Such language has but one meaning. By a previous understanding with the Directory, the French army was to be paid, the French treasury to be replenished, at the expense of the lands which were the seat of war. Corsicans in the French service had long been suspected of sometimes serving their own interests to the detriment of their adopted country. Bonaparte was no exception, and occasionally he felt it necessary to justify himself. For example, he had carefully explained that his marriage bound him to the republic by still another tie. Yet it appears that his promotion, his engagement with the directors, and his devotion to the republic were all concerned primarily with personal ambition, though secondarily and incidentally with the perpetuation of a government professedly based on the Revolution. From the outset of Napoleon's independent career, something of the future dictator appears. This implied promise that pillage, plunder, and rapine should henceforth go unpunished in order that his soldiers might line their pockets is the indication of a settled policy which was more definitely expressed in each successive proclamation as it issued from his pen. It was repeated whenever new energy was to be inspired into faltering columns, whenever some unparalleled effort in a dark design was to be demanded from the rank and file of the army, until at last a point-blank promise was made that every man should return to France with money enough in his pocket to become a landowner. There was magic in the new spell, the charm never ceased to work; with that first call from Nice began the transformation of the French army, fighting now no longer for principle, but for glory, victory, and booty. Its leader, if successful, would be in no sense a constitutional general, but a despotic conqueror. Outwardly gracious, and with no irritating condescension; considerate wherever mercy would strengthen his reputation; fully aware of the influence a dramatic situation or a pregnant aphorism has upon the common mind, and using both with mastery; appealing as a climax to the powerful motive of greed in every heart, Bonaparte was soon to be not alone the general of consummate genius, not alone the organizing lawgiver of conquered lands and peoples, but, what was essential to his whole career, the idol of an army which was not, as of old, the servant of a great nation, but, as the new era had transformed it, the nation itself.