During the night of the 2nd and 3rd July, 1800, Bonaparte re-entered Paris, overwhelmed on the way by evidences of public joy, which were most brilliantly manifested at Lyons. He had forbidden all preparations for his return: "My intention is to have neither arches of triumph nor any species of ceremony," he wrote to his brother Lucien, who had replaced Laplace at the ministry of the interior. "I have too good an opinion of myself to hold such baubles in much estimation. I know no other triumph than the public satisfaction." The day would come when public satisfaction, of a truth much mitigated by long sufferings, would no longer suffice for the triumph of the absolute master who dragged exhausted France across fields of battle; the remembrance of his return to Paris after the victory of Marengo was to recur to his sorrowful mind when he dictated at St. Helena the memoirs explanatory of his life: "It was a great day," said he. Already the adulations and mean worship of courtiers were encompassing him; already, also, was revealed the provisional character of that power which depended so completely upon the life of a single man. Sinister reports were circulated during the campaign in Italy; the names of Carnot, Moreau, and La Fayette had been put forward. The triumphant arrival of the First Consul promptly baffled the intrigues in which the principals interested had never taken part; nevertheless, he nursed against Carnot an unjust feeling, which soon betrayed itself in his dismissal. Lucien Bonaparte had forestalled, or badly comprehended, the wishes of his brother; he had got Fontanes to write a pamphlet entitled "Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte," which revealed projects and hopes in favor of the First Consul for which the public was not prepared. "Happy for the Republic," it was said, "if Bonaparte were immortal? But where are his successors? Who is the successor of Pericles? Frenchmen, you slumber over an abyss, and your sleep is madly tranquil."