question of government, but of the safety of the country; and besides, his ambition was vast as his genius, vague as the future. A republic agitated at home, threatened from abroad, could not but be favorable to an ambitious soldier at the head of an army who adored him; for when royalty was abolished, there was no one of higher rank in the nation than its generalissimo. The commissioners had also instructions to order the retreat of the army behind the Marne. Dumouriez asked and obtained from them six days' delay; on the seventh, at sunrise, the French videttes beheld the heights of La Lune deserted, and the columns of the Duke of Brunswick slowly defiling between the hills of Champagne, and taking the direction of Grandpré. Fortune had justified perseverance, and genius had baffled numbers. Dumouriez was triumphant, and France was saved. At this intelligence, one general shout of "Vive la nation!" burst from the French army. The commissioners, the generals Beurnonville, Miranda, even Kellermann, threw themselves into the arms of Dumouriez, and acknowledged the superiority of his judgment and the accuracy of his perception--while the soldiers proclaimed him the Fabius of his country. But this name, which he accepted for a day, but ill responded to the ardor of his soul; and he already meditated playing the part of Hannibal, which was more consonant with the activity of his character and the determination of his genius. At home, that of Cæsar might one day tempt him. This ambition of Dumouriez explains the unmolested retreat of the Prussians through an enemy's country, and through defiles which might easily have been converted into Caudine Forks, and under the cannon of seventy thousand French, before which the weakened and enervated army of the Duke of Brunswick had to make a flank movement.