As the first fruits of the Venetian alliance, Bonaparte seized upon Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. "You will start," he wrote to General Gentili, "as quickly and as secretly as possible, and take possession of all the Venetian establishments in the Levant.... If the inhabitants should be inclined for independence, you should flatter their tastes, and in all your proclamations you should not fail to allude to Greece, Athens, and Sparta." This was to be the French share in the spoil. Yet even now, though stripped of its islands, its coasts, and its ancient Italian territory, Venice might still have remained a prominent city in Italy. It was sacrificed in order to gain the Rhenish Provinces for France. Bonaparte had returned to the neighbourhood of Milan, and received the Austrian envoy, De Gallo, at the villa of Montebello. Wresting a forced meaning from the Preliminaries of Leoben, Bonaparte claimed the frontier of the Rhine, offering to Austria not only the territory of Venice upon the mainland, but the city of Venice itself. De Gallo yielded. Whatever causes subsequently prolonged the negotiation, no trace of honour or pity in Bonaparte led him even to feign a reluctance to betray Venice. "We have to-day had our first conference on the definitive treaty," he wrote to the Directory, on the night of the 26th of May, "and have agreed to present the following propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the Emperor; ... the maintenance of the Germanic Body; ... Venice for the Emperor. Venice," he continued, "which has been in decadence since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the rise of Trieste and Ancona, can scarcely survive the blows we have just struck. With a cowardly and helpless population in no way fit for liberty, without territory and without rivers, it is but natural that she should go to those to whom we give the mainland." Thus was Italy to be freed from foreign intervention; and thus was Venice to be regenerated by the friendship of France! [Genoa.]