minister, being in fact the only one
whom Louis admitted to any degree of confidence; but this arrangement
lasted less than a single week. Louis had yielded to and adopted his
advice on every point but one. He had sanctioned the dismissal of the
Constitutional Guard, and the formation of the new body of troops, which,
no one doubted, was intended to be used against himself; but he was as
firmly convinced as ever that his religious duty bound him to refuse his
assent to the decree against the priests, and he refused to do a violence
to his conscience, and to commit what he regarded as a sin. But this very
decree was the one which Dumouriez regarded as the most dangerous one for
him to reject, as being that which the Assembly was most firmly resolved
to make law; and, as his most vigorous remonstrances failed to shake the
king's resolution on this point, he resigned his post as a minister, and
repaired to the Flemish frontier to take the command of the army, which
greatly needed an able leader.

CHAPTER XXXV.

The Insurrection of June 20th.

Both Jacobins and Girondins felt that the departure of Dumouriez from
Paris had removed a formidable obstacle from their path, and they at once
began to hurry forward the preparations for their meditated insurrection.
The general gave in his resignation on the 15th of June, and the 20th was
fixed for an attack on the palace, by which its contrivers designed to
effect the overthrow of the throne, if not the destruction of the entire
royal family. It was organized with unusual deliberation. The meetings of
conspirators were attended not only by the Girondin leaders, to whom
Madame Roland had recently added a new recruit, a young barrister from the
South, named Barbaroux, remarkable for his personal beauty, and, as was
soon seen, for a pitiless hardness of heart, and energetic delight in
deeds of cruelty that, even in that blood-thirsty company, was equaled by
few; with them met all those as yet most notorious for ferocity--Danton
and Legendre, the founders of the Cordeliers; Marat, daily, in his obscene
and blasphemous newspaper, clamoring for wholesale bloodshed; Santerre,
odious as the sanguinary leader of the very first outbreaks of the
Revolution; Rotondo, already, as we have seen, detected in attempting to
assassinate the queen; and Petion, who thus repaid her preference of him
to La Fayette, which had placed him in the mayoralty, whose duties he was
now betraying. Some,