Here he gradually surrendered all independence and became the tool of Metternich. But before this happened, Gentz had had his period of greatness. The apathy with which the Viennese accommodated themselves to French supremacy, to defeats and humiliations without end, roused all that there was of energy and genius in him. The burning hatred of Napoleon by which he was inspired made him for a short time, during their misfortunes and deep depression, the Demosthenes of the German people. But it was only independence that he so passionately desired, not liberty. In Napoleon the whole Revolution seemed to him to be concentrated. Against him he would not have hesitated to employ even such a means as assassination. He strove with all his might to bring about a union between the German powers and to rouse the German people. But, true to his character, he appealed less to the people than to the chosen few in whose hands it seemed to him that the destiny of the people lay. His preface to the _Political Fragments_, his manifestoes and proclamations of war, are written with passionate vigour, in a fluent, magniloquent, and yet manly style, the rhetorical flourish of which is never in bad taste. Even the defeats of Ulm and Austerlitz did not crush him; but it was with deep dejection that he observed the miserable condition of affairs in Prussia before the battle of Jena. When Johannes von Müller, and others upon whom he had relied, allowed themselves to be flattered and won over by Napoleon, Gentz remained immovably firm. In the famous letter to Müller he makes scathing allusion to those "whose lives are an incessant capitulation." But when Austria gave up the struggle, and, as generally happens in such cases, frivolity and pleasure-seeking increased in proportion to the defeats and humiliations suffered by the country, Gentz too was soon so deeply entangled in the wild whirl of stupefying dissipations that, in his terrible pecuniary difficulties, he caught at an alliance with Metternich as a drowning man at a plank. The influence on a character like his of the man whom Talleyrand called the "weekly politician," because his range of vision never extended beyond that period, and whom a distinguished Russian called "varnished dust," was no happy one.