The overhauling of the army list with the subsequent reassignment of officers turned out ill for Buonaparte. Aubry, the head of the committee, appears to have been utterly indifferent to him, displaying no ill will, and certainly no active good will, toward the sometime Jacobin, whose name, moreover, was last on the list of artillery officers in the order of seniority. According to the regulations, when one arm of the service was overmanned, the superfluous officers were to be transferred to another. This was now the case with the artillery, and Buonaparte, as a supernumerary, was on June thirteenth again ordered to the west, but this time only as a mere infantry general of brigade. He appears to have felt throughout life more vindictiveness toward Aubry, the man whom he believed to have been the author of this particular misfortune, than toward any other person with whom he ever came in contact. In this rigid scrutiny of the army list, exaggerated pretensions of service and untruthful testimonials were no longer accepted. For this reason Joseph also had already lost his position, and was about to settle with his family in Genoa, while Louis was actually sent back to school, being ordered to Châlons. Poor Lucien, overwhelmed in the general ruin of the radicals, and with a wife and child dependent on him, was in despair. The other members of the family were temporarily destitute, but self-helpful. In this there was nothing new; but, for all that, the monotony of the situation must have been disheartening. Napoleon's resolution was soon taken. He was either really ill from privation and disappointment, or soon became so. Armed with a medical certificate, he applied for and received a furlough. This step having been taken, the next, according to the unchanged and familiar instincts of the man, was to apply under the law for mileage to pay his expenses on the journey which he had taken as far as Paris in pursuance of the order given him on March twenty-ninth to proceed to his post in the west. Again, following the precedents of his life, he calculated mileage not from Marseilles, whence he had really started, but from Nice, thus largely increasing the amount which he asked for, and in due time received. During his leave several projects occupied his busy brain. The most important were a speculation in the sequestered lands of the emigrants and monasteries, and the writing of two monographs--one a history of events from the ninth of Fructidor, year II (August twenty-sixth, 1794), to the beginning of year IV (September twenty-third, 1795), the other a memoir on the Army of Italy. The first notion was doubtless due to the frenzy for speculation, more and more rife, which was now comparable only to that which prevailed in France at the time of Law's Mississippi scheme or in England during the South Sea Bubble. It affords an insight into financial conditions to know that a gold piece of twenty francs was worth seven hundred and fifty in paper.