When the negotiations began to arrange peace, Napoleon treated the two distinguished officers, Prince John of Lichtenstein and General von Bubna, with the utmost courtesy. He spared no pains to show his personal esteem and to flatter their national pride; he spoke in the highest terms of the Austrian army and of the bravery it had displayed in the last campaign. He said to them: "You will always remain the first continental power, after France; you are deucedly strong. Allied as I was with Russia, I never expected to have on my hands a serious continental war, and what a war!" Then to console them for the conditions imposed on mutilated Austria, he added: "Why distress yourselves about a few scraps of territory which must come back to you some day? All this can only last during my lifetime. France ought never to fight beyond the Rhine. I have been able to; but when I'm gone, it's all over." Perhaps he was thinking of marrying Marie Louise; at any rate, he showed a consideration for Prince John of Lichtenstein and General Bubna which amazed all who saw it. M. de Bausset, who accompanied him as a gentleman-in-waiting, says in his Memoirs: "I watched attentively the two Austrian commissioners while they were breakfasting with the Emperor: I tried to read their expressions, and I fancied that I saw harmony and a good understanding growing day by day.... Napoleon's politeness and graciousness towards these gentlemen never relaxed for a moment. He seemed anxious to give them a favorable idea of his manners and his person." Nevertheless there were many patriotic men and women in Austria who were inconsolable. Princess Charles of Schwarzenberg--the wife of the brilliant general who had just fought like a hero, and, in the next year, as Austrian ambassador at the court of the Tuileries Avas to negotiate the marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise--wrote a most despairing letter to her husband, in which she said: "I shall bury myself in the past in order to escape the present and the future. I have heard that you were to be chosen to negotiate this so-called peace; it was a heavenly grace by which you escaped sullying your name. To conclude, I have only one earthly wish: it is that the ruin which we are cowardly enough to call a peace, may become complete, that our political existence may end. I pray for the calm of death."