Napoleon was received by the ministers assembled at Rastadt with the respect due to the extraordinary talents which he had already displayed in negotiation as well as in war. But he stayed among them only two or three days, for he perceived that the multiplicity of minor arrangements to be discussed and settled, must, if he seriously entered upon them, involve the necessity of a long-protracted residence at Rastadt; and he had many reasons for desiring to be quickly in Paris. His personal relations with the Directory were of a very doubtful kind, and he earnestly wished to study with his own eyes the position in which the government stood towards the various orders of society in the all-influential capital. He abandoned the conduct of the diplomatic business to his colleagues, and reached Paris at the beginning of December. Nor was he without a feasible pretext for this rapidity. On the 2nd of October, the Directory had announced to the French people their purpose to carry the war with the English into England itself; the immediate organisation of a great invading army; and their design to place it under the command of "Citizen General Buonaparte." During his brief stay at Rastadt the dictator of Campo-Formio once more broke out. The Swedish envoy was Count Fersen, the same nobleman who had distinguished himself in Paris, during the early period of the Revolution, by his devotion to King Louis and Marie-Antoinette. Buonaparte refused peremptorily to enter into any negotiation in which a man, so well known for his hostility to the cause of the Republic, should have any part; and Fersen instantly withdrew.