Sixth. And lastly, the town of Arbois, General Pichegru's native place, should be re-christened Pichegru, and should be exempt from all taxes for twenty-five years.
Pichegru had flatly refused to give up Huningue.
"I will never enter into a conspiracy," he said. "I do not wish to become a third edition of La Fayette and Dumouriez. My resources are as sure as they are great. They have roots, not only in the army but in Paris, in the departments and in the generals who are my colleagues, and who think as I do. I ask nothing for myself. When I have succeeded I shall take my reward. But I am not ambitious. You may make your minds easy on that score at once. But to induce my soldiers to shout 'Long live the King!' they must each have a full glass in their right hand and six livres in the left.
"I will cross the Rhine, and enter France with the white flag; I will march upon Paris; and, for the benefit of his Majesty Louis XVIII., I will overturn whatever government may be there when I arrive.
"But my soldiers must receive their pay every day, at least until we have made our fifth day's march upon French soil.
"They will give me credit for the rest."
The negotiations had fallen through on account of the Prince de Condé's obstinacy in insisting that Pichegru should proclaim the king on the other side of the Rhine, and give up the town of Huningue.
Although he possessed this precious document, Bonaparte had refused to use it. It would have cost him too much to betray a general of Pichegru's renown, whose military talent he admired and who had been his master at Brienne.
But he was reckoning none the less on what Pichegru could accomplish as a member of the Council of the Ancients, when, on that very morning, just as he was about to make a military reconnoissance in the neighborhood of Milan, he had received a letter from his brother Joseph, telling him that not only had Pichegru been elected a member of the Five Hundred, but that by unanimous choice he had been made their president.