The Chief Consul had resolved upon conducting, in person, one of the most adventurous enterprises recorded in the history of war. The formation of the army of reserve at Dijon was a mere deceit. A numerous staff, indeed, assembled in that town; and the preparation of the munitions of war proceeded there as elsewhere with the utmost energy: but the troops collected at Dijon were few; and--it being universally circulated and believed, that they were the force meant to re-establish the once glorious army of Italy, by marching to the headquarters of Massena at Genoa,--the Austrians received the accounts of their numbers and appearance, not only with indifference but with derision. Buonaparte, meanwhile, had spent three months in recruiting his armies throughout the interior of France; and the troops, by means of which it was his purpose to change the face of affairs beyond the Alps, were already marching by different routes, each detachment in total ignorance of the other's destination, upon the territory of Switzerland. To that quarter Buonaparte had already sent forward Berthier, the most confidential of his military friends, and other officers of the highest skill, with orders to reconnoitre the various passes in the great Alpine chain, and make every other preparation for the movement, of which they alone were, as yet, in the secret.
The statesmen who ventured, even after Brumaire, to oppose the investiture of Buonaparte with the whole power of the state, had, at first (as we have seen) attempted to confine him to the military department; or so arrange it that his orders, as to civil affairs, should, at least, not be absolute. Failing in this, they then proposed that the Chief Consul should be incapable of heading an army in the field, without abdicating previously his magistracy; and to their surprise, Napoleon at once acceded to a proposition which, it had been expected, would rouse his indignation. It now turned out how much the saving clause in question was worth. The Chief Consul could not, indeed, be general-in-chief of an army; but he could appoint whom he pleased to that post; and there was no law against his being present, in his own person, as a spectator of the campaign. It signified little that a Berthier should write himself commander, when a Napoleon was known to be in the camp.