  Following the lead of a recent work we perform a variational principle model
calculation for the nuclear caloric curve. A Skyrme type interaction with and
without momentum dependence is used. The calculation is done for a large
nucleus, i.e, in the nuclear matter limit. Thus we address the issue of volume
fragmentation only. Nonetheless the results are similar to the previous,
largely phenomenological calculation for a finite nucleus. We find the onset of
fragmentation can be sudden as a function of temperature/excitation energy.
