Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte, baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that day," says Béranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by Béranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others. The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side; even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Fréjus, he was master of France. [Conspiracy of Siéyès and Bonaparte.]