for some time longer, Bonaparte playing his
part with singular ability. He sent to Kellermann, in Savoy, without
the form of transmitting it through government channels, a subsidy of
one million two hundred thousand francs. As long as he was unhampered,
his despatches to Paris were soldierly and straightforward, although
after the passage of the Po they began to be somewhat bombastic, and
to abound in his old-fashioned, curious, and sometimes incorrect
classical or literary allusions. But if he were crossed in the least,
if reinforcements did not arrive, or if there were any sign of
independence in Paris, they became petulant, talking of ill-health,
threatening resignation, and requesting that numbers of men be sent
out to replace him in the multiform functions which in his single
person he was performing. Of course these tirades often failed of
immediate effect, but at least no effort was made to put an effective
check on the writer's career. Read a century later in a cold and
critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem
stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be
found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic
devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for
genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they
had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused
the French soldiers to frenzied enthusiasm.

In fact, if the Directory stood on the army, the army belonged
henceforth to Bonaparte. On the very day that Milan was entered,
Marmont heard from his leader's lips the memorable words, "Fortune is
a woman; the more she does for me, the more I shall exact from her....
In our day no one has conceived anything great; it falls to me to give
the example." This is the language that soldiers like to hear from
their leader, and it was no doubt repeated throughout the army. "From
this moment," wrote the same chronicler, a few months later, "the
chief part of the pay and salaries was in coin. This led to a great
change in the situation of the officers, and to a certain extent in
their habits." Bonaparte was incorruptible. Salicetti announced one
day that the brother of the Duke of Modena was waiting outside with
four chests containing a million of francs in gold, and urged the
general, as a friend and compatriot, to accept them. "Thank you," was
the calm and significant answer, "I shall not put myself in the