The conquest of Egypt and the restoration to France of her supremacy in India appealed to both sides of Bonaparte’s nature.  The vision of the tricolour floating above the minarets of Cairo and the palace of the Great Mogul at Delhi fascinated a mind in which the mysticism of the south was curiously blent with the practicality and passion for details that characterize the northern races.  To very few men in the world’s history has it been granted to dream grandiose dreams and all but realize them, to use by turns the telescope and the microscope of political survey, to plan vast combinations of force, and yet to supervise with infinite care the adjustment of every adjunct.  Caesar, in the old world, was possibly the mental peer of Bonaparte in this majestic equipoise of the imaginative and practical qualities; but of Caesar we know comparatively little; whereas the complex workings of the greatest mind of the modern world stand revealed in that storehouse of facts and fancies, the “Correspondance de Napoleon.”  The motives which led to the Eastern Expedition are there unfolded.  In the letter which he wrote to Talleyrand shortly before the signature of the peace of Campo Formio occurs this suggestive passage: 

“The character of our nation is to be far too vivacious amidst prosperity.  If we take for the basis of all our operations true policy, which is nothing else than the calculation of combinations and chances, we shall long be la grande nation and the arbiter of Europe.  I say more:  we hold the balance of Europe:  we will make that balance incline as we wish; and, if such is the order of fate, I think it by no means impossible that we may in a few years attain those grand results of which the heated and enthusiastic imagination catches a glimpse, and which the extremely cool, persistent, and calculating man will alone attain.”

This letter was written when Bonaparte was bartering away Venice to the Emperor in consideration of the acquisition by France of the Ionian Isles.  Its reference to the vivacity of the French was doubtless evoked by the orders which he then received to “revolutionize Italy.”  To do that, while the Directory further extorted from England Gibraltar, the Channel Islands, and her eastern conquests, was a programme dictated by excessive vivacity.  The Directory lacked the practical qualities that selected one great enterprise at a time and brought to bear on it the needful concentration of effort.  In brief, he selected the war against England’s eastern commerce as his next sphere of action; for it offered “an arena vaster, more necessary and resplendent” than war with Austria; “if we compel the [British] Government to a peace, the advantages we shall gain for our commerce in both hemispheres will be a great step towards the consolidation of liberty and the public welfare."[94]