But Buonaparte's presence was not so essentially necessary to the support of the Directory as he might have expected, or as he perhaps hoped. They had military aid nearer at hand. Disregarding a fundamental law of the Constitution, which declared that armed troops should not be brought within a certain distance of the Legislative Bodies, they moved towards Paris a part of General Hoche's army. The majority of the Councils becoming alarmed, prepared means of defence by summoning the national guards to arms. But Augereau allowed them no time. He marched to their place of meeting, at the head of a considerable armed force.[329] The guards stationed for their protection, surprised or faithless, offered no resistance; and, proceeding as men possessed of the superior strength, the Directory treated their political opponents as state prisoners, arrested Barthelemey--Carnot having fled to Geneva--and made prisoners, in the hall of the Assembly and elsewhere, Willot, President of the Council of Ancients, Pichegru, President of that of the Five Hundred,[330] and above one hundred and fifty deputies, journalists, and other public characters. As an excuse for these arbitrary and illegal proceedings, the Directory made public the intercepted correspondence of Pichegru; although few of the others involved in the same accusation were in the secret of the Royalist conspiracy. Indeed, though all who desired an absolute repose from the revolutionary altercations which tore the country to pieces, began to look that way, he must have been a violent partisan of royalty indeed, that could have approved of the conduct of a general, who, like Pichegru, commanding an army, had made it his business to sacrifice his troops to the sword of the enemy, by disappointing and deranging those plans which it was his duty to have carried into effect. Few would at first believe Pichegru's breach of faith; but it was suddenly confirmed by a proclamation of Moreau, who, in the course of the war, had intercepted a baggage waggon belonging to the Austrian general Klinglin, and became possessed of the whole secret correspondence, which, nevertheless, he had never mentioned, until it came out by the seizure of the Comte d'Entraigues' portfolio. Then, indeed, fearing perhaps the consequences of having been so long silent, Moreau published what he knew. Regnier had observed the same suspicious silence; which seems to infer, that if these generals did not precisely favour the royal cause, they were not disposed to be active in detecting the conspiracies formed in its behalf. [Sidenote: THE EIGHTEENTH FRUCTIDOR.]