Still, however, the better elements were upon his side, perhaps from expediency,—for Murat’s servants would receive short shrift at Ferdinand’s hands should that monarch return,—but they gave Joachim some very good advice among them, even if some of it is rather too subtle. Napoleon’s hands were too full to allow of his interference, and he, in his dealings with the Allies, invariably quoted fifty thousand Neapolitan troops as part of his own force. The Allies knew better, though. Two fatal defects in a ruler are over-craftiness and inconsistency. Murat had both. At one time, as it has been seen, he hastened to pardon those who had conspired against his life; a year later he allowed his own resentment against the Carbonari to lead him into an attempt to crush them by a severity which merely drove them in on each other and made a solid body out of a straggling mob. Before this, with an ideal the meaning of which very few of them understood, the Carbonari—the leaders of the movement, that is to say—were fighting the clouds; but the harrying they received gave them a definite grievance and one that was shared, for purely personal reasons, by thousands who would otherwise never have joined the movement at all. The craftiness which Murat conceived to be policy delivered him into the hands of men far cleverer than himself, whose life’s business it was to overreach one another. He was a brave man and a most excellent soldier, but those were not qualities that could help him in the thimble-rigging, knife-in-the-boot game of Napoleonic statecraft, played by men who had not an illusion remaining about each other, and who, with the possible exception of the Russians, had each and all betrayed their neighbours over and over again. Murat, at Ollendorf upon the shores of Ulm, received several very polite and pressing invitations to an alliance from the Austrian Commissioner, Count von Mier, and he had listened to them, as one of his contemporaries says, without disdain. Wishing, though, to get an idea of what his own people might think of such a suggestion, he consulted two or three of his ministers and generals on the subject. The result did not help him much, for they all held different opinions. One held that France’s welfare was that of Naples, and that with the return of the Bourbons to Paris everything that the Revolution and the Empire had done for Italy would he wiped out; another, that Murat’s duty was to establish himself firmly and hold fast to his throne, whatever might happen to his own people and the Emperor. Upon one point they were all agreed and that was that Murat’s first and most imperative duty was to so order his relations with the Powers as to exclude any possible chance of Ferdinand’s return; it was as to the best way of attaining that desired condition of things that they differed.