As for Italy, a great victory was needed to force the King of Piedmont to make peace, or to compel him to give up his kingdom. This end achieved, the kingdom of Piedmont wiped off the map of Italy and joined to France under the title of the department of the Po, they would cross the river, skirt Pavia, wrest Milan from Austria, then break through into Lombardy, and penetrate up to the very gates of Vienna by way of the Tyrol and Venice. As in the case of Germany (and certainly as well able to do it as Germany), Italy would feed our armies. In consequence of this scheme, and in order to put it into execution, Hoche was to unite under his command the three armies of the coasts of Cherbourg, the shores of Brest, and of the West, a hundred thousand men all told, to achieve the pacification of la Vendée. Jourdan was to keep the command of the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse. Moreau was to replace Pichegru on the Rhine. And Bonaparte was appointed commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy. On the 21st March 1796, Bonaparte left Paris, taking with him in his carriage two thousand louis. It was all he had been able to get together, and it included his own fortune, the contributions of his friends, and the subsidies of the Directory. Alexander took seven times more when he set out to conquer the Indies. It should be stated that each louis d'or, in the time of Bonaparte, was worth seven thousand two hundred francs in assignats. Why did Bonaparte prefer the 25,000 naked and famished soldiers of the coastline of Genoa to those grand armies of the Rhine, to those 80,000 well-armed, well-equipped men who had been put under the orders of Jourdan and Moreau, whose command could have been his, had he wished it? Because Italy is Italy--the country of wonderful memories; he chose rather the Éridan and the Tiber to the Rhine and the Meuse, the Milanese country to the Palatinate; he preferred to be a Hannibal rather than a Turenne or the Marshal of Saxony. When he reached Nice, he found an army minus food, minus clothing, minus shoes, striving with great difficulty to keep to its posts, facing 60,000 Austrian troops and the most famous generals of the empire. The day after his arrival Bonaparte distributed the sum of four louis to each general, in respect of his entry upon the scene; then, pointing to the plains of Italy, he said to the soldiers, "Comrades, you starve among these rocks! Cast your eyes over those fertile plains which spread out below your feet; they belong to you, take them." Hannibal had made a similar remark nineteen hundred years before to his Numidian troops, as they crouched like sphinxes on the highest pinnacles of the Alps and gazed with eager eyes down into Italy; and during those nineteen hundred years there had only risen two men--Cæsar and Charlemagne--worthy to be compared with these two.