It may well be imagined that Joachim began to feel safe on his throne, and the fact that, by an agreement concluded at Charmont some little time before the fall of Napoleon, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England had confirmed the principles of the alliance between Austria and Murat, helped him to hope that, after all and in spite of everything, he might be allowed to remain. He had not reckoned, though, with Talleyrand, whose desire it was, just then, to show himself as a reformed character who was ready to do anything to prove his detestation of the fiend whom he had been serving and of all the fiend’s family, which of course included Joachim. Talleyrand had besides a private grudge against Joachim, for the latter had openly mistrusted him for years, and Napoleon’s parting remarks on the subject of his late Minister for Foreign Affairs must still have been tingling in that gentleman’s ears when he set out for Vienna. “I should have hung him long ago,” said the Emperor. “I always knew that he would be the first to betray me when the occasion offered itself!” Talleyrand, who had arrived at the Congress as an apologist both for France and himself, a man with no claims to consideration from anybody, outside the pale of Christian intercourse as an excommunicate bishop and an unfrocked priest, a creature at the sight of whom Francis and his Catholic princes must have shuddered; without a friend—or a case—bankrupt of power and credit, contrived by the sheer force of his own genius to dominate the whole Congress after the first half-dozen sittings. He set Austria and Russia by the ears, and heated up the quarrel until there was every prospect of war; lined up their adherents and pushed them into the conflict, and manœuvred so marvellously that, in a very short while, France and her friendship were the objects of the diplomacy of both contending parties. Metternich, Nesselrode, Hardenberg, Castlereagh, Stewart, and Stackelberg were little more than children in his hands. His confrères—Noailles, Dupin, and Dalberg—had no voice in the questions that arose. Talleyrand was the Congress, and when he began to use his power to pay off some of his grudges and enmities, it was on Murat that his hand first fell. More Legitimist than the Legitimists, he set out to earn the million francs promised him by Ferdinand for the throne of Naples. The first inkling that Murat received of the turn that affairs had taken was a request, couched in the terms of a command, from Francis, that he would restore the Marches to the Pope. Now the Marches in question had been promised to Murat by Francis himself, not twelve months before, and Murat in answer proceeded to increase his garrison and commenced to strengthen the fortifications of Ancona. He, besides, started a quarrel with the Pope, and despatched a minister of his called Magella into the Marches to assist the Carbonari in their plots against the dominion of the Holy Father.