When they came to treat of the convention, and when the Cardinal disavowed the proceedings of Mgr. Caleppi, Murat gave a signal proof of his affection for Pius VII. It was in his power to insist on the ratification of the treaty, and to inform Bonaparte of the Pope's refusal; but he preferred to lose the credit he could have won for himself by such an act, and after employing many arguments to shake the Pope's resolution, he at length exclaimed: "Well, then, since this treaty is a source of so much trouble to the Holy Father and to you, let us throw it into the fire, and say no more about it". Soon after this occurrence Consalvi went to Paris to negociate the Concordat. After the ratification of the French Concordat came the discussion of the Italian Concordat for the kingdom of Italy. What the organic laws were to the French Concordat, the decrees of the President Melzi became to the Italian one. The Emperor's decrees--which, while they appeared to revoke those of Melzi in deference to the Pope's opposition, in reality confirmed them--completely frustrated the good effects of the Concordat. The difficulties of these two negociations were hardly over when the marriage of the Emperor's brother Jerome was a source of fresh trouble to the Holy See. Napoleon urged the Pope to declare null the marriage his brother had contracted in America without the consent of his mother or his brother. Cardinal Fesch, the Emperor's uncle, was charged with the management of this affair, and spared no importunities to extort from the Pope the desired decision. The whole question hinged on this: could the Emperor prove that the decrees of the Council of Trent had been published at Baltimore, where the marriage was contracted? If proof of this were forthcoming, the Pope would at once declare the marriage null and void; but if it could not be proved, then the marriage was perfectly valid, seeing that the defect of the consent of the parents was not an _impedimentum dirimens_, but only a civil disability in the eyes of the French law. The Cardinal relates that in the many letters written by the Emperor to the Pope during the course of this affair, he frequently insisted, and with extreme energy, on the fact that his brother's spouse was a Protestant, and he censured in the most abusive language the Pontiff, who, as he said, was desirous of maintaining a heretic in a family every member of which was destined to mount a throne. The Pope's reply was, that although this difference of religion rendered the marriage unlawful, yet it did not make it invalid. After these letters, who could believe that as soon as the ecclesiastical authorities at Paris had declared the American marriage null and void, the Emperor would make Jerome marry another Protestant, the daughter of the King of Wurtemberg, and afterwards Queen of Westphalia?