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 FRENCH REVOLUTION AND FRENCH REPUBLIC 355 Asia as his base conquering both Europe and India. He had already learnt to regard Great Britain as the one serious obstacle to his tremendous ambitions, which were hidden from the Directory ; they were well enough pleased by any plan which would keep their terrible general as far as possible from France. Great preparations were made, ostensibly for an invasion of England ; but when the French fleet snatched an opportunity for sailing out of Toulon with Bonaparte on board, while the British squadron under Nelson's com- mand was temporarily disabled by weather, its objective was not England but Egypt. Nelson was promptly Battle of in hot pursuit, but passed the French in a fog and tn eNiie. found no one at Alexandria. When the game of hide-and-seek was ended, and he caught and annihilated the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, or Aboukir Bay (Aug. 1st), Bonaparte and his army had already landed and were engaged in making themselves masters of Egypt. But Nelson's victory turned the Mediterranean into a British lake ; Bonaparte's communica- tions with France were completely cut off. Left entirely dependent on his own resources in Egypt, he brought that country into subjection j but when he carried his arms into Syria, he was foiled by the stubborn resistance Bonaparte of Acre. His great scheme had been ruined by in Syria, the destruction of the French fleet. Returning to Egypt, news reached him of European events which caused him hastily to make sail for France with a few companions, leaving Egypt under the control of General Kleber. When Bonaparte sailed for Egypt, Great Britain was the only nation with which the Republic was actually at war. Austria and Prussia were at odds as to the compensation to be given to the Rhineland princes whose territories the recent treaties handed over to France. The Tsar Paul, who succeeded Catharine in Russia at the end of 1796, took offence at Bonaparte's seizure of Malta on his way to Egypt, and was hostile to all the ideas which the French Revolution represented. The Directory roused general alarm in Europe by its high- handed treatment of the pope, and by organising a Roman