The same despatch, in which Buonaparte informs the Directory, that his committee of artist collectors "had made a good harvest of paintings in the Papal dominions, and which, with the objects of art ceded by the Pope, included almost all that was curious and valuable, excepting some few objects at Turin and Naples," conveyed to them a document of a very different kind. This was a respectful and almost reverential letter from Napoleon to the Pope,[258] recommending to his Holiness to distrust such persons as might excite him to doubt the good intentions of France, assuring him that he would always find the Republic most sincere and faithful, and expressing in his own name the perfect esteem and veneration which he entertained for the person of his Holiness, and the extreme desire which he had to afford him proofs to that effect.[259] This letter furnished much amusement at the time, and seemed far less to intimate the sentiments of a sans-culotte general, than those of a civilized highwayman of the old school of Macheath, who never dismissed the travellers whom he had plundered, without his sincere good wishes for the happy prosecution of their journey. [Sidenote: REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO.] A more pleasing view of Buonaparte's character was exhibited about this time, in his conduct towards the little interesting republic of San Marino. That state, which only acknowledges the Pope as a protector, not as a sovereign, had maintained for very many years an independence, which conquerors had spared either in contempt or in respect. It consists of a single mountain and a single town, and boasts about seven thousand inhabitants, governed by their own laws. Citizen Monge, the chief of the committee of collecting artists, was sent deputy to San Marino to knit the bands of amity between the two republics,--which might well resemble a union between Lilliput and Brobdingnag. There were no pictures in the little republic, or they might have been a temptation to the citizen collector. The people of San Marino conducted themselves with much sagacity; and although more complimentary to Buonaparte than Diogenes to Alexander the Great, when he came to visit the philosopher in his tub, they showed the same judgment in eschewing too much courtesy.[260] They respectfully declined an accession of territory, which could but have involved them in subsequent quarrels with the sovereign from whom it was to be wrested, and only accepted as an honorary gift the present of four field pieces, being a train of artillery upon the scale of their military force, and of which, it is to be hoped, the Captain Regents of the little contented state will never have any occasion to make use.[261]