His brother Lucien, recently elected President of the Council of Five Hundred--the acute and spirited Abbe Sieyes, for whom, as "a man of systems," Buonaparte had formerly manifested great repugnance, but who was now recommended effectually by his supposed want of high ambition--and Fouche, minister of police--these were his chief confidants; nor could any age or country have furnished instruments more admirably qualified for his purpose.
Josephine, too, exerted indefatigably in his cause all the arts of address, and contrived to neutralise by flattery many whom promises had failed to gain.

Meanwhile his house was frequented by the principal officers who had accompanied him from Egypt, and by others who had served in his Italian campaigns; and though no one pretended to say what was about to happen, the impression became universal throughout Paris, that some great and decisive event was at hand, and that it was to be brought about by means of Buonaparte.
His friends at first busied themselves with schemes for making him one of the directorial body; but the law, requiring that every candidate for that office should be forty years of age, still subsisted; and this presented an obstacle which Napoleon chose rather to avoid than to overcome.

The conspirators in his confidence were from day to day more numerous, and, before he had been three weeks in Paris, audacity reached its height.

"During this crisis" (writes Bourienne) "there occurred nothing a whit more elevated, more grand, more noble, than had been observed in our preceding revolutionary commotions.

In these political intrigues, all is so despicable--so made up of trickery, lying, spying, treachery, and impudence--that for the honour of human nature the details ought to be buried under an eternal veil." Sieyes governed absolutely one of his colleagues in the Directory, Ducos; and the party of which he was the chief predominated strongly, as has been mentioned, in the Council of Ancients.