Although he possessed this precious document, Bonaparte had refused to use it. It would have cost him too much to betray a general of Pichegru's renown, whose military talent he admired and who had been his master at Brienne. But he was reckoning none the less on what Pichegru could accomplish as a member of the Council of the Ancients, when, on that very morning, just as he was about to make a military reconnoissance in the neighborhood of Milan, he had received a letter from his brother Joseph, telling him that not only had Pichegru been elected a member of the Five Hundred, but that by unanimous choice he had been made their president. He was therefore doubly armed with his former popularity with his soldiers and his new civic power. Hence Bonaparte's sudden decision to send a messenger to Augereau informing him that he wished to see him. The duel which he had witnessed and the cause which had led to it had not been without their weight in the scale of his ambition. But the two combatants little dreamed that they had largely contributed toward making Augereau a marshal of France, Murat a prince, and Bonaparte an emperor. Nor would aught of this have come to pass, had not the 18th Fructidor, like the 13th Vendémiaire, destroyed the hopes of the royalists. CHAPTER XV AUGEREAU On the next day, while Bonaparte was dictating his letters to Bourrienne, Marmont, one of his favorite aides-de-camp, who was discreetly looking out of the window, announced that he could distinguish at the end of the avenue the waving plume of Murat and the somewhat massive form of Augereau. Murat was then, as we have said, a handsome young man of twenty-three or four. He was the son of an innkeeper of Labastide, near Cahors; and his father being also postmaster, Murat, at an early age, learned how to manage horses, and in time became an excellent horseman. Then through I know not what caprice of his father's (who probably wanted to have a prelate in the family), he had been sent to a seminary, where, if we may judge from the letters which are lying before us, his studies did not extend so far as to give him a proper knowledge of orthography. Luckily, or unluckily for him, the Revolution opened the doors of the seminaries. Young Joachim took flight and enlisted in the Constitutional Guard of Louis XVI., where he distinguished himself by his extreme opinions, his duels, and his courage. Dismissed, like Bonaparte, by that same Aubry who in the Five Hundred continued to wage such severe war upon patriots, he met Bonaparte, became intimate with him, hastened to place himself under his orders on the 13th Vendémiaire, and followed him to Italy as aide-de-camp.