A young man of twenty-four, with black hair and mustache, and a quick, intelligent eye, dashed forward on his horse, and sprang instantly to the general's side. "Murat," he said, "you will start at once for Vicenza, where Augereau is at present. You will bring him to me at the Palace Serbelloni. You will tell him that the ground-floor is unoccupied, and that he can have it." "The deuce!" murmured those who had seen but had not heard; "it looks as though General Bonaparte were out of humor." CHAPTER XIV THE CAUSE OF CITIZEN-GENERAL BONAPARTE'S ILL-HUMOR Bonaparte returned to the Palace Serbelloni. He was indeed in a bad humor. While he was hardly at the beginning of his career, had hardly reached the dawn of his vast renown, calumny was already persecuting him with her endeavors to rob him of the merit of his incredible victories, which were comparable only to those of Alexander, Hannibal, or Cæsar. Men said that Carnot laid out his military plans, and that his pretended military genius merely followed step by step the written directions of the Directory. They also said that he knew nothing of the matter of administration, and that Berthier, his chief of staff, attended to everything. He saw the struggle which was taking place in Paris against the partisans of royalty, then represented by the Clichy Club, as they had been represented two years earlier by the Section Le Peletier. Bonaparte's two brothers, in their private correspondence, urged him to take a stand between the royalists, that is to say the counter-revolution, and the Directory, which still stood for the Republic, greatly diverted no doubt from its original starting-point and its original aim, but the only standard nevertheless around which republicans could rally. In the majority of the two councils ill-will against him was patent. Party leaders were incessantly wounding his self-esteem by their speeches and their writings. They belittled his glory, and decried the merits of the admirable army with which he had conquered five others. He had attempted to enter civil affairs. He had been ambitious to become one of the five directors in the stead of the one who had resigned. If he had succeeded in that attempt he was confident that he would in the end have been sole director. But they had objected to his age--twenty-eight--as an obstacle, since he would have to be at least thirty to become a director. He had therefore withdrawn, not daring to ask an exception in his favor, and thus violate that constitution for the maintenance of which he had fought on the 13th Vendémiaire. The directors, moreover, were far from desiring him for a colleague. The members of this body did not disguise the jealousy with which Bonaparte's genius inspired them, nor did they hesitate to proclaim that they were offended at his haughty manner and assumption of independence.