d invigorating the whole service until a zealous
activity of the most promising kind was displayed by officers and men
alike. By September twenty-ninth fourteen guns were mounted and four
mortars, the essential material was gathered, and by sheer
self-assertion Buonaparte was in complete charge. The only check
was in the ignorant meddling of Carteaux, who, though energetic and
zealous, though born and bred in camp, being the son of a soldier,
was, after all, not a soldier, but a very fair artist (painter). For
his battle-pieces and portraits of military celebrities he had
received large prices, and was as vain of his artistic as of his
military talent, though both were mediocre. Strange characters rose to
the top in those troublous times: the painter's opponent at Avignon,
the leader of the insurgents, had been a tailor; his successor was one
Lapoype, a physician. Buonaparte's ready pen stood him again in good
stead, and he sent up a memorial to the ministry, explaining the
situation, and asking for the appointment of an artillery general with
full powers. The commissioners transmitted the paper to Paris, and
appointed the memorialist to the higher rank of acting commander.

[Illustration: In the collection of the Duc de Trevise. Josephine.
From a pastel by Pierre Prud'hon.]

Though the commanding general could not well yield to his subordinate,
he did, most ungraciously, to the Convention legates. Between the
seventeenth and twentieth of September effective batteries under
Buonaparte's command forced the enemy's frigates to withdraw from the
neighborhood of La Seyne on the inner bay. The shot were red hot, the
fire concentrated, and the guns served with cool efficiency. Next day
the village was occupied and with only four hundred men General
Delaborde marched to seize the Eguillette, the key to the siege, as
Buonaparte reiterated and reiterated. He was ingloriously routed; the
British landed reinforcements and erected strong fortifications over
night. They styled the place Fort Mulgrave. It was speedily flanked by
three redoubts. To Buonaparte this contemptuous defiance was
insufferable: he spoke and Salicetti wrote of the siege as destitute
both of brains and means. Thereupon the Paris legates began to
represent Carteaux as an incapable and demand his recall. Buonaparte
ransacked the surrounding towns and countryside for cannon and secured
a number; he established forges at Ollioules to keep his apparatus in
order,