In fact, if the Directory stood on the army, the army belonged henceforth to Bonaparte. On the very day that Milan was entered, Marmont heard from his leader's lips the memorable words, "Fortune is a woman; the more she does for me, the more I shall exact from her.... In our day no one has conceived anything great; it falls to me to give the example." This is the language that soldiers like to hear from their leader, and it was no doubt repeated throughout the army. "From this moment," wrote the same chronicler, a few months later, "the chief part of the pay and salaries was in coin. This led to a great change in the situation of the officers, and to a certain extent in their habits." Bonaparte was incorruptible. Salicetti announced one day that the brother of the Duke of Modena was waiting outside with four chests containing a million of francs in gold, and urged the general, as a friend and compatriot, to accept them. "Thank you," was the calm and significant answer, "I shall not put myself in the hands of the Duke of Modena for such a sum." But similar propositions were made by the commander-in-chief to his subordinates, and they with less prudence fell into the trap, taking all they could lay hands upon and thus becoming the bond-slaves of their virtuous leader. There were stories at the time that some of the generals, not daring to send their ill-gotten money to France, and having no opportunity for investing it elsewhere, actually carried hundreds of thousands of francs in their baggage. This prostitution of his subordinates was part of a system. Twenty million francs was approximately the sum total of all contributions announced to the Directory, and in their destitution it seemed enormous. They also accepted with pleasure a hundred of the finest horses in Lombardy to replace, as Bonaparte wrote on sending his present, the ordinary ones which drew their carriages. Was this paltry four million dollars the whole of what was derived from the sequestrations of princely domains and the secularization of ecclesiastical estates? By no means. The army chest, of which none knew the contents but Bonaparte, was as inexhaustible as the widow's cruse. At the opening of the campaign in Piedmont, empty wagons had been ostentatiously displayed as representing the military funds at the commander's disposal: these same vehicles now groaned under a weight of treasure, and were kept in a safe obscurity. Well might he say, as he did in June to Miot, that the commissioners of the Directory would soon leave and not be replaced, since they counted for nothing in his policy.