ath agonies might tickle jaded appetites, and help to weave
anew the old Circean spells. So it seemed to the few who cared to
think of the frightful sacrifices of the past, and to measure them
against the seemingly hopeless degradation of the present.

Some such thoughts seem to have flitted across the mind of Buonaparte
in those months of forced inactivity. It was a time of disillusionment.
Rarely do we find thenceforth in his correspondence any gleams of
faith respecting the higher possibilities of the human race. The
golden visions of youth now vanish along with the _bonnet rouge_ and
the jargon of the Terror. His bent had ever been for the material and
practical: and now that faith in the Jacobinical creed was vanishing,
it was more than ever desirable to grapple that errant balloon to
substantial facts. Evidently, the Revolution must now trust to the
clinging of the peasant proprietors to the recently confiscated lands
of the Church and of the emigrant nobles. If all else was vain and
transitory, here surely was a solid basis of material interests to
which the best part of the manhood of France would tenaciously adhere,
defying alike the plots of reactionaries and the forces of monarchical
Europe. Of these interests Buonaparte was to be the determined
guarantor. Amidst much that was visionary in his later policy he never
wavered in his championship of the new peasant proprietors. He was
ever the peasants' General, the peasants' Consul, the peasants'
Emperor.

The transition of the Revolution to an ordinary form of polity was
also being furthered by its unparalleled series of military triumphs.
When Buonaparte's name was as yet unknown, except in Corsica and
Provence, France practically gained her "natural boundaries," the
Rhine and the Alps. In the campaigns of 1793-4, the soldiers of
Pichegru, Kleber, Hoche, and Moreau overran the whole of the Low
Countries and chased the Germans beyond the Rhine; the Piedmontese
were thrust behind the Alps; the Spaniards behind the Pyrenees. In
quick succession State after State sued for peace: Tuscany in
February, 1795; Prussia in April; Hanover, Westphalia, and Saxony in
May; Spain and Hesse-Cassel in July; Switzerland and Denmark in
August.

Such was the state of France when Buonaparte came to seek his
fortunes in the Sphinx-like capital. His artillery command had been
commuted to a corresponding rank in the infantry--a step that deeply
incensed him. He attributed it to ma