He was opposed by Austria and Prussia as strongly as by England and France, and the pressure exerted by the four powers sufficed to compel him to withdraw his army from Turkish soil. Thereupon the war, which had as yet been waged only between Russia and Turkey, might well have ended, had not England and France undertaken a quite needless invasion of the Crimea: an enterprise in which Austria and Prussia refused to join. The end did not justify the proceedings, for in spite of success in this war, Napoleon the Third's dynasty crumbled to dust within twenty years, while within a like period after Palmerston's death Lord Salisbury frankly admitted that we had 'put our money on the wrong horse.' As to Nicholas I, his pride was destined to be bitterly mortified by the results of an enterprise which not only failed of its immediate object, but by its failure actually hastened the coming of those reforms in Russia against which he had set his face. Even Turkey did not really benefit by being allowed to oppress her subject races for a couple of generations longer. It was the influence of Napoleon III, as Kinglake has pointed out, that led England to take part in the war. Having by treachery and murder made himself Emperor of the French, that monarch found himself for a time dangerously isolated from the support of people of good repute. In consultation with Palmerston, he decided to subordinate the traditional Eastern policy of his country to that of England if thereby he could succeed in being publicly paraded as the friend and ally of Queen Victoria. As soon as he had secured an alliance with England, with Palmerston's aid, and helped by the extraordinary war fever which seized the English nation, he quickly forced the peacefully disposed Lord Aberdeen along an inclined plane which ultimately plunged both nations into a war for which no sufficient motive justification or excuse existed. 1854 Hostilities between Russia and Turkey had begun in October 1853, but France and England did not break off negotiations with the former power till the end of March 1854, the very month in which Tolstoy reached Bucharest on his way through Wallachia to join the army. From there he wrote to his aunt, telling of his journey. The roads after he had passed Khersón, and especially after he had crossed the frontier, were abominable; his journey lasted nine days; and he 'arrived almost ill with fatigue.' A few days later, on 17th March, he wrote of his first interview with Gortchakóf: [14]Le prince Gortchakóf n'était pas ici. Hier il vient d'arriver et je viens de chez lui. Il m'a reçu mieux que je ne croyais--en vrai parent. Il m'a embrassé, il m'a engagé de venir dîner tous les jours chez lui et il veut me garder auprès de lui, mais ce n'est pas encore décidé.