Not that Chateaubriand himself was simple enough to have any respect whatever for that Ferdinand of Spain for whom French troops were to shed their blood, in order that he might be restored to a throne which his own people considered him unfit to occupy. He calls him a promise-breaker and a traitor, calls him a tyrant who allowed himself to be influenced by the evil passions of his female relations, one of those cowardly tyrants who have no peace until they have done some high-handed deed, and who sit and tremble when they have done it. Chateaubriand's reason for making war was this. He knew that France was undermined by Bonapartist and Republican plots, which were widely spread even in the army; he knew that discontent with the restored monarchical government was universal; therefore, trusting to the friendship of the Emperor Alexander, he determined, in spite of Canning's protests and Metternich's dissuasions, to stake everything on one card. Victory, which he considered probable, meant the suppression of the plots, the union under the white flag of all the different parties, and the firm establishment of the Bourbons on the family thrones of Spain and France. In the case of victory, which the inward disunion of Spain might even make easy (as it actually did), the French nation would behold the spectacle of the tricoloured flag lowered to the white, and would, for the first time since Napoleon's palmy days, hear tidings of victories won by the arms of France, and that in a country which the great Emperor himself had not been able thoroughly to subdue. All this meant "new laurels for the race of St. Louis," as Chateaubriand says, and--new laurels for its minister of foreign affairs, a fact which he did not forget to take into account.[3] As we all know, the French army under the command of the Duke of Angoulème, the heir-apparent, succeeded, almost without bloodshed, in liberating Ferdinand at Cadiz, and conducting him back to Madrid. Ferdinand immediately wrote a letter of thanks to Louis XVIII. The answer to this was written for Louis by Chateaubriand; it is amusing to compare it with Paul Louis Courier's imaginary letter from Louis to Ferdinand. Chateaubriand exhorts the Spanish monarch to refrain from high-handedness, "which, instead of strengthening the power of the king, only weakens it"--a piece of good advice to which Ferdinand paid uncommonly little attention. In its giddy elation over this Spanish triumph the court entirely neglected the man to whom the success was originally due. Chateaubriand was no favourite. The Duchess of Angoulème did not address a word to him when he came, on receiving the news of Ferdinand's liberation, to offer his congratulations on her husband's success. Villèle and Corbière were envious of him, and feared that he might wish to take their places; such an idea had never occurred to him, but they were too deeply in his debt not to bear him a grudge.