Finding his projects of marriage and usurpation thwarted by the Mother of the Camps, the monster had her poisoned. She alone, had she consented to abjure her faith and contract a union with him, could have cleared the path for him to reach the hereditary throne of Gaul. With Victoria dead, he realized the futility of persevering along that route. Moreover, he soon felt that, being no longer sustained by the wisdom and sovereign influence of that august woman, the people's affection for him was visibly ebbing. Seeing that with every day he lost some of his former prestige, and foreseeing his speedy fall, he began to cast about for the commission of one of the two acts of treason that I had long ago suspected him of contemplating. He labored in the dark to reduce Gaul, after the country had acquired its complete independence, back to the level of a dependency of the Roman Emperors. Long in advance, and by means of a thousand and one covert schemes, he sowed the germs of civil discord in the country. By these means Gaul's powers of resistance were weakened. He succeeded in re-kindling the old jealousies between province and province that had long been allayed. By means of deliberately practiced acts of favoritism and of injustice, he incited violent rivalries between the generals and also between the several army corps. When matters were ripe for the deed of treason he secretly wrote to Aurelian, the Roman Emperor: "The favorable moment for an attack upon Gaul has arrived. You will prevail easily over a people that is weakened by internal dissensions, and an army, one division of which is jealous of the other. I shall notify you in advance of how the Gallic troops are distributed, and also of their moves, in order to insure the prospects of your triumph."