In this far-reaching design of Bonaparte's--a plan which comprehended the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and which, by throwing French troops into Spain, opened the way for further interference in that peninsula--lies the germ of all his future dealing with the Castilian monarchy. The focal point of the whole system, he had explained as early as May, was the island of Malta, the citadel of the Mediterranean. The grand master of the Knights was at the point of death; the King of Naples claimed the island as an ancient appanage, but a German was the most prominent of his order among the candidates for the succession. Bonaparte's proposal was that the Maltese should first be bribed to revolt, and that then the French or Spanish fleet should seize Valetta, compel the election of a Spaniard, and thus secure a bulwark in the heart of the Mediterranean against Turkey on one side and England on the other.
Such were some of the summer's avocations; its real business was supposed to be the conclusion of a peace with the empire. But Austria was far from being exhausted, and her agents protracted the negotiations while the Vienna government was recruiting its forces, hoping all the time for a triumph of the royalist party in Paris. Until after the eighteenth of Fructidor this was not entirely distasteful to Bonaparte, in view of the desire of Carnot for peace on the basis of the preliminaries. Nevertheless, a spirited comedy was playing all the time, Bonaparte mystifying both Merveldt, one of the Austrian plenipotentiaries, and Clarke, who had finally been admitted to the negotiations as agent of the Directory, by outbursts of feigned impatience, while, by pretended confidences, he coquetted with Gallo, who, though the second Austrian plenipotentiary, was a Neapolitan, minister from that kingdom to Vienna, and has by some been thought to have been Bonaparte's own creature, and to have accepted his bribes. Attempted bribery and counter-bribery, at any rate, there were; for the conqueror himself received from Francis the offer of a principality in the empire with not less than two hundred and fifty thousand subjects, and an independent income. Had the German emperor known the projects of his opponent he would have reviled himself as an artless simpleton. In May it was agreed that the congress to determine the territorial transfers within the Germanic body should sit, not at Bern, but at Rastadt in Baden. But the demands of the conqueror in amplification of the articles signed at Leoben were then so extortionate that the Austrian minister for foreign affairs doubted the good faith of his representatives, and recalled from Russia Count Cobenzl, his most learned, accomplished, and skilful diplomatist, in order to secure something like equality in the negotiations. This gave a temporary pause to the proceedings, which dragged on without significance until after Fructidor, when Barras wrote from Paris: "Peace, peace, but an honorable and lasting one. No more of Carnot's worthless suggestions."