Bonaparte, in the course of his ever-increasing successes, seemed called upon to change the royal dynasties, to make his own the oldest of them all. He had made Kings of the Electors of Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Saxony; he had given the crown of Naples to Murat, that of Spain to Joseph, that of Holland to Louis, that of Westphalia to Jerome; his sister, Élisa Bacciochi, was Princess of Lucca; he, on his own account, was Emperor of the French, King of Italy, in which kingdom were included Venice, Tuscany, Parma and Piacenza; Piedmont was united to France; he had consented to allow one of his captains, Bernadotte[90], to reign in Sweden; by the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine he exercised the rights of the House of Austria over Germany; he had declared himself the mediator of the Helvetian Confederation; he had laid Prussia low; without possessing a bark, he had declared the British Isles in a state of blockade. England, in spite of her fleets, was on the point of not having a port in Europe in which to discharge a bale of merchandise or post a letter. [Sidenote: Napoleon's position in 1813.] The Papal States formed part of the French Empire; the Tiber was a French department. In the streets of Paris, one saw cardinals, half-prisoners, who, putting their heads through the window of their cab, asked: "Is this where the King of ---- lives?" "No," replied the porter to whom the question was put, "it's higher up." Austria had redeemed herself only by handing over her daughter: the "raider" of the South[91] demanded Honoria[92] from Valentinian[93], with half of the provinces of the Empire. How had those miracles been worked? What qualities were possessed by the man who gave birth to them? What qualities did he lack for their achievement? I will trace the immense fortune of Bonaparte, who, notwithstanding, passed so quickly that his days fill but a short period of the time covered by these Memoirs. Fastidious productions of genealogies, cold disquisitions upon facts, insipid verifications of dates are the burdens and servitudes of the writer.[94] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Second Book of these Memoirs you have read (I had then returned from my first exile to Dieppe): "I have been permitted to return to my valley. The soil trembles beneath the steps of the foreign soldier: I am writing, like the last of the Romans, to the sound of the Barbarian invasion. By day I compose pages as agitated as the events of the day; at night, while the rolling of the distant cannon dies away in my solitary woods, I return to the silence of the years that sleep in the grave and to the peace of my youngest memories." *