January 18, M. Petry, at the order of Cadore, called on the American minister, and requested from him a written memorandum expressing the demands of his Government. Armstrong drew up a short minute of the provisions to be made the material of a treaty.[173] The first Article required the restoration of sequestered property; the next stipulated that any ship which had paid tribute to a foreign Power should be liable to confiscation, but that with this exception commerce should be free. Cadore sent this paper to the Emperor, and within a few hours received a characteristic reply. “You must see the American minister,” wrote Napoleon.[174] “It is quite too ridiculous (_par trop ridicule_) that he should write things that no one can comprehend. I prefer him to write in English, but fully and in a manner that we can understand. [It is absurd] that in affairs so important he should content himself with writing letters of four lines.... Send by special courier a cipher despatch to America to let it be understood that that government is not represented here; that its minister does not know French; is a morose man with whom one cannot treat; that all obstacles would be raised if they had here an envoy to be talked with. Write in detail on this point.” Petry returned to Armstrong with the condemned paper, and received another, somewhat more elaborate, but hardly more agreeable to the Emperor. January 25, Cadore himself sent for the American minister, and discussed the subject. The Emperor, he said, would not commit himself to the admission of colonial produce; he wished to restrict American commerce to articles the growth or manufacture of the two countries; he would not permit his neighbors to carry on a commerce with America which he denied to himself; but the “only condition required for the revocation by his Majesty of the Decree of Berlin will be a previous revocation by the British government of her blockade of France, or part of France (such as the coast from the Elbe to Brest, etc.), of a date anterior to that of the aforesaid decree; and if the British government would then recall the Orders in Council which had occasioned the Decree of Milan, that decree should also be annulled.” This pledge purported to come directly from the Emperor, and at Armstrong’s request was repeated in the Emperor’s exact words.[175]