4 The revolutionary armies acquired skills and talented leaders in the two years of war against allied royalist

"...Yes, gentlemen, it's above all those miserable people who just might say, as La Fontaine had his sculptor wondering: "Will it be a god, a table, or a washbowl? "'It will be a god!' proclaims the great writer of fables! These words, so noble and so profound, seem to describe you, gentlemen. Act by yourselves, and France will reappear, almost as noble as our ancestors made it, and as we ourselves actually saw it before the death of Louis XVI. "England—or at least its noble lords—find this unspeakable Jacobinism as abominable as we do. Without English gold, Austria, Russia, and Prussia will produce only two or three campaigns. Will that be enough to lead to a successful occupation, like that which Monsieur de Richelieu5 squandered, so stupidly, in 1817? I do not think so." At this point there was an interruption, but it was stifled by a "Hush!" from everyone else. Once more, the interrupter had been the former general, who longed for the nation's grandest medal, and wanted his name to appear prominent among the authors of the secret note. "I do not think so," Monsieur de La Mole repeated when the noise died down. He stressed "I," with an insolence that charmed Julien. "That's well played," he said to himself, even as he made his pen fly almost as rapidly as the marquis's words. With a single, well-said word, Monsieur de La Mole had wiped out the turncoat general's twenty campaigns. "It's not only foreigners," the marquis continued, his words carefully measured, "to whom we may owe a new military occupation. All the young fellows who write incendiary articles in The Globe6 may provide you with three or four thousand young captains, among whom, perhaps, might be found a Kléber, a Hoche, a Jourdain, a Pichegru, but not so well meaning."7 "We haven't known how to make him glorious," said the chairman. "Pichegru should have been kept immortal." "Finally: France must have two parties," resumed Monsieur de La Mole, "two parties not only in name, but two clearly defined parties, distinct and separate. We need to be aware of who and what must be crushed. On the one hand, journalists, voters, public opinion—in short, youth and all who admire it. While they stupefy themselves with the noise of their empty words, we—we have the clear advantage of consuming the budget." Here there was another interruption. "You sir," said Monsieur de La Mole to the interrupter, with admirable arrogance and facility, "if the word shocks you, then you don't 'consume' the budget: you devour forty thousand francs, as a line item in the state budget, and eighty thousand which you receive from the king's budget.8