A rupture with France seemed certain. Turreau expected it and hoped only to delay it. In his eyes the Emperor had suffered an indignity that could not be overlooked, although he asked that retaliation should be delayed till autumn. “However dissatisfied the French government may be by the last measures adopted by Congress, I believe it would be well to await the result of the next session two months hence before taking a severer course against the Americans. This opinion, which I express only with doubt, is yet warranted by advices which I have received within a few days, and which have been given me by men who know the Executive intentions, and who at least till now have not deceived me.” Turreau believed that when the Emperor learned what the late Congress had done, he would strike the United States with the thunderbolt of his power. Doubtless the same impression was general. Even after Napoleon’s character has been the favorite study of biographers and historians for nearly a hundred years, the shrewdest criticism might fail in the effort to conjecture what shape the Emperor’s resentment took. This story has shown many of his processes from the time when he met the resistance of the Haytian negroes in 1803 to the time when he met the uprising of the Spanish patriots in 1809; but even with the advantage of his own writings as a guide, neither friend nor enemy could test theories of his character better than by attempting to divine the conduct he was to pursue toward the United States after their defiance of his wishes in the repeal of the embargo. As though to remove the last doubt of rupture with Napoleon, the President startled the country by suddenly announcing a settlement of his disputes with England. April 7 Erskine received new instructions from London, and during the next two weeks he was closeted with the President and the Cabinet. April 21 the “National Intelligencer” announced the result of their labors. CHAPTER III. IN Canning’s note to Pinkney of Sept. 23, 1808,--the same paper which expressed his Majesty’s regret for the embargo “as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American people,”--a paragraph easily overlooked had been inserted to provide for future chances of fortune:--