"Your Royal Highness has been much in the wrong: I did not require as a proof of it the letter you wrote to me, and which I have always wished to ignore. Should you be a king in your turn you would know how sacred are the rights of the throne; any application to a foreign sovereign on the part of an hereditary prince is criminal. As regards the marriage of a French princess with your Royal Highness, I hold it would be conformable to the interests of my people, and above all a circumstance which would attach me by new bonds to a family that has won nothing but praises from me since I ascended the throne. Your Royal Highness ought to mistrust the outbreaks of popular emotions; they may be able to commit a few murders on my isolated soldiers, but the ruin of Spain would be the result of it. Your Highness understands my thoughts fully; you see that I am floating between diverse ideas, that require to be fixed. You may be certain that in any case I shall comport myself towards you as towards the king your father." On receiving this letter, by turns menacing and caressing, and on listening to the commentaries with which General Savary accompanied it, the prince and his followers still hesitated to advance beyond the frontiers. The repugnance manifested by the population became every day more intense. Urquijo, one of the oldest and wisest counsellors of King Charles IV., insisted upon the advantages that Napoleon would realize by counterbalancing the claims of the son by those of the father, and by thus placing the peninsula under the laws of the general system of the French Empire. He asserted that the intention was already apparent under the words used, official and private, and that Ferdinand would lose himself, and lose Spain, in repairing to Bayonne. "What!" cried the Duc de l'Infantado, for a long time an accomplice in all the intrigues of the Prince of Asturias, "what! would a hero surrounded with so much glory descend to the basest of perfidies?" "You do not understand heroes," replied Urquijo, bitterly. "You have not read Plutarch. The greatest amongst them have raised their greatness upon heaps of corpses. What did our own Charles V. do in Germany and Italy, and in Spain itself? I do not go back to the most wicked of our princes. Posterity takes no account of means."