Secret articles bound the Emperor to use his influence in the Empire to secure for France the left bank of the Rhine; while France was to use her good offices to procure for the Emperor the Archbishopric of Salzburg and the Bavarian land between that State and the River Inn.  Other secret articles referred to the indemnities which were to be found in Germany for some of the potentates who suffered by the changes announced in the public treaty.

The bartering away of Venice awakened profound indignation.  After more than a thousand years of independence, that city was abandoned to the Emperor by the very general who had promised to free Italy.  It was in vain that Bonaparte strove to soothe the provisional government of that city through the influence of a Venetian Jew, who, after his conversion, had taken the famous name of Dandolo.  Summoning him to Passeriano, he explained to him the hard necessity which now dictated the transfer of Venice to Austria.  France could not now shed any more of her best blood for what was, after all, only “a moral cause”:  the Venetians therefore must cultivate resignation for the present and hope for the future.

[Illustration:  CENTRAL EUROPE AFTER THE PEACE OF CAMPO FORMIO, 1797

The boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire are indicated by thick dots.  The Austrian Dominions are indicated by vertical lines.  The Prussian Dominions are indicated by horizontal lines.  The Ecclesiastical States are indicated by dotted areas.]

The advice was useless.  The Venetian democrats determined on a last desperate venture.  They secretly sent three deputies, among them Dandolo, with a large sum of money wherewith to bribe the Directors to reject the treaty of Campo Formio.  This would have been quite practicable, had not their errand become known to Bonaparte.  Alarmed and enraged at this device, which, if successful, would have consigned him to infamy, he sent Duroc in chase; and the envoys, caught before they crossed the Maritime Alps, were brought before the general at Milan.  To his vehement reproaches and threats they opposed a dignified silence, until Dandolo, appealing to his generosity, awakened those nobler feelings which were never long dormant.  Then he quietly dismissed them—­to witness the downfall of their beloved city.

Acribus initiis, ut ferme talia, incuriosa fine; these cynical words, with which the historian of the Roman Empire blasted the movements of his age, may almost serve as the epitaph to Bonaparte’s early enthusiasms.  Proclaiming at the beginning of his Italian campaigns that he came to free Italy, he yet finished his course of almost unbroken triumphs by a surrender which his panegyrists have scarcely attempted to condone.  But the fate of Venice was almost forgotten amidst the jubilant acclaim which greeted the conqueror of Italy on his arrival at Paris.  All France rang with the praises of the hero who had spread liberty throughout Northern and Central Italy,