This flame, had it been suffered to spread, threatened immeasurable evil to the French cause.  Lannes instantly marched to Benasco, stormed the place, plundered and burnt it, and put the inhabitants to the sword without mercy.  The general in person appeared before Pavia; blew the gates open; easily scattered the townspeople; and caused the leaders to be executed, as if they had committed a crime in endeavouring to rescue their country from the arm of a foreign invader.  Everywhere the same ferocious system was acted on.  The insurgent commanders were tried by courts-martial, and shot without ceremony.  At Lugo, where a French squadron of horse had been gallantly and disastrously defeated, the whole of the male inhabitants were massacred.  These bloody examples quelled the insurrections; but they fixed the first dark and indelible stain on the name of Napoleon Buonaparte.

The spirit of the Austrian and Catholic parties in Lombardy thus crushed, the French advanced on the Mincio.  The general made such disposition of his troops, that Beaulieu doubted not he meant to pass that river, if he could, at Peschiera.  Meantime he had been preparing to repeat the scene of Placenza;—­and actually, on the 30th of May, forced the passage of the Mincio, not at Peschiera, but further down at Borghetto.  The Austrian garrison at Borghetto in vain destroyed one arch of the bridge.  Buonaparte supplied the breach with planks; and his men, flushed with so many victories, charged with a fury not to be resisted.  Beaulieu was obliged to abandon the Mincio, as he had before the Adda and the Po, and to take up the new line of the Adige.

Meanwhile an occurrence, which may be called accidental, had nearly done more than repay the Austrians for all their reverses.  The left of their line, stationed still further down the Mincio,—­at Puzzuolo, no sooner learned from the cannonade that the French were at Borghetto, than they hastened to ascend the stream, with the view of assisting the defence of their friends.  They came too late for this; the commander at Borghetto had retreated before they arrived.  They, however, came unexpectedly; and, such was the chance, reached Valleggio after the French army had pursued the Austrians through it and onwards—­and, at the moment when Buonaparte and a few friends, considering the work of the day to be over, and this village as altogether in the rear of both armies, were about to sit down to dinner in security.  Sebetendorff, who commanded the Puzzuolo division, came rapidly, little guessing what a prize was near him, into the village.  The French general’s attendants had barely time to shut the gates of the inn, and alarm their chief by the cry “To arms.”  Buonaparte threw himself on horseback, and galloping out by a back passage, effected the narrowest of escapes from the most urgent of dangers.  Sebetendorff was soon assaulted by a French column, and retreated, after Beaulieu’s example, on the line of the Adige.  Buonaparte, profiting by the perilous adventure of Valleggio, instituted a small corps of picked men, called Guides, to watch continually over his personal safety.  Such was the germ from which sprung the famous Imperial Guard of Napoleon.