“Regicides” were marked out as excluded from all honour and position. When Talleyrand protested that this was no reason for rejecting the abler and more useful of the Republicans, the King pleaded that his courtiers would not tolerate them. The King’s chief confidant, Blacas, replied to all suggestions of the dangers they were incurring with a lofty declaration that there could be no compromise between truth and error, between the monarchy and the revolution. Talleyrand by this time knew how to wait, and fell back on that attitude. His only action in the Senate, to which he belonged, was to defend the proposals of the new Minister of Finance, his friend, Baron Louis. On the other hand he made careful preparation for the campaign at Vienna. The first thing to do was to discover the aims and intentions of the four great Powers, and that did not take him long. The treaties that had knit together the coalition against Napoleon were based on a partition of the territory to be wrested from him. Napoleon’s ruthless clipping and maiming of Austria and Prussia had to be amended, and those Powers demanded a heavy discount. Prussia hoped to get Saxony, Lower Pomerania, part of Poland, and the Rhine districts from Mayence to Holland. The Tsar, whose plans were sufficiently revealed to Talleyrand during the few weeks’ stay at the Hotel St. Florentin, desired the whole of Poland (with a separate constitution, but under the Russian Crown). Thus the claims of the two most covetous Powers were inconsistent with each other and inacceptable to Austria, who was especially unwilling to compensate the King of Saxony in Italy. England had already secured Hanover and the independence of the Netherlands, and was not further interested in Europe, except in the balancing of the Powers against each other; but she was bound by the treaties signed.