The Prince de Kaunitz, his principal minister, replied to the notes of Dumouriez in language that seemed a defiance of the Assembly.

Dumouriez laid these documents before the Assembly, and forestalled the expressions of their just indignation, by bursting himself into patriotic anger.

The _contre coup_ of these scenes was felt even in the cabinet of the emperor at Vienna, where Francis I., pale and trembling with rage, censured the tardiness of his minister.

He was present every day at the conferences held at the bedside of the veteran Prince de Kaunitz and the Prussian and Russian envoys charged by their sovereigns to foment the war.

The king of Prussia demanded to have the whole direction of the war in his hands, and he proposed the sudden invasion of the French territory as the most efficacious means of preventing the effusion of blood, by striking terror into the Revolution, and causing a counter-revolution, with the hope of which the _emigres_ flattered him, to break out in France.