SPOLIATION AND PECULATION.

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their evil course by some of the Directors, or their subordinate ministers. He wrote to Paris-"Since I have returned to Milan, Citizen Directors, I am busy making war against the rascals, many of whom I have had tried and punished; but I must now denounce others to you, at the risk of being slandered by a thousand tongues, who, after saying two months since that I aimed at being Duke of Milan, now say that I want to be King of Italy. You had probably reckoned that our employés should pilfer a little, but that at the same time they should do their duty, and keep within the bounds of decency. But they rob in such a gross and impudent manner, that, if I had a month's leisure, I might have them all convicted. I have arrested many, and brought them to trial; but they bribe the judges. Everything here is bought and sold. One commissary, charged with having levied a contribution of 18,000 livres on the town of Salo for his own private account, has only been sentenced to three months' imprisonment. The city of Cremona furnished more than fifty thousand ells of linen for the use of our hospitals: the villains have sold it; they have even sold the mattresses and bolsters; they turn everything into money. It is impossible to produce evidence: they all hold together. Attempts are being made to bribe my secretaries in my own anteroom: a commissary of war is charged with having sold a chest of bark, which the King of Spain had sent for our medical stores.

Four millions of English goods have been seized at Leghorn; the Duke of Modena had paid two millions more. Ferrara and Bologna have made large payments; and yet the soldiers are without shoes, and in want of clothes, the chests are without money, ⚫ and the patients in the hospital are sleeping on the ground." And he goes on naming the different commissaries, contractors, and other employés, concluding, with very few exceptions, that "they were all thieves." He recommends the Directory to dismiss them, and replace them by more honest men, or at least more discreet ones :-"If I had fifteen honest commissaries, you might make to each of them a present of 100,000 crowns, and yet save fifteen millions . . . If I had a month's time to attend to these matters, there is hardly one of these fellows but I could cause to be shot;

but I must set off to-morrow for the army, which will give great joy to the thieves."

Although he had certainly obtained a fortune which might place him and his family beyond the hard, and to them well-known, grip of want or poverty, Bonaparte himself had taken only a moderate share of the great harvest. Bourrienne says that he had at this time in his possession about three millions of livres, or £120,000, no very exorbitant amount, it has been observed, for a victorious general, or rather dictator, who had subdued seven or eight sovereign states, which had paid into the hands of the army receivers nearly one hundred millions of livres in cash, plate, jewels, and other precious effects. According to other accounts, the money he carried away with him across the Alps was less than £50,000. He told Bourrienne that the quicksilver-mines of Idria, in Carniola, which he seized in his advance against the Archduke Charles, furnished the greater part of what he possessed. He has said himself, that he remitted, at various times, twenty millions of livres to the Directory. Much was spent, no doubt, in secret service; much was shared between generals, commissaries, and paymasters; and part of it went to shoe and clothe the soldiers. But who can tell what became of the rest? Regular accounts were not kept in those fraternity and equality days; and we have seen Bonaparte's emphatic confession, that he was surrounded by thieves, whose depredations he could not repress. Italy was plundered; thousands of families were ruined; the public credit of its several states was annihilated; and yet hardly one-fourth of the capital that was wrung from her can be accounted for-the French national treasury was none the richer for it.

Such is generally the result of wholesale plunder and remorseless spoliation! The Peninsula was rich and prosperous when Bonaparte entered it. Never again did the French find such a harvest in it. We need not ask where was the liberty and independence which had been promised. That question has been sufficiently answered already. Yet even when Bonaparte was taking his departure, and when all this evil had been inflicted on that beautiful country, there were still liberalized Italian nobles who fed themselves on the hope that he would unite all Italy under one government, and make him

A PROPHETIC DREAM.

self the President or the King of it-in general, they did not care which. A well-known Milanese lady of rank, to whom the conqueror paid rather more attention than was agreeable to his wife Josephine, said, in a half-jesting manner, "General, I dreamed last night that you were King of all Italy." "Perhaps," whispered Bonaparte, "I have sometimes had such idle visions myself. My blood is all Italian. But, before being King of all Italy, I must be King and master of all France. . . . Bah! what are we talking about? We are in a Republic! I am a republican; we are all republicans!" "Yes, General, for the moment." "Pour toujours (For ever)," said he; and then he laughed, pinched the fair lady's cheek, and hummed part of an Italian opera air.

IT T was on the 17th of November, 1797, that Bonaparte quitted Milan for Rastadt, where it had been agreed at Campo Formio to hold a Congress, in order to settle various questions relating to Germany. The Directory had appointed him to act as plenipotentiary at this Congress. Of course, he left his victorious army behind him in Italy, to keep what had been got, and to prevent a counter-revolution, which inevitably would have followed the departure of his troops. As he passed through Switzerland he found an opportunity of insulting Berne and the other aristocratic cantons, thus indicating that they, as a reward for their neutrality, were soon to be democratized and plundered. The conferences at Rastadt, which promised to be very slow and dilatory, did not suit his temper.

CONGRESS AT RASTADT.

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Except where he could dictate to princes and powers, he detested all congresses. He therefore merely signed a military convention for the delivery of Mayence on the Rhine by the Emperor against the counter-delivery by the French of Venice and Palmanova to the Austrians, which completed the conditions of the Treaty of Campo Formio, and then he set off for Paris, where he alighted on the 5th of December at his house, Rue Chante-Reine (Sing-Queen Street), which name the Paris municipality, in compliment to him, changed into that of Rue de la Victoire (Victory Street); here, for some time, he lived very privately. He wished to pacify certain jealousies and to avoid observation; but it is evident that he had those who extolled his high qualities and who observed for him in every corner of the capital. His agreeable manners (and no man could be more agreeable than he) gained him many new friends or admirers, and the fame of his victories won him still more. In the evening he liked to put on an old coat and a worn hat, and to walk about the streets and to enter into the shops, just to hear what people were saying about General Bonaparte. The Directors gave him a splendid public festival, and in their residence, the Luxembourg Palace, where they set up statues of Liberty, Equality, and Peace, he delivered the treaty of Campo Formio, and made a modest speech :

"Citizen Directors,-The French people, in struggling to obtain their freedom, had to contend with kings in order to obtain a constitution founded upon rational principles; they were obliged to overcome the prejudices of eighteen centuries, during which period religion, feudality, and royalism have governed Europe in succession. From the date of the peace which you have just concluded begins the era of representative governments. You have effected the organization of the great nation, whose vast territory is circumscribed by limits fixed by nature itself. When the happiness of the French people shall be secured on the best organic laws, the rest of Europe will then become free."

Director Barras, who must have already felt his Luxembourg throne tottering under him, måde in return a prolix rhetorical speech, extolling General Bonaparte above all the heroes of antiquity, whether Greek or Roman, and ended by inviting him to go