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the individuals hereafter named (about sixty in number) were no longer members of the national representation, on account of their excesses and illegal acts, especially in the sitting of that morning." Another decree, passed with equal rapidity, instituted what was called a Provisional Executive Commission, consisting of three persons who should be styled Consuls, and nominated Sièyes, Roger Ducos, and General Bonaparte, as such. The Council of Ancients, from which the stormy minority of the morning had taken their departure, submissively and quietly passed a resolution to the same effect, and, at about an hour after midnight, Bonaparte and his two colleagues appeared before them and took the oath "to the sovereignty of the people, to the Republic one and indivisible, to liberty and equality, and to the representative system." The two Councils appointed a commission of fifty members, taken from both Councils, which was to discuss Sièyes new Constitution; and they then adjourned themselves indefinitely. About three o'clock in the morning the General left St. Cloud to return to Paris, where Josephine had been suffering agonies of doubt and anxiety. As he entered his own drawing-room in the Rue de la Victoire, he rubbed his hands and congratulated himself on the business being over. "No doubt," said he, "I talked a good deal of nonsense. I must have said many absurd things up there at St. Cloud. I like to speak to soldiers, not to lawyers; those fellows put me out. I have not been used to public assemblies; perhaps I shall be, in time. Nous verrons-we shall see. Remember, Bourrienne, we sleep at the Palace of the Luxembourg to-night."

"MY

Y reign began from the day that I was made Consul." Bonaparte used the expression many years afterwards, when he was reviewing his own political history; but the fact was understood at the time by all clear-sighted people. From the night of the 10th or morning of the 11th of November, 1799, he really reigned, and was a sovereign in everything but the mere name.

Avoiding the unpopular name of King, Sièyes would have put him upon a modest sort of throne under the title of Grand Elector, but the priest and constitution-maker, in increasing his splendour would have decreased his power. According to this scheme, the real executive power of the state was to be committed to two separate Consuls, one for war and one for peace, nominally the inferiors of the Elector, but in influence necessarily quite above him. "How," said Bonaparte, "would they bribe me into a life of inaction with

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their millions of livres a year? Would they shut me up like a pig to fatten (comme un cochon à l'engraisse)? And your two acting Consuls-one leading churchmen, lawyers, and civilians—the other leading diplomatists and commanding soldiers-on what footing would be their intercourse? How could they ever get on together? The war Consul demanding money and recruits, the peace Consul refusing the supplies? And who would be your Grand Elector, that might at any time be degraded by a vote of even one of your legislative bodies? Bah!"

The scheme, like many others which proceeded from the same source, was whistled down the wind, as in every respect it merited to be. The nation, too, after so many complicated political schemes (every one of which was to have rendered them the most free, the greatest, and the happiest people upon earth), was quite sick of scheming, and wanted something simple, direct, strong, and likely to last. Taking the people at large, the French no longer cared for that nominal sovereignty of the people for which they had fought during ten years, and for which a million or two of lives had been sacrificed. But they were eager for military glory, and who so likely to lead them to it as Bonaparte? Except the men—and we ought to add women-who lost by the changes, there really appears to have been none who regretted the downfall of the Directors. Barras, who had retired to his splendid country seat of Gros Bois the morning on which Bonaparte rode to St. Cloud, was utterly discredited and quite sure to give no more trouble. He could only silently regret that he had been the first man in France to put the young Corsican officer of artillery on the high road of promotion and greatness.

At the first sittings of the three Consuls, Roger Ducos said, "The General takes the chair of course." Bonaparte seated himself in the President's chair as though it had been a throne, and the throne of an absolute monarchy to which he had succeeded in due course of inheritance. Sièyes was quite chapfallen, for he found he had placed a master over his head. The daring, irreverent soldier, who had no thought of confining himself to the military department, as the civilians who had worked with him calculated he would do, treated

the logician's last masterpiece with no more respect than he would have treated an order of the day, or a despatch badly written out by a blundering aide-de-camp; and he clipped, cut, and hacked Sièyes' new Constitution, until it was no longer recognizable. Sièyes had strengthened the executive, though not half enough for Bonaparte; but both the original of the scheme, and the modification of it, deprived the French people of every direct election of their representatives, and set up a tripartite legislature which could only become slavish and contemptible. As finally promulgated on the 24th of December, this "Constitution of the Year Eight,” as it is called, established three Consuls—or a Chief Consul, with two inferior ones who were to have only a deliberative voice; the first or Chief Consul having the power of appointing to all public offices, and of proposing all public measures, such as peace or war; while he also commanded the forces, and superintended both the internal and foreign departments of the state. There were—1. A Senate called Conservative, composed of only eighty members, appointed for life, and enjoying high salaries; 2. A Legislative Body, of three hundred members, one-fifth of whom were to be renewed annually; 3. A Tribunate, of one hundred members, of whom also one-fifth were to be renewed every year. The Consuls chose the Senate, and the Senate chose, out of lists of candidates presented by the electoral colleges, both the Legislative Body and the Tribunate. The Consuls, or rather the First Consul, had the initiative, or the sole right of proposing acts of legislation; the Senate was to sit privately with closed doors; the Legislative Body was to vote, but not debate or speak, all the speaking being reserved for the Tribunate. The process was this:— the First Consul sent in his project of law to the Tribunate, who debated it, but without voting upon it, for the voting was reserved for the Legislative Body, who were not allowed to speak; when the Tribunate had debated the project, they left the business to the Legislative Body, who silently voted by ballot, and then returned the act to the quarter where it had originated, or to the Consul, who made it law by putting his signature to it, and promulgating it. Bonaparte never pretended that this was a perfect Constitution, or even a Constitution intended to last. He afterwards said, and with

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a great deal of truth, that the Girondins and the Jacobins, who had preceded him, had not left in France materials wherewith to form a Constitution. "It was, at best, a temporary measure for a transitory state. There was then in France a total absence of aristocracy. It is difficult to establish a strong Republic without an aristocracy. I saw that France could exist only as a monarchy. To frame a Constitution in a country without an aristocracy is like attempting to guide a balloon."

Left perfectly free to choose his own two satellites, Bonaparte would have retained Sièyes, but the ex-abbè preferred taking the place of Senator, with the yearly salary of 25,000 francs, and the royal domain of Crosne, in the park of Versailles. Cambacérès and Lebrun, who had both been brought up to the law, were appointed Second and Third Consuls. Roger Ducos was also put into the Senate. The First Consul very soon removed from the Luxembourg to the palace of the Tuileries, where he lived with royal state. He now wrote to the King of England, as one sovereign writes to another, expressing a wish for peace, but without stating any conditions. George III., who could scarcely do otherwise, gave the epistle to his Secretary for Foreign Affairs to answer it. Lord Grenville addressed his reply, not to the First Consul, but to Talleyrand, now the French Minister for Foreign Affairs. Talleyrand replied, Lord Grenville rejoined, and there the matter ended. Our opposition orators attached great importance to the overture, which was the hollowest of all that had been made, for the First Consul was preparing, at the moment, to recover Italy, and was determined to keep Switzerland, Savoy, Nice, Belgium, Holland, and all the German territories on the left bank of the Rhine. Bonaparte tells us himself that the answer from London filled him with secret satisfaction, as war was necessary to maintain union and energy in the state, which was ill organized, as also to maintain his own influence over the imagination of the French people. But, notwithstanding this secret satisfaction, he, in public, pretended to be greatly grieved; and in a proclamation to the French he complained of the obstinate hostility of the English, and called upon the French to furnish men and money in order to acquire peace by force of arms.