Count Nesselrode was early attached as a councillor to the private _chancellerie_ of the Czar, who soon discovered him to possess a faithful disposition, great and solid erudition, a serious understanding, and a spirit of ready obedience that would willingly support his sovereign will. Count Nesselrode took especial pains to please Alexander, whose mind was too full of his own ideas to bear any impulse that was not given by himself. At the time of his departure for the interview at Erfurt, it was evident that three ideas in particular possessed the minds of the members of the cabinet of St. Petersburg. The one, entirely Russian, observed with feelings of grief and humiliation, the alliance between Alexander and the head of the French government; a strong dislike was felt by the old Muscovites to the greatness of the new empire; the noble Sclavonian detested the proud and arrogant _parvenus_. They did not wish for an open rupture with France, but the engagements entered into by the treaty of Erfurt, the intimacy between the two crowns, which had been formed by the fascinations of Napoleon--all this, I say, was a source of great displeasure to the old aristocracy, to the successors of those Boyards who claimed the feudal government of the Russian provinces. The second school of this diplomacy was in some degree Greek and Oriental. Napoleon had been desirous of satisfying some of the projects of Russia by the treaty of Erfurt; and as he was then dividing the world with Alexander, he conceded to him the full and entire realisation of the plans of Catherine, agreeing that Constantinople should be his in a few years, Ispahan and Persia in the course of time; they even spoke of the independence of Greece, and consequently of the possibility of an insurrection among the Hellenic and Syrian population. Napoleon had long revolved these projects in his mind; in fact, had not the general of the army of Egypt already had an idea of appealing to the Christian profession, as a means of rousing the Copts and Syrians against their Ottoman masters? Some maxims of liberty were to be attached to the Greek school of diplomacy, and they were brought forward some years afterwards at the congress of Vienna by Count Capo d'Istria.