Rom. ix. 321.
the mainland, as at the time of the League of Cambrai, a clever diplomacy might yet have saved the State. But he was a Venetian and a most patriotic one, and he could not understand that it needed something more than skill to keep Venice alive, that it needed life itself, the life that was all spent, at last, after more than a thousand years.
The Provveditor for the lagoons, Giacomo Nani, wrote to the Doge the courageous words: ‘A State has not the right to possess provinces which it cannot defend.’ He, too, remembered the League of Cambrai. But the Doge was not to be roused; it was no longer vacillation, it was paralysis of the will that made him follow the Senate. Yet Nani’s letters determined the Savi to look about for some general into whose hands the whole defence might be given. It was the old tradition of employing the condottiero; but there was only one man alive just then who had the genius and the conviction that save a cause all but lost; he was a man who could have stopped a host with Falstaff’s ragged company, and he was at the gates of Venice. The Savi hit upon the Prince of Nassau as a possible captain, but Austria stepped in and forbade that he should be called.
The King of Naples now signed an armistice with the French, and Bonaparte made himself at home on the Venetian mainland, quartering his troops at Bergamo, Brescia, and Crema without ceremony, and merely notifying the Venetian Senate that he did so, as if no excuse were needed. He took the Venetian guns he found at Legnago and used them at the siege of Mantua as if they were his own. Bonaparte was well aware of the truth of what Nani had written to the Doge, and he took full advantage of the axiom. If the governors of the cities in which he chose to stop did not please him, he wrote them notes like the following:—
... I beg you, Sir, to let me know what game we are playing, for I do not believe you will allow your brothers in arms [the French soldiers!] to die without help
Rom. ix. 341.
within the walls of Brescia, or to be murdered on the highroad. If you are not able to keep order in your country, and to make the city of Brescia furnish what is needed for establishing hospitals and for the wants of the troops, I shall have to take more efficient measures.—Believe me, with feelings of esteem and consideration,
Bonaparte.
Bonnal says of him that he avenged legitimate complaints with a host of accusations and denials, and with unmistakable threats; and the Venetians
Bonnal, 275.