The Austrian had, in effect, abandoned for the time the open country of Italy.  He now lay on the frontier, between the vast tract of rich provinces which Napoleon had conquered, and the Tyrol.  The citadel of Milan, indeed, still held out; but the force there was not great, and, cooped up on every side, could not be expected to resist much longer.  Mantua, which possessed prodigious natural advantages, and into which the retreating general had flung a garrison of full 15,000 men, was, in truth, the last and only Italian possession of the imperial crown, which, as it seemed, there might still be a possibility of saving.  Beaulieu anxiously waited the approach of new troops from Germany, to attempt the relief of this great city; and his antagonist, eager to anticipate the efforts of the imperial government, sat down immediately before it.

Mantua lies on an island, being cut off on all sides from the main land by the branches of the Mincio, and approachable only by five narrow causeways, of which three were defended by strong and regular fortresses or entrenched camps, the other two by gates, drawbridges, and batteries.  Situated amidst stagnant waters and morasses, its air is pestilential, especially to strangers.  The garrison were prepared to maintain the position with their usual bravery; and it remained to be seen whether the French general possessed any new system of attack, capable of abridging the usual operations of the siege, as effectually as he had already done by those of the march and the battle.  His commencement was alarming:  of the five causeways, by sudden and overwhelming assaults, he obtained four; and the garrison were cut off from the main land, except only at the fifth causeway, the strongest of them all, named, from a palace near it, La Favorita.  It seemed necessary, however, in order that this blockade might be complete, that the Venetian territory, lying immediately beyond Mantua, should be occupied by the French.  The power of this ancient government was no longer such as to inspire much respect, and Buonaparte resolved that the claim of neutrality should form no obstacle to his measures.  The French Directory had already most ungenerously trampled on the dignity of Venice, by demanding that she should no longer afford a retreat to the illustrious exile, the Count of Provence, eldest surviving brother of Louis XVI.[9] That unfortunate prince had, accordingly, though most reluctantly, been desired to quit the Venetian states, and had already passed to the Rhine, where his gallant cousin, the Prince of Conde, had long been at the head of a small and devoted army composed of the expatriated gentry of France.  Buonaparte, however, chose to treat the reluctance with which Venice had been driven to this violation of her hospitality, as a new injury to his government:  he argued that a power who had harboured in friendship, and unwillingly expelled, the Pretender to the French monarchy, had lost all title to forbearance on the part of the Revolutionary