Some years earlier, in a speech made before the Directory and all the public officials (December 1797), he had reckoned attachment to religion, along with attachment to monarchy and feudalism, among "the prejudices which the French people must overcome." When in Egypt, he had not scrupled to proclaim himself a Mussulman. His proclamation to the Arabian population contains this clause: "We, too, are good Mussulmans. Is it not we that have destroyed the power of the Pope, who commanded war upon Mussulmans?" Now he certainly (officially) called the same Pope "the holy Father" and (privately) "the good lamb"; nevertheless, when negotiations were being hindered by Romish intrigues, he wrote of him in his letters as "the old fox," and called the priests, or, to use his own word, _la prêtraille_, "imbecile bunglers."
His behaviour during these same negotiations with Rome witnesses equally strongly to his political wiliness and his unorthodoxy. Cardinal Consalvi, before setting out on his journey to Paris in 1801, had been imprudent enough to write to a friend of the anxiety he felt in thus venturing into the very jaws of the lion, into the hot-bed of that Revolution which had very recently shown itself so terribly hostile to religion and its priests. Bonaparte owned a sort of Odin's raven, which repeated all such private confessions to him. This raven was at the post office where the Cardinal's letter was opened, and its master consequently prepared just such a reception as was likely to make an impression on the man to whose character the letter gave a clue. It was evening when Consalvi arrived in Paris, but his audience was already appointed for the next morning, so that he had neither time to recover from the fatigues of the journey nor to take counsel with the Pope's representatives. Early in the morning he was driven to the Tuileries and ushered into a small bare room which he took to be the anteroom of the First Consul's audience chamber. After he had waited here for some time, a small door was opened, and through it he passed, to his surprise, into a long suite of splendid apartments, where all the principal government officials, the Senate, the Legislative Assembly, the generals, and the staff were assembled. In the courtyard he could see several regiments drawn up for inspection. It was, as he himself wrote, the sudden transition from a hut to a palace. All the dazzling splendour and formidable signs of authority by which the consular dignity could be enhanced were here exhibited, and when, in the farthest room of the suite, the Cardinal at last entered the presence of the three Consuls, who sat surrounded by a splendid retinue, Bonaparte advanced to meet him and said curtly, in an imperious voice: "I know why you have come. You have five days for negotiation. If the treaty is not signed by that time, everything is at an end." Consalvi was undoubtedly perturbed for the moment, but he succeeded in gaining time, and with the subtlety and skill of Romish statecraft placed so many difficulties in Napoleon's way that the latter, in one of the stormy audiences which followed, shouted angrily and arrogantly: "If Henry VIII., who had not the twentieth part of my power, could change the religion of his country, how much easier is it for me to do it! I will change it, not in France alone, but throughout Europe. Rome will weep blood when it is too late."