According to Prince Metternich, "One of Napoleon's keenest and most persistent regrets was that he could not appeal to the principle of legitimacy as the foundation of his power. Few men have felt like him the fragility and precariousness of authority without this basis, and its vulnerability to attacks." One day, in speaking to the Austrian statesman about the letter he wrote when First Consul to Louis XVIII., he said: "His answer was dignified and rich in impressive traditions. In Legitimists there is something which lies outside of their intelligence. If he had consulted his intellect alone, he would have come to terms with me, and I should have treated him most generously." The Emperor had come to regard himself as the glorious personification of divine right, and as the defender of all the monarchies. In his eyes the King of Prussia was only a revolutionary monarch. If we may believe Chateaubriand, "Frederick William's great crime, according to Bonaparte the Republican, was this, that he abandoned the cause of the kings. The negotiations of the Berlin court with the Directory indicated, Bonaparte used to say, a timid, selfish, undignified policy, which sacrificed his own position and the general monarchical interests to petty advantages. When he used to look at the new Prussia on the map he would say, 'Is it possible that I have left that man so much territory?'" The philosophers aroused as much horror in Napoleon as the Jacobins. In his eyes strong minds were weak minds; and though he persecuted the Pope, he denounced with equal severity attacks on the throne and attacks on the Church. He especially detested the Voltairian irony, regarding it as both blasphemous and treasonable. To quote once more from Prince Metternich: "He had a profound contempt for the false philosophy as well as for the false philanthropy of the eighteenth century. Of all the founders of the doctrine it was Voltaire who was his pet aversion, and he carried his hate so far as to attack on every occasion his general literary reputation."