"This was too much for Napoleon. The man who was accustomed to see the greatest of his generation tremble before his slightest frown gazed in no small astonishment at the plump, placid little soubrette who confronted him without a tremor. He burst into a merry laugh, and exclaimed. '_Eh bien, que votre mari reste à Paris. Berthier, je vous en charge!_' turning to Marshal Berthier who was in his suite; and Mr Chambers was never sent back to the dépôt." Few, however, shared the temerity of Madame Chambers. John Stanhope writes: "The awe that even the principal ministers felt in the presence of Napoleon would not be credited in England. His courtiers literally trembled before him. 'In what sort of a humour is the Emperor to-day?' was a frequent question in Paris.... How I have blushed for the adulation, the degrading, I may almost say the blasphemous flattery that has been offered before the throne of Napoleon by men of the highest rank. But perhaps I ought to make some allowance for those who had witnessed the horrors of the Revolution. Can, however, such men be expected to recover the high tone of feeling they once entertained? Can France ever be restored to a sound state?" Yet one man stood alone in heroic opposition to the Conqueror of Christendom. Frail, old, and deserted even by those upon whose support he had relied, the Pope, Pius VII., had courage to oppose the Conqueror of the world. While John Stanhope was in Paris the celebrated interview took place between the aged Pontiff and the autocrat to whom the Vicar of Christ was but as a temporal Sovereign to be crushed beneath the might of an all-but universal monarchy. Pius VII. had indeed had an ample warning in the fate of his predecessor, who, bereft of all power, had been consigned by Napoleon to an imprisonment in which he had expired. In 1801 Pius VII. had been forced to conclude a _concordat_ with Napoleon, which the latter had afterwards subjected to arbitrary alterations; in 1804 the Pontiff had found himself compelled to repair to Paris to assist at the coronation of his enemy. Shortly after his return to Rome the French had entered the Eternal city, and in May 1809 the Papal States were annexed by France. Promptly the brave old Pontiff excommunicated the robbers of the Holy See, and the vengeance of Bonaparte upon this act was swift and sure. The Pope was removed as a prisoner to Grenoble, then to Fontainebleau; and it is curious to learn, by Stanhope's contemporary account, the light in which such a stupendous event in the history of the Roman Church was regarded at the date of its happening.