e Emperor renounced that
part of his Italian possessions which lay to the west of the Oglio, he
was to receive all the mainland territories of Venice east of that
river, including Dalmatia and Istria, Venice was also to cede her
lands west of the Oglio to the French Government; and in return for
these sacrifices she was to gain the three legations of Romagna,
Ferrara, and Bologna--the very lands which Bonaparte had recently
formed into the Cispadane Republic! For the rest, the Emperor would
have to recognize the proposed Republic at Milan, as also that already
existing at Modena, "compensation" being somewhere found for the
deposed duke.

From the correspondence of Thugut, the Austrian Minister, it appears
certain that Austria herself had looked forward to the partition of
the Venetian mainland territories, and this was the scheme which
Bonaparte _actually proposed to her at Leoben_. Still more
extraordinary was his proposal to sacrifice, ostensibly to Venice but
ultimately to Austria, the greater part of the Cispadane Republic. It
is, indeed, inexplicable, except on the ground that 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 c