At that point Napoleon lost patience. Interposing to close the discussion, he curtly bade the Council to cease from wasting time. They must decide on the Lion for the Imperial Emblem. His preference was for the figure of a Lion, lying over the map of France, with one paw stretched out across the Rhine: “Il faut prendre un Lion, s’étendu sur la carte de France, la patte prête à dépasser le Rhin.” Napoleon proposed in addition, by way of motto, beneath the Lion-figure, these defiant words: “_Malheur à qui me cherche!_” No more was said on the subject after that. The Council submitted forthwith to Napoleon’s dictation, and, as it would appear, without taking any formal vote, passed to the remaining business of the day: the inscription on the new coinage and certain amendments to the Criminal Code. But even then, as it befell, the decision as to the national emblem was not conclusive. Napoleon changed his mind about the Lion shortly after the Council had broken up. The Lion as the designated cognisance of the French Empire did not last twenty-four hours. Napoleon himself, on the report of the Council meeting being presented for his signature, definitely rejected the Lion. He cancelled his own proposition with a stroke of his pen. With his own hand the Emperor struck out the words “Lion couchant,” with the reference to the map of France and the Rhine, writing over the erasure, “Un Aigle éploye”--an Eagle with extended wings. So Napoleon independently settled the matter. Napoleon, as it would appear, in making his ultimate choice of the Eagle, had this in his mind. Charlemagne was ever in his thoughts at that time as his own destined exemplar. The Eagle of Charlemagne, it was now borne in upon his mind irresistibly, had a pre-eminent claim to be recalled and become the national heraldic badge for the new Frankish Empire of the West, as having been the traditional emblem of Imperial authority in the ancient Frankish Empire, the prototype and historic predecessor of the Empire of which he was head. Said Napoleon, indeed, in justifying his final adoption of the Eagle: “Elle affirme la dignité Impériale et rappelait Charlemagne.” [Sidenote: WHERE THE ARTIST GOT HIS DESIGN] A commission to design the new Imperial Eagle “after that of Charlemagne” was forthwith given to Isabey (the elder Isabey--Jean Baptiste), “Peintre et Dessinateur du Cabinet de l’Empereur,” whose reputation was at that moment at its zenith. The artist, however, had no Carlovingian model to draw from, and nobody, it would appear, could give him any advice. He had to depict “Un Aigle éployé”--a Spread-Eagle. Discarding heraldic conventionalism, he produced the Napoleonic Eagle of history; an Eagle _au naturel_, shown in the act of taking wing. The idea of it Isabey took from a sketch he himself had made nine years before, in the Monastery of the Certosa of Milan, of an eagle sculptured on one of the tombs of the Visconti.