Napoleon, however, had never forgiven Bernadotte for his refusal to act on his side on the 18th Brumaire. He thenceforth considered this great soldier of the Republic as one who might serve the Emperor well, because in doing so he served France, but who looked to himself with none of those feelings of personal devotion which could alone entitle a subject to his favour. Bernadotte had been distinguished in the army before Napoleon himself appeared on the great theatre of events; he could never be classed with those who had earned all their distinction and pre-eminence under the banners of the Emperor; he had an existence separate and his own; he had stood aloof at the great and decisive crisis of Napoleon's fate; he might be entrusted and employed afterwards--he could never be loved. The proposal of the Diet, therefore, was the reverse of agreeable to him whose favour it was expressly designed to conciliate. Bernadotte, however, was powerful in the esteem of a great party in the French army, as well as among the old republicans of the state: to have interfered against him would have been to kindle high wrath and hatred among all those officers who belonged to the ante-Buonapartean period; and, on the other hand, to oppose the free-will of the Swedes would have appeared extraordinary conduct indeed on the part of a sovereign who studiously represented himself as owing everything to the free-will of the French. Sweden, finally, was still an independent state; and the events of the Peninsula were likely to impress the Emperor with a lively sense of the dangers of exciting a spirit of national aversion at the other extremity of Europe. Napoleon consented to the acceptance of the proffered dignity by Bernadotte. The Marshal was called on to sign a declaration, before he left Paris, that he would never bear arms against France. He rejected this condition as incompatible with the connexion which Napoleon himself had just sanctioned him in forming with another state, and said he was sure the suggestion came not from the Emperor, who knew what were the duties of a sovereign, but from some lawyer. Napoleon frowned darkly, and answered with an air of embarrassment, "Go; our destinies are about to be fulfilled." Bernadotte said he had not heard his words distinctly: Napoleon repeated them; and they parted. Bernadotte was received with an enthusiastic welcome in Stockholm; and, notwithstanding the unpleasant circumstances under which Napoleon had dismissed him, the French alliance continued to be maintained. The private history of the transaction was not likely to be divulged at the time; and the natural as well as universal notion was, that Sweden, governed in effect by Marshal Bernadotte as crown prince, had become almost as mere a dependence of France as Naples under King Joachim Murat, or Westphalia under King Jerome Buonaparte.