The national historian has said: "In proportion as he lost the support of the public, Napoleon took pleasure in thinking that it was the lack of a future and not his own misdeeds that threatened his proud throne with premature fragility. The desire to make firm what he felt trembling beneath his feet, became his dominant passion, as if, with a new wife in the Tuileries, the mother of a male heir, the faults which had armed the whole world against him would be only causes without effects." And Thiers adds this reflection: "It would doubtless have been to his advantage to have had an undoubted heir; it would have been better, a hundred times better, to have been prudent and wise. Napoleon, who, despite his need of a son, could not, after Tilsit, at the very climax of his power and glory, make up his mind to sacrifice Josephine, at last came to a decision because he felt the Empire threatened, and he tried in a new marriage to secure the solidity which he should have tried to obtain by wise and moderate conduct." Possibly even when at Schoenbrunn the conqueror already thought of asking for the hand of the young archduchess whose home this palace was. At any rate, it never crossed his mind that in the very room where he wove such proud visions, such far-reaching plans, his heir would die so sadly, the heir whom the daughter of the Germanic Caesars was to give to him. When he reappeared crowned with victory at Fontainebleau, October 26, 1809, Josephine felt that her fate was sealed. The immediate result of the battle of Wagram was the divorce. III. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE WEDDING. Austria had known terrible fears during the campaign of Wagram; it had asked anxiously, whether the Hapsburgs might not disappear from the list of crowned heads, like the Spanish Bourbons, or might not, like the Neapolitan Bourbons, be left to enjoy only part of their States. The peace which was signed at Vienna, October 14, 1809, had somewhat allayed these serious apprehensions, but the situation of Austria remained no less anxious and painful. As Prince Metternich has said in his curious Memoirs: "The so-called Peace of Vienna had enclosed the Empire in an iron circle, cutting off its communication with the Adriatic, and surrounding it from Brody, on the extreme northeast, towards Russia, to the southeastern frontiers toward the Ottoman Empire, with a row of states under Napoleon's rule, or under his direct influence. The Empire, as if caught in a vice, was not free to move in any direction; moreover, the conqueror had done all he could to prevent the defeated nation from renewing its strength; a secret article of the treaty of peace established one hundred and fifty thousand men as the maximum force of the Austrian army."