To which Lebzeltern, in order to restore the Pope’s equanimity, replied by telling him how Metternich in speaking to Napoleon had declared himself openly on the side of the Holy Father; and, moreover, had emphatically impressed upon the Emperor the unchangeable principles[10] of the Austrian Government in regard to the Catholic Church and its visible spiritual Head on earth. “I should indeed be grateful for any help that Austria could give me,” said the Pope. “All I ask is that Napoleon will let me go back to Rome, and that he will allow me to keep about me a sufficient number of people for the business of consistories and councils—and that my relations with the faithful may be free and unhampered. I have no means of compelling Napoleon to restore the dominions of which he has robbed me—very well, all I can do is to protest. Beyond that I can do nothing.” Here Lebzeltern, it must be recorded, made some attempt to persuade the Holy Father to make what he called “sacrifices” in the interests of the distracted Church—but of what nature, precisely, he did not specify. But Pius VII, reading his mind, replied that the duty imposed upon him by his conscience of defending the rights of the Holy See and the patrimony of the Church—which patrimony he was bound by his oath as Pope to transmit intact, in so far as in him lay, to his successors—forbade his remaining silent under Napoleon’s iniquity: his silence would be understood, by his enemies, to be a tacit abdication of the Temporal Power, and would be considered by the faithful as a cowardly surrender. From this point in the conversation the two men understood each other’s position and standpoint clearly—and yet both did their best to avoid the blind-alley into which the talk was surely leading them. “Let Napoleon only allow me to return to Rome,” pleaded the Pope—“the catacombs will be enough for me, they have served as a shelter before now for other Pontiffs.... As to my sustenance, as I said before, the faithful will take care for it. No doubt Napoleon would offer me a revenue from the funds of the religious orders he has suppressed—in the same way that, when I went to Paris to crown him, he offered me some eighteen or twenty million francs of such stolen money—an unspeakable suggestion which I refused with horror and indignation! But, indeed, now that I think of it—how could I possibly hold my tongue as he proposes I should do, and not protest, while he would go on suppressing convents and religious orders under my very eyes, as well as introducing innovations that I could not pass over in silence without becoming his accomplice in the face of all Christendom?” In response Lebzeltern submitted that, possibly, Napoleon’s malevolent dispositions towards the Church might be beneficially affected by the removal of the ban of excommunication under which he still lay.