One more great event of the year 1804 must be noticed before we return to foreign affairs. On May 18 Napoleon was declared Emperor. Talleyrand had no repugnance whatever to the re-introduction of the hereditary principle or the formal declaration of the autocracy of Napoleon. He would have preferred the title of king, but Napoleon had a larger prospect. The change took place with the full wish of the country, and seemed to be in its interest. Talleyrand was entrusted with the task of forming the new Court. From the frame of the old German Empire he borrowed half-a-dozen high-sounding dignities, and he is said to have been much mortified when Napoleon failed to bestow one of those on himself. It is explained that Napoleon did not care to put any minister in an “immovable” position. He was, however, made Grand Chamberlain to the new Emperor, receiving nearly 500,000 francs a year and a much closer association with Napoleon’s monarchical ways than he cared for. As Foreign Minister he had the difficult task of inducing Pius VII to come for the coronation—“a miracle of Napoleon’s destiny,” he calls it. In July he accompanied Napoleon and Josephine to the camp at Boulogne, and then to Aix la Chapelle, where Napoleon posed as the modern Charlemagne to a crowd of small German princes. In November the Pope arrived. The suspicious pontiff did not feel his apprehensions allayed when, at their first meeting, Napoleon deliberately tricked him into taking the second seat in the carriage. Nor was Napoleon too pleased when Josephine appealed to the Pope to have her marriage made secure by a religious ceremony. Cardinal Fesch married them, but the Bonapartists always held that it was invalid as the parish priest was not present. When Rogers asked Talleyrand afterwards whether Napoleon had really married Josephine, he answered: “Not altogether.”