The greatest danger to Bonaparte's ambitions was that he should by some mishap become identified with a party. Thus far, chiefly by absence from the seat of government, he had successfully avoided that pitfall. The Parisian populace did not even identify him with the Fructidorians; and, though not entirely forgetful of the Day of the Sections, they flocked to see him wherever it was known he would be. When asked if their interest did not gratify him, he replied that it meant nothing; they would crowd in the same way to stare if he were on his way to the scaffold. He appears to have felt that long residence would diminish his prestige, which for his purposes would be a disaster, and consequently he seems carefully to have conveyed the impression that he was but a visitor. Sandoz-Rollin, the Prussian minister in Paris, believed that the soldiers sent into France from Italy were intended for use in the capital. Exactly what was planned he did not know, for Bonaparte was not yet thirty, and therefore ineligible, at least under the constitution, to the Directory. Others believed that, Austria having been vanquished, England was to be struck--first through a fight between the two fleets, and then by the landing on her shores of a large body of veterans from the Army of Italy, under their victorious commander. In fact, Monge had formally stated, on December tenth, that "the government of England and the French republic cannot both continue to exist"; and during the winter Thomas Paine exercised his powers as a pamphleteer on the theme of England's approaching bankruptcy, while the public crowded one of the theaters to stare at stage pictures representing the invasion of England. As Bonaparte's almost superhuman diligence had ever open and ready two or more possibilities, this direct invasion may already have been a third choice. In the report which he made in February of the following year after a visit to Dunkirk, he distinctly set forth the studied policy of his whole career; viz., to keep three possibilities in working order, a pretense of invasion, a system of barring England from continental commerce, and a blow at the trade of Great Britain in the Orient. Otherwise there is nothing for it but a peace. But his dealings with every Italian power and with Austria had shown a definite policy of striking, not at the heart to produce desperation, but at the limbs, where the blow would be quite as deadly and resistance less furious. All the natural and successive steps of preparation for such an enterprise had been taken by the government during the summer of 1797. Corfu and Zante, and with them the possessions of Venice in the Levant, were secured and kept; a fleet was collected and equipped from the spoils of northern Italy; Naples was temporarily neutralized; and plans had then been carefully elaborated with experts, among whom was Monge, for the seizure of Malta and the disruption of Turkey by an attack on Egypt.