Joubert, thus disappointed of his promised object, began to find himself in an embarrassing situation. The whole country was in insurrection around him, and a retreat in the line by which he had advanced, might have exposed him to great loss, if not to destruction. He determined, therefore, to elude the enemy, and by descending the river Drave, to achieve a junction with his commander-in-chief Napoleon. He accomplished his difficult march by breaking down the bridges behind him, and thus arresting the progress of the enemy; but it was with difficulty, and not without loss, that he effected his proposed union, and his retreat from the Tyrol gave infinite spirits not only to the martial Tyrolese, but to all the favourers of Austria in the North of Italy. The Austrian general Laudon sallied from the Tyrol at the head of a considerable force, and compelled the slender body of French under Balland, to shut themselves up in garrisons; and their opponents were for the moment again lords of a part of Lombardy. They also re-occupied Trieste and Fiume, which Buonaparte had not been able sufficiently to garrison; so that the rear of the French army seemed to be endangered.[271] The Venetians, at this crisis, fatally for their ancient republic, if indeed its doom had not, as is most likely, been long before sealed, received with eager ears the accounts, exaggerated as they were by rumour, that the French were driven from the Tyrol, and the Austrians about to descend the Adige, and resume their ancient empire in Italy. The Senate were aware that neither their government nor their persons were acceptable to the French general, and that they had offended him irreconcilably by declining the intimate alliance and contribution of troops which he had demanded. He had parted from them with such menaces as were not easily to be misunderstood. They believed, if his vengeance might not be instant, it was only the more sure; and conceiving him now deeply engaged in Germany, and surrounded by the Austrian levies en masse from the warlike countries of Hungary and Croatia, they imagined that throwing their own weight into the scale at so opportune a moment, must weigh it down for ever. To chastise their insurgent subjects of Bergamo and Brescia, was an additional temptation. [Sidenote: April 16.]