summer heats. "This armistice," he wrote to Paris on June twenty-first, 1796, "being concluded with the dog-star rather than with the papal army, my opinion is that you should be in no haste to make peace, so that in September, if all goes well in Germany and northern Italy, we can take possession of Rome." [Illustration: Josephine, Empress of the French. From the painting by Francois Gérard. In the Museum of Versailles.] In fact, this ingenious man was really practising moderation, as both he and the terrified Italians, considering their relative situations, understood it. Whatever had been the original arrangement with the directors, there was nothing they did not now expect and demand from Italy; they wrote requiring, in addition to all that had hitherto been mentioned, plunder of every kind from Leghorn; masts, cordage, and ship supplies from Genoa; horses, provisions, and forage from Milan; and contributions of jewels and precious stones from the reigning princes. As for the papal power, the French radicals would gladly have destroyed it. They had not forgotten that Basseville, a diplomatic agent of the republic, had been killed in the streets of Rome, and that no reparation had been made either by the punishment of the assassin or otherwise. The Pope, they declared, had been the real author of the terrible civil war fomented by the unyielding clergy, and waged with such fury in France. Moreover, the whole sentimental and philosophical movement of the century in France and elsewhere considered the ecclesiastical centralization and hierarchical tyranny of the papacy as a dangerous survival of absolutism.