kept just large enough to save
the face and quiet the clamors of the Directory. Victor Amadeus being
checkmated, Bonaparte was free to deal with Beaulieu.

[Illustration: Northern Italy. Illustrating the Campaigns of 1796 and
1797.]

This short campaign was in some respects insignificant, especially
when compared as to numbers and results with what was to follow. But
the names of Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Mondovi, and Cherasco were
ever dear to Bonaparte, and stand in a high place on his greatest
monument. The King of Sardinia was the father-in-law of Louis XVIII,
and his court had been a nest of plotting French emigrants. When his
agents reached Paris they were received with coarse resentment by the
Directory and bullied into an alliance, though they had been
instructed to make only a peace. Their sovereign was humiliated to the
limit of possibility. The loss of his fortress robbed him of his
power. By the terms of the treaty he was to banish the French
royalists from his lands. Stripped thus of both force and prestige,
he did not long survive the disgrace, and died, leaving to Charles
Emmanuel, his son, no real dominion but that over the island of
Sardinia. The contrast between the ferocious bluster of the Directory
and the generous simplicity of a great conqueror was not lost on the
Italians nor on the moderate French. For them as for Bonaparte, a
military and political aspirant in his first independence, everything,
absolutely everything, was at stake in those earliest engagements; on
the event hung not merely his career, but their release. In pleasant
succession the spring days passed like a transformation scene. Success
was in the air, not the success of accident, but the resultant of
forethought and careful combination. The generals, infected by their
leader's spirit, vied with each other in daring and gallantry. For
happy desperation Rampon's famous stand remains unsurpassed in the
annals of war.

From the heights of Ceva the leader of conquering and now devoted
soldiers could show to them and their equally enthusiastic officers
the gateway into the fertile and well-watered land whither he had
promised to lead them, the historic fields of Lombardy. Nothing
comparable to that inexhaustible storehouse of nature can be found in
France, generous as is her soil. Walled in on the north and west by
the majestic masses of the Alps, and to the south by the smaller but
still mighty bastions of the Apennines, these