Generals Bellegarde and Merfield, on the part of the Emperor, presented themselves at the headquarters of Buonaparte, 13th April, 1797, and announced the desire of their sovereign for peace. Buonaparte granted a suspension of arms, to endure for five days only; which was afterwards extended, when the probability of the definitive treaty of peace was evident. It is affirmed, that in the whole discussions respecting this most important armistice, Napoleon--as a conqueror, whose victories had been in a certain degree his own, whose army had been supported and paid from the resources of the country which he conquered, who had received reinforcements from France only late and reluctantly, and who had recruited his army by new levies among the republicanized Italians--maintained an appearance of independence of the Government of France. He had, even at this period, assumed a freedom of thought and action, the tenth part of the suspicion attached to which would have cost the most popular general his head in the times of Danton and Robespierre. But, though acquired slowly, and in counteraction to the once overpowering, and still powerful, democratic influence, the authority of Buonaparte was great; and, indeed, the power which a conquering general attains, by means of his successes, in the bosom of his soldiers, becomes soon formidable to any species of government, where the soldier is not intimately interested in the liberties of the subject. Yet it must not be supposed that Napoleon exhibited publicly any of that spirit of independence which the Directory appear to have dreaded, and which, according to the opinion which he himself intimates, seems to have delayed the promised co-operation, which was to be afforded by the eastern armies on the banks of the Rhine. Far from testifying such a feeling, his assertion of the rights of the Republic was decidedly striking, of which the following is a remarkable instance. The Austrian commissioner, in hopes to gain some credit for the admission, had stated in the preliminary articles of the convention, as a concession of consequence, that his Imperial Majesty acknowledged the French Government in its present state. "Strike out that condition," said Buonaparte sternly, "the French Republic is like the sun in heaven. The misfortune lies with those who are so blind as to be ignorant of the existence of either."[274] It was gallantly spoken; but how strange to reflect, that the same individual, in three or four years afterwards, was able to place an extinguisher on one of those suns, without even an eclipse being the consequence.[275]