Only dangerous to the weak, gifted with no constructive talent whatever, incapable of sustained labor of any sort, strong only in sudden emergencies, in the crises of political changes, Talleyrand was known to Napoleon like an open book. Scorning him, rather than fearing him, Napoleon’s anger against him now was inflamed to the highest pitch, not so much because of anything he had done, as because of what his treachery implied. That so keen-eyed a time-server as Talleyrand should begin to plot, meant that confidence was shaken in the Napoleonic power. That the funds should fall, conscripts dodge the law, allies shirk their obligations, and domestic enemies conspire, were but various symptoms of the same malady. When Talleyrand appeared at the levee, Napoleon boiled over. He began to rebuke the false courtier, began in a moderate tone, but the more he talked the less he could control himself. All the past perfidies of this most perfidious of men came to mind, and in bitter words were hurled at Talleyrand’s head. His venalities, his bribe-takings, his betrayal of state secrets--they all swelled the torrent of Napoleon’s excoriation. “You base wretch, you false-hearted minister. _You_ pretend that you advised against the trial of the Duke d’Enghien when you urged it in writing; _you_ pretend that you advised against the Spanish war when you urged me into it!” And at each sentence Napoleon advanced, face distorted with passion, hand raised in menace, while the guilty courtier slunk back step by step as the Emperor advanced, until he reached the wall. There he stood, with Napoleon’s clenched hand in his face and Napoleon’s blazing eyes threatening death, warning him, as he loved life, to say nothing, and let the storm pass. When Talleyrand reached home, “he fell into a kind of fit,” and the doctors had to be called in. Only a few days elapsed, however, before he was again at the levee, bending humbly before his master, and ready again with his fawnings and flatteries. Napoleon’s anger had passed: he listened to the courtier’s suave phrases with a smile of contemptuous indifference. France had given Austria no cause for war. It was not even claimed that she had. Austria had causelessly provoked two wars already, had got whipped in both, had lost much territory, much money, much prestige. She now believed she was strong enough to win back all she had lost--hence she had mustered her forces and commenced the march into Bavaria. Her readiness to “begin again” had been accelerated by a bribe of $20,000,000 paid her by England.