his military
position at Leoben was more brilliant than secure. His uneasiness
about this article of the preliminaries is seen in his letter of April
22nd to the Directors, which explains that the preliminaries need not
count for much. But most extraordinary of all was his procedure
concerning the young Lombard Republic. He seems quite calmly to have
discussed its retrocession to the Austrians, and that, too, after he
had encouraged the Milanese to found a republic, and had declared that
every French victory was "a line of the constitutional charter."[74]
The most reasonable explanation is that Bonaparte over-estimated the
military strength of Austria, and undervalued the energy of the men of
Milan, Modena, and Bologna, of whose levies he spoke most
contemptuously. Certain it is that he desired to disengage himself
from their affairs so as to be free for the grander visions of
oriental conquest that now haunted his imagination. Whatever were his
motives in signing the preliminaries at Leoben, he speedily found
means for their modification in the ever-enlarging area of negotiable
lands.

It is now time to return to the affairs of Venice. For seven months
the towns and villages of that republic had been a prey to pitiless
warfare and systematic rapacity, a fate which the weak ruling
oligarchy could neither avert nor avenge. In the western cities,
Bergamo and Brescia, whose interests and feelings linked them with
Milan rather than Venice, the populace desired an alliance with the
nascent republic on the west and a severance from the gloomy
despotism of the Queen of the Adriatic. Though glorious in her prime,
she now governed with obscurantist methods inspired by fear of her
weakness becoming manifest; and Bonaparte, tearing off the mask which
hitherto had screened her dotage, left her despised by the more
progressive of her own subjects. Even before he first entered the
Venetian territory, he set forth to the Directory the facilities for
plunder and partition which it offered. Referring to its reception of
the Comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII.) and the occupation of
Peschiera by the Austrians, he wrote (June 6th, 1796):

"If your plan is to extract five or six million francs from Venice,
I have expressly prepared for you this sort of rupture with her....
If you have intentions more pronounced, I think that you ought to
continue this subject of contention, instruct me as to your
desires