On his return to Paris he had become acquainted with Etienne Claviere, the Genevese exile, and a banker named Panchaud.
His first literary work, except the bombastic but eloquent Essai sur le despotisme (Neufchatel, 1 775), was a translation of Robert Watson's Philip II., done in Holland with the help of Durival; his Considerations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus (London, 1788) was based on a pamphlet by Aedanus Burke (1743-1802), of South Carolina, who opposed the aristocratic tendencies of the Society of the Cincinnati, and the notes to it were by Target;, his financial writings were suggested by the Genevese exile, Claviere.
Dumont was a Genevese exile, and an old friend of Romilly's, who willingly prepared for him those famous addresses which Mirabeau used to make the Assembly pass by sudden bursts'of eloquent declamation; Claviere helped him in finance, and not only worked out his figures, but even wrote his financial discourses; Lamourette wrote the speeches on the civil constitution of the clergy; Reybaz not only wrote for him his famous speeches on the assignats, the organization of the national guard, and others, which Mirabeau read word for word at the tribune, but even the posthumous speech on succession to the estates of intestates, which Talleyrand read in the Assembly as the last work of his dead friend.
To this period belongs his first crude literary effort, a polemic against a Genevese pastor who had criticized Rousseau.
In 1797, at the instance of English statesmen, he published a translation of a history of French finance by Francois d'Ivernois (1757-1842), an eminent Genevese exile naturalized and knighted in England, extracts from which he had previously given in his journal.