Republic of Venice, once the terror of the whole world, the victorious
Queen of the Adriatic, had to bow her haughty head, and her diadem fell
in fragments at the feet of her triumphant conqueror. The lion of St.
Mark's no longer made mankind tremble at his angry roar, and the slender
monumental pillars on the Piazzetta were all that remained to the
shattered and fallen Venetian Republic of her conquests in Candia,
Cyprus, and the Morea. But, from the dust and ashes of the old
commonwealth, there arose, at Bonaparte's command, a new state, the
Cisalpine Republic, as a new and youthful daughter of the French
Republic; and, when the last Doge of Venice, Luigi Manin, laid his
peaked crown at the feet of Bonaparte, and then fainted away, another
Venetian, Dandolo, the son of a family that had given Venice the
greatest and most celebrated of her doges, stepped to the front at the
head of the new republic--that Dandolo of whom Bonaparte had said that
he was "a man."

"Good God!" exclaimed Bonaparte one day to Bourrienne, "how seldom one
meets _men_ in the world! In Italy there are eighteen millions of
inhabitants, but I have found only two _men_ among them all--Dandolo and
Melzi[6]."

[Footnote 6: Bourrienne, vol. i., p. 139.]

But, while Bonaparte was despairing of _men_, in the very midst of his
victories, he cherished the warmest, most impassioned love for his wife,
to whom he almost daily wrote the tenderest and most ardent letters, the
answers to which he awaited with the most impatient longing.

Josephine's letters formed the sole exception to a very unusual and
singular system that Bonaparte had adopted during a part of his