The detention of the Pope and the annexation of the States of the Church to France were but the caprice of tyranny through which he lost the advantage of passing for the restorer of religion. Bonaparte did not stop, as he should have done, when he had married the daughter of the Cæsars: Russia and England were crying mercy to him. He did not revive Poland, when the safety of Europe depended on the restoration of that kingdom. Madness having once set in, he went on from Smolensk[374]; everything told him that he must not go further at his first step, that his first Northern Campaign was finished, and that the second, as he himself felt, would make him master of the Empire of the Tsars. [Illustration: Pope Pius VII.] He was able neither to compute the days nor to foresee the effect of the climatic changes, which every one at Moscow computed and foresaw. See above what I have said of the Continental Blockade and the Confederation of the Rhine[375]: the first, a gigantic conception, but a questionable act; the second, an important work, but spoilt in the execution by the camp instinct and the fiscal spirit Napoleon inherited the old French monarchy as the centuries and an uninterrupted succession of great men had made it, as the majesty of Louis XIV. and the alliances of Louis XV. had left it, as the Republic had enlarged it. He seated himself on that magnificent pedestal, stretched out his arms, laid hold of the peoples, and gathered them around him; but he lost Europe with as much suddenness as he had taken it; he twice brought the Allies to Paris, notwithstanding the marvels of his military intelligence. He had the world under his feet, and all he got from it was a prison for himself, exile for his family, the loss of all his conquests and of a portion of the old French soil. [Sidenote: Where Napoleon failed.] Here is history proved by facts and deniable by none. Whence arose the faults which I have just pointed out, followed by so quick and so fatal a catastrophe? They arose from Bonaparte's imperfectness as a politician.