As a preliminary to the second personal interview between the two monarchs, suggested at Tilsit, and for which proposals were now renewed from Paris, the two ministers, Caulaincourt and Rumianzoff, finally began to discuss the terms of a partition of Turkey. The diplomatic gladiators were well matched; between offer and substitute, demand and excuse, feint and counterfeint, the days passed in a most entertaining manner, until suddenly the Czar became aware that time was flying and that he was not making headway. Somewhat petulantly the interview was postponed, for it was clear that the ministers would not agree by the time suggested, and without an agreement Alexander refused to attend. Meanwhile his troops in Finland had met with bitter and obstinate resistance. His army had been driven from eastern Bothnia, and his fleet lay blockaded by that of Great Britain under Admiral Saumarez. St. Petersburg was terrified by the presence of an English fleet in the Baltic. The Czar could not weaken his force on the Danube, lest he should lose the coveted provinces, and he dared not withdraw troops from Poland, for the French were still in Silesia. With the understanding that Bernadotte should be their active auxiliary, the Russian forces had rashly crossed the Swedish border with inadequate numbers; and in reality the marshal did set out to join them, but half-way on his march, for some unexplained reason, he had paused. Caulaincourt said it was because of the difficulties encountered in crossing the Belt; but the halt was, of course, one move in Napoleon's game. On April twenty-fifth the latter wrote to Talleyrand: "Was I to send my soldiers so lightly into Sweden? There was nothing for me there." Simultaneously the French forces in both Poland and Prussia were compacted and strengthened, while at the confluence of the Bug and the Vistula, in the grand duchy of Warsaw, over against the Russian frontier, were steadily rising the walls of a powerful fort above which waved the tricolor. What a plight was this for the White Czar, the grandson of Catherine II, the philosophic monarch educated by Laharpe, the beneficent despot! Behind him a disgusted nation, before him illimitable warfare; bound by the letter of an ambiguous treaty, occupied in a doubtful conquest, thwarted in his ambitions; in short, if not checkmated, put into a position very much like that known in the noble game of chess as stalemate!