Council of Five Hundred felt the earthquake swelling under their feet.
Napoleon appeared at the bar of the Assembly, and attempted a rambling
and incoherent justification for what was going on. A motion was made
to outlaw him; but the soldiers rushed in, and the refractory members
were seized and expelled. A few who were in the revolution remained,
and to the number of fifty voted a decree making Sieyes, Bonaparte and
Ducos provisional _Consuls_, thus conferring on them the supreme
executive power of the State. By nightfall the business was
accomplished, and the man of Ajaccio slept in the palace of the
Tuileries. He had said to his secretary, Bourriene, on that morning,
"We shall sleep to-night in the Tuileries--or in prison."

The new order was immediately made organic. There could be no question
when Three Consuls were appointed and Bonaparte one of the number,
which of the three would be _First_ Consul. He would be that himself;
the other two might be the ciphers which should make his unit 100. The
new system was defined as the "Provisionary Consulate;" but this form
was only transitional. The managers of the _coup_ went rapidly forward
to make it permanent. The Constitution of the Year III gave place
quickly to the Constitution of the Year VIII, which provided for an
executive government, under the name of the CONSULATE. Nominally the
Consulate was to be an executive committee of three, but really an
executive committee of _one_--with two associates. The three men
chosen were Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean Jacques Cambaceres and Charles
Francois Lebrun. On Christmas day, 1799, Napoleon was made FIRST
CONSUL; and that signified the beginning of a new order, destined to
endure for sixteen and a half years, and to end at Waterloo. The old
century was dying and the new was ready to arise out of its ashes.