In taking this last step the executive virtually surrendered its identity. Such, however, was the exultation of the Parisian populace and of the soldiery, that the degradation or even the forced resignation of the conquering dictator would have at once assured the fall of the directors. They could not even protest when, soon after, there came from Bonaparte a despatch announcing that the articles of "the glorious peace which you have concluded with the King of Sardinia" had reached "us," and significantly adding in a later paragraph that the troops were content, having received half their pay in coin. Voices in Paris declared that for such language the writer should be shot. Perhaps those who put the worst interpretation on the apparently harmless words were correct in their instinct. In reality the Directory had been wholly dependent on the army since the previous October; and while such an offensive insinuation of the fact would be, if intentional, most unpalatable, yet those who had profited by the fact dared not resent a remote reference to it. The farce was continued for some time longer, Bonaparte playing his part with singular ability. He sent to Kellermann, in Savoy, without the form of transmitting it through government channels, a subsidy of one million two hundred thousand francs. As long as he was unhampered, his despatches to Paris were soldierly and straightforward, although after the passage of the Po they began to be somewhat bombastic, and to abound in his old-fashioned, curious, and sometimes incorrect classical or literary allusions. But if he were crossed in the least, if reinforcements did not arrive, or if there were any sign of independence in Paris, they became petulant, talking of ill-health, threatening resignation, and requesting that numbers of men be sent out to replace him in the multiform functions which in his single person he was performing. Of course these tirades often failed of immediate effect, but at least no effort was made to put an effective check on the writer's career. Read a century later in a cold and critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused the French soldiers to frenzied enthusiasm.