I wish him to shut his ports against the English, and that he should not receive them into his states, and that not being able to defend his ports and fortresses he should permit me to defend them. Rest assured that at Rome they have lost their heads. They have no longer there the great men of the time of Leo X. Ganganelli would not have conducted himself in this style. I wish to be in safety in my own house. The whole of Italy belongs to me by right of conquest. Let the Pope do what I wish, and he will be recompensed for the past and for the future. I only forewarn you that all must be completed before the 1st of January: if the Pope will consent, he will lose nothing; if he will refuse, then I shall take away his states. Excommunications are no longer in fashion, and my soldiers will not refuse to march wherever I send them. Call to mind Charles V., who kept the Pope prisoner, and who made him recite prayers for him at Madrid. I shall take the same course if I am brought to bay." Mgr. Arezzo having asked for some prolongation of the delay: "Ah well! I give you till February," replied the emperor; "but let everything be finished before February." "And where will it be necessary to send the ambassador of the Pope? to Berlin, to Warsaw, to St. Petersburg? Your Majesty moves so quickly!" Napoleon began to laugh. "No, to Paris," said he. It was in fact at Paris, in the month of October, 1807, when the victory of Friedland had delivered Russia, like Prussia, to the influence of Napoleon, that the envoy of the Pope succeeded in obtaining an audience-- not of the emperor, but of Champagny, his new Minister of Foreign Affairs. New difficulties had aggravated the bitterness of the relations between France and Rome. Pius VII., however, had perceived that the requirements of the emperor, so absolute in their harshness, would not yield to his moderate and passive resistance. He had authorized his French representative, the Cardinal de Bayanne, to make an important concession. "The last demands of his Imperial Majesty," wrote Cardinal Casoni, Minister of State, on the 14th of October, "are limited as regards the English to the closure of the ports. The holy father has every reason to think that his adherence ought to be limited to this closure; but if anything else is required of him he will consent to it, provided that it does not compel him to engage in actual war, and that it does not injure the independence of the pontifical sovereignty. It will he desirable then that your Eminence and the cardinal legate, to whom this despatch is common, should be on your guard, to concert the explanation and import of these words in order to satisfy his Imperial Majesty as the holy father desires, but at the same time not to impose upon his Holiness an obligation opposed to his duties and his honor."