When Napoleon used many words and became apologetic, he was least interesting, because his motives became most evident. In regard to America, he wished to elude an inconvenient inquiry whether the Berlin and Milan Decrees were or were not revoked. Consequently he did not mention those decrees, although credulity itself could not have reconciled his pledge to wait until February 2, with his official assertion of August 5 that the decrees would be withdrawn on November 1. Such a course was fatal to Madison, for it forced him to appear as accepting the Berlin and Milan Decrees after so long protesting against them. So justly anxious was the President to protect himself from this risk, that in sending to Russell the Non-intercourse Proclamation of November 2 he warned the _chargé_ against the doctrine of a condition precedent involved in Cadore’s “bien entendu.” The Emperor was to understand that the United States acted on the ground that “bien entendu” did not mean “condition precedent.”[298] “It is to be remarked, moreover, that in issuing the Proclamation, it has been presumed that the requisition ... on the subject of the sequestered property will have been satisfied.” December 13, at the moment when Napoleon was writing his instructions to Cadore, Jonathan Russell was reading the instructions of President Madison. No diplomatist could have found common ground on which to reconcile the two documents. Madison’s knowledge of the Napoleonic idiom was certainly incomplete. Whatever “bien entendu” meant in the dictionaries, it meant in Napoleon’s mouth the words “on condition,”--and something more. In further assuming that the sequestered property had been restored, President Madison might with equal propriety have assumed that it had never been seized. Russell did what he could to satisfy Madison’s wishes, but he could not hope to succeed. Bound by these instructions to communicate the President’s proclamation in language far from according with Napoleon’s ideas, Russell wrote to Cadore, December 17, a note,[299], in which he not only repeated the President’s assumptions in regard to the revocation of the decrees, but also ventured beyond the scope of his instructions: he demanded an explanation of the language used by Cadore himself in his report to the Emperor, and by Semonville in the Senate. As though such a demand under such circumstances were not indiscreet enough, Russell strengthened the formal and perfunctory protests of the President by adding an assurance of his own that the United States, after cutting off their own intercourse with England, would not consent to “any commercial intercourse whatever, under licenses or otherwise, between France and her enemy.”