In a just cause this policy is great and humane; in an unjust cause any warfare is butchery. To assert, as many do, that Marengo was superb, but unpatriotic, is simply to renounce the cause in which it was fought. As to the strategy of the campaign, the final judgment must be that of Napoleon himself: To be a good general you must know mathematics; that serves in a thousand circumstances to clarify your ideas. Perhaps I owe my success to my mathematical ideas: a general should never make pictures, this is the worst of all. Because a partizan has captured a position, you need not think the whole army was there; my great talent, my chief distinction, is to see clear in everything, it is even the style of my eloquence to see beneath all its appearances the root of the question. It is the perpendicular, shorter than the oblique. The great art of battle is during the action to change the line of operations: my own idea, entirely new. That made me the victor at Marengo: the enemy moved against my line of operations to cut it; I had changed it and he then found himself cut off. Throughout his absence from Paris, Bonaparte's mind was almost as much absorbed in home as in foreign affairs. His correspondence, packed as it is with details, gives only a faint idea of the multiplicity of his cares in regard to his family, the army, and the nation. The capital was full of conspiracies, machinations, complots, and intrigues: it could not be otherwise, and he felt it. There were the British and the Chouans combining to rekindle the flames of civil war, and rid the earth of the man who would not restore the Bourbons. The Institute was embroiled over the restoration of the Fructidorians it had expelled. There was Fouché to be cajoled and bribed with promises, if only the police would repress the cabals forming everywhere like mushrooms. There were Bernadotte and all the touchy generals, aspirants to power, who must be flattered and soothed. There were the newspapers to be inspired and fed by a carefully organized news bureau. There was Josephine clamoring for money, and his brothers to be appeased. There were the consuls to be guided and the wheels of government to be kept oiled. All these matters received his attention.