His next object was to hasten the execution of the monument which was erecting to the memory of Virgil.

Thus, in one day, he paid honour to France and Italy, to modern and to ancient glory, to the laurels of war and to the laurels of poetry.
A person who saw Bonaparte on this occasion for the first time thus described him in a letter he wrote to Paris:--"With lively interest and extreme attention I have observed this extraordinary man, who has performed such great deeds, and about whom there is something which seems to indicate that his career is not yet terminated.

I found him very like his portraits--little, thin, pale, with an air of fatigue, but not of ill-health, as has been reported of him.

He appears to me to listen with more abstraction than interest, and that he was more occupied with what he was thinking of than with what was said to him.

There is great intelligence in his countenance, along with which may be marked an air of habitual meditation, which reveals nothing of what is passing within.
In that thinking head, in that bold mind, it is impossible not to believe that some daring designs are engendering which will have their influence an the destinies of Europe." From the last phrase, in particular, of this letter, one might suspect that it was written after Bonaparte had made his name feared throughout Europe; but it really appeared in a journal in the month of December 1797, a little before his arrival in Paris.
There exists a sort of analogy between celebrated men and celebrated places; it was not, therefore, an uninteresting spectacle to see Bonaparte surveying the field of Morat, where, in 1476, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, daring like himself, fell with his powerful army under the effects of Helvetian valour.