he was met by Marescot, who had been employed in exploring the wild passes of the Great St. Bernard, and received from him an appalling picture of the difficulties of marching an army by that route into Italy.  “Is it possible to pass?” said Napoleon, cutting the engineer’s narrative short.  “The thing is barely possible,” answered Marescot.  “Very well,” said the Chief Consul, “en avant—­let us proceed.”

While the Austrians were thinking only of the frontier where Suchet commanded an enfeebled and dispirited division,—­destined, as they doubted not, to be reinforced by the army, such as it was, of Dijon,—­the Chief Consul had resolved to penetrate into Italy, as Hannibal had done of old, through all the dangers and difficulties of the great Alps themselves.  The march on the Var and Genoa might have been executed with comparative ease, and might, in all likelihood, have led to victory; but mere victory would not suffice.  It was urgently necessary that the name of Buonaparte should be surrounded with some blaze of almost supernatural renown; and his plan for purchasing this splendour was to rush down from the Alps, at whatever hazard, upon the rear of Melas, cut off all his communications with Austria, and then force him to a conflict, in which, Massena and Suchet being on the other side of him, reverse must needs be ruin.

For the treble purpose of more easily collecting a sufficient stock of provisions for the march, of making its accomplishment more rapid, and of perplexing the enemy on its termination, Napoleon determined that his army should pass in four divisions, by as many separate routes.  The left wing, under Moncey, consisting of 15,000 detached from the army of Moreau, was ordered to debouch by the way of St. Gothard.  The corps of Thureau, 5000 strong, took the direction of Mount Cenis:  that of Chabran, of similar strength, moved by the Little St. Bernard.  Of the main body, consisting of 35,000, the Chief Consul himself took care; and he reserved for them the gigantic task of surmounting, with the artillery, the huge barriers of the Great St. Bernard.  Thus along the Alpine Chain—­from the sources of the Rhine and the Rhone to Isere and Durance—­about 60,000 men, in all, prepared for the adventure.  It must be added, if we would form a fair conception of the enterprise, that Napoleon well knew not one-third of these men had ever seen a shot fired in earnest.

The difficulties encountered by Moncey, Thureau, and Chabran will be sufficiently understood from the narrative of Buonaparte’s own march.  From the 15th to the 18th of May all his columns were put in motion; Lannes, with the advanced guard, clearing the way before them; the general, Berthier, and the Chief Consul himself superintending the rear guard, which, as having with it the artillery, was the object of highest importance.  At St. Pierre all semblance of a road disappeared.  Thenceforth an army, horse and foot, laden with all the munitions of a campaign, a park of forty field-pieces included, were to be urged up and along airy ridges of rock and eternal snow, where the goatherd, the hunter of the chamois, and the outlaw-smuggler are alone accustomed to venture; amidst precipices where to slip a foot is death; beneath glaciers from which the percussion of a musket-shot is often sufficient to hurl an avalanche; across bottomless chasms caked over with frost or snow-drift; and breathing