No more of Carnot's worthless suggestions." When, therefore, the negotiations were again renewed in the first days of September, Bonaparte earnestly longed for at least a temporary peace. He arranged that the plenipotentiaries should meet at Udine, not far from his military headquarters at Passariano, so that he might secure the greatest possible advantage from the attitude of a conqueror ready at a moment to resume hostilities. The Directory, suspecting that Clarke had become too facile an instrument in the hands of the ambitious soldier, chose this moment to recall him. For a month the conflict of wits between the formal diplomatists and the determined, unhampered French general was hot and furious. Even the veteran Cobenzl, who did not arrive until September twenty-sixth, was but a toy in Bonaparte's hands. More than once the latter had recourse to his old tactics of barbaric rudeness, and once, toward the close, he wilfully brought on a fit of anger, in which by accident he dashed from its stand a porcelain tray, the gift of Catherine II to Cobenzl. The legend ran that as he caught up his hat, he hissed out the words: "In less than a month I shall have shattered your monarchy like this!" and then flung out of the room, declaring that the truce was ended. In fact, no one seems to have paid any attention to the crash at all. Cobenzl wrote that Bonaparte behaved like a crazy man, and the French officers had difficulty in soothing their general. Whether the nervous attack were real or feigned no one can say: at subsequent crises in diplomacy there recurred others, very similar. Both sides were anxious to make the doubtful language of Leoben as elastic as possible--each, naturally enough, for its own advantage. Proposition and counter-proposition, rejoinder and surrejoinder, followed one another through those weeks so pregnant of consequence to both sides. Twice it appeared as if no conclusion could be reached, and as if a breach were imminent. Once, marching orders for the invading army were actually prepared and in part issued. But the season was inclement and to Marmont his general confided a sense of uneasiness regarding Augereau's appointment on the Rhine. Both parties realized that neither could secure all they claimed without delay, or a possible renewal of warfare. They determined, therefore, to brave their respective governments, and entirely to disregard both Prussian and German feeling as to the Rhine boundary. Finally a compromise was made, and on the seventeenth of October at midnight, after a long social reunion of the plenipotentiaries; in the dark, Bonaparte telling ghost stories, and making the scene generally dramatic and even theatrical, the treaty was engrossed and signed, being dated from Campo Formio, a hamlet neutralized for the purpose. The negotiators parted with the exchange of friendly greetings.