Napoleon understood very well that the war had been brought on by the feudal powers in Germany,--those petty lords who had dukedoms and principalities scattered throughout the land, miniature kingdoms in which these lords lived a luxurious life at the expense of the peasantry. These feudal chiefs were desperately opposed to French principles, and dreaded the Confederation of the Rhine. Every elector, prince, duke, or what not, expected, with trembling, the day when he might be “mediatized,” and his little monopoly of a kingdom thrown into the modernized confederation. Hence their eagerness for war, and hence Napoleon’s bitterness toward them. It went abroad that he said that he would make the nobles of Prussia beg their bread. He may have said it, for by this time he was no longer a mute, all-concealing sphinx. He had become one of the most talkative of men; therefore, one of the most imprudent. Unfortunately, he did nothing to separate the cause of the German people from that of the German nobles. His heavy hand fell upon all alike; and it was his own fault that the national spirit of Germany rose against him finally, and helped to overthrow him. Not only did he speak harshly, imprudently of the Prussian nobles, he committed the greater blunder of reviling the Queen. True, she had well-nigh said, as a French empress said later, “This shall be _my_ war!” She had inspired the war party by word and by example. In every way known to a beautiful young sovereign, she had made the war craze the fashion. She had done for Prussia what Eugénie afterward did for France,--led thousands of brave men to sudden death, led her country into a colossal smash-up. Eugénie’s husband, swayed by an unwomanly wife, lost his liberty and his throne. By a mere scratch did Louisa’s husband, as blindly led, escape the same fate. A brazen but patriotic lie, told by old Blücher to the French general, Klein,--“an armistice has been signed,”--saved Frederick William III. from playing Bajazet to the French Tamerlane. A political woman was ever Napoleon’s “pet aversion.” In his creed the place held by women was that of mothers of numerous children, breeders of stout soldiers, wearers of dainty toilets, companions of a lustful or an idle hour, nymphs of the garden walks, sirens of the boudoir, nurses of the sick, comforters of grief, censer bearers in the triumphal progress of great men. A woman who would talk war, put on a uniform, mount a horse, and parade at the head of an army, aroused his anger and excited his disgust. This feeling was the secret of his dislike to the Queen of Prussia, and of his ungentlemanly references to her in his bulletins. But while those references were such as no gentleman should have made, they were infinitely more delicate than those in which the royalist gentlemen of Europe were constantly alluding to Napoleon’s mother, his sisters, his wife, his step-daughter, and himself. It is only fair, in trying to reach just