The king yielded, and Dumouriez was appointed.
II.
History should pause a moment before this man, who, without having assumed the name of Dictator, concentrated in himself during two years all expiring France, and exercised over his country the most incontestible of dictatorships--that of genius.

Dumouriez was of the number of men who are not to be painted by merely naming them, but of those whose previous life explains their nature; who have in the past the secret of their future; who have, like Mirabeau, their existence spread over two epochs; who have their roots in two soils, and are only known by the perusal of every detail.
Dumouriez, son of a commissioner in the war department, was born at Cambrai in 1739; and although his family lived in the north, his blood was southern by extraction.

His family, originally from Aix, in Provence, evinced itself in the light, warmth, and sensibility of his nature; there was perceptible the same sky that had rendered so prolific the genius of Mirabeau.

His father, a military and well-read man, educated him equally for war and literature.

One of his uncles, employed in the foreign office, made him early a diplomatist.