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.