Letter of May 13th, 1797.
It would even seem, from Bonaparte's letter of July 12th, 1797, that not till then did he deign to send on to Paris the terms of the treaty with Venice. He accompanied it with the cynical suggestion that they could do what they liked with the treaty, and even annul it!
The name Italian was rejected by Bonaparte as too aggressively nationalist; but the prefix Cis—applied to a State which stretched southward to the Rubicon—was a concession to Italian nationality. It implied that Florence or Rome was the natural capital of the new State.
See Arnault's "Souvenirs d'un sexagénaire" (vol. iii., p. 31) and Levy's "Napoléon intime," p. 131.