"The Holy Father, the representative of St Peter, he who holds the Keys of Heaven and Hell, is actually a prisoner in the hands of Napoleon! Poor, excellent old man, gallantly and with the resignation of a martyr does he bear up against his sufferings and maintain the dignity of the Papal See. It is a singular thing that in a _soi-disant_ Catholic country the imprisonment of the Father of their Church should make so little sensation. I hear, indeed, that many women gathered round the different places at which he stopped in the course of his journey through France, but even the interest they felt for him soon appears to have subsided. _A partie de chasse_ the other day was announced to take place in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This afforded the Emperor an opportunity of having a conversation with the Pope without any sacrifice of his own dignity, without any troublesome arrangement of ceremony, and still more without drawing upon himself the public eye, as to go hunting near the Palace of Fontainebleau without even paying a visit to the Pope would have been a positive breach of politeness. "The interview took place. On the one side was the venerable churchman bending beneath the weight of affliction as well as of years, on the other Napoleon Bonaparte; yet if the reports circulated in Paris are to be believed, the old Pontiff held his own with unabated courage and dignity, and nobly maintained the cause of his religion, though the Emperor is said _actually to have thrust his fist in his face and all but struck him_. How the interview terminated I cannot learn, but I heard the fresh Concordat cried about the streets of Paris that same evening. "This dispute," he writes later, "has narrowly escaped producing the most important results in ecclesiastical history--the separation of the French Empire from the See of Rome. The Emperor had assumed the nomination to the French Bishoprics, but the Pope refused to give the investiture to the persons he appointed. The Church almost universally stood by their Chief; the consequence was that there was a considerable difficulty in filling up the vacant Sees. The Archbishopric of Paris was one of these. The Emperor offered it to his Uncle, Cardinal Fesch, but he, either from sincere attachment to his Church, or from the duty he owed to the Roman supremacy as a Cardinal, or from a conviction that he was safer in possession of the Archbishopric of Lyons, held under the Pope's authority, than he could be in one held in defiance of it, resolved to brave the Emperor's anger and refuse that offer. Napoleon, contenting himself with calling Fesch a fool, offered it to Cardinal Maury, who became titular Archbishop of Paris. There are few things in the history of the French Revolution that make one blush more for human nature than the falling off of that man whose opening career had been so brilliant....