The sad comfort of saying “I told you so,” was all that was left to Sieyès. “Gentlemen, we have a master,” said he to his friends that Monday evening; and the will of this imperious colleague he did not seriously try to oppose. In the very first meeting of the consuls, Napoleon had won the complete supremacy by refusing to share in the secret fund which the Directors had hidden away for their own uses. They had emptied the treasury, and had spent $15,000,000 in advance of the revenues, yet they had laid by for the rainy day which might overtake themselves personally the sum of 800,000 francs or about $160,000. Sieyès blandly called attention to this fact, and proposed that he, Ducos, and Napoleon should divide the fund. “Share it between you,” said Napoleon, who refused to touch it. [Illustration: NAPOLEON As First Consul, at Malmaison. From a painting by J. B. Isabey] * * * * * Without the slightest apparent effort, Napoleon’s genius expanded to the great work of reorganizing the Republic. Heretofore he had been a man of camps and battle-fields; but he had so completely mastered everything connected with the recruiting equipment and maintenance of an army, had served so useful an apprenticeship in organizing the Italian republics, and had been to school to such purpose in dealing with politicians of all sorts, negotiating treaties, and sounding the secrets of parties, that he really came to his great task magnificently trained by actual experience. In theory the new government of the three consuls was only experimental, limited to sixty days. The two councils had not been dissolved. Purged of about sixty violently anti-Bonaparte members, the Ancients and the Five Hundred were but adjourned to the 19th of February, 1800. If by that time the consuls had not been able to offer to France a new scheme of government which would be accepted, the councils were to meet again and decide what should be done. On paper, therefore, Napoleon was a consul on probation, a pilot on a trial trip. In his own eyes he was permanent chief of the State; and his every motion was made under the impulse of that conviction.