Venice was now accused of having violated her neutrality by allowing the passage of Austrian troops through her dominions. She answered that she had acted in accordance with a very ancient treaty which accorded the Empire the use of the road to Gambara, and that she was as neutral as ever; but this the French found it hard to believe. When further accused of favouring royalist intrigues, the Signory made a show of punishing the authors of a few libels on the Directory. As for Louis XVIII., as the Comte de Lille was now called by his adherents, Venice was reluctantly obliged to ask him to leave her territory, as the Directory threatened war if he remained. He departed, shaking the dust from his feet. He demanded that the name of his family should be [Sidenote: _Smedley, Sketches from Venetian History, ii. chap. xx. note._] erased from the Golden Book, and that the armour of his ancestor Henry IV. should be given back to him. This armour Smedley rightly conjectures to have been the sword worn by Henry IV. at the battle of Ivry, with which he had knighted the Venetian Ambassadors after his accession, and which he then presented to the Treasury of Saint Mark’s. The Signory entirely refused to accede to the Comte de Lille’s demands. It could not deprive itself, it replied, of the satisfaction of counting the royal family of France amongst its nobility, and it could not bring itself to part with such a valuable gift as it had received from Henry IV.; and with this quiet answer to the Russian envoy who represented him the Comte de Lille had to be satisfied. But France was not, and the Inquisitors received many private warnings to the effect that the French government would seize upon any pretext for attacking Venice. ‘Arm, if you hope not to be trodden under foot!’ Such was the burden of these fruitless messages. Austria, Sardinia, Naples, and Pius VII. openly allied themselves together, and the Duchies of Parma and Modena secretly promised their help. Genoa was paralysed by the vicinity of the French army; Tuscany was playing the game of neutrality, like Venice. The Signory had great confidence in the army of the allies and in its chief, Bonaparte was only a boy; the old general Beaulieu would easily beat him. But the Signory was mistaken. The boy had grown up--‘Napoleon, Apollyon, destroyer of Cities, being a Lion roaming about,’ as the barbarous Greek jest on his name has it. [Illustration: EVENING] XVII THE LAST HOUR The end was at hand when Bonaparte crossed the river Po. One is apt to forget that he had already showed himself to be much more than a victorious [Sidenote: _1796. Rom. ix. 284._] general, and that throughout the campaign he displayed that marvellous skill in dealing with men which so often ensured him an enthusiastic reception in places where he could not have been expected to be welcome.