With reference to the third point, it seems impossible to determine
whether the menace to Russia was actually made, as one version of the
reply has it, or whether a later speech, at the opening of the
legislature in June, and the report on the situation of France, issued
in the same month, have not both been confused with the Emperor's talk
in March. In either case the result was identical, for France and
Europe instinctively took in the situation, and clearly understood
that the Emperor was not indisposed toward the renewal of war in
northern Europe. This third point was of course the most noteworthy of
the three, for it could be only a question of time when the storm
should burst.
If it were possible at that epoch of the world's history to
distinguish between Napoleon the man and Napoleon the embodied
political force of Europe, the aspect of the former would abound in
human interest. Filled with paternal tenderness, his sole ambition
appeared for a time to be that of retaining what he had gained, the
leadership of a Western empire as splendid as that of Charles the
Great. To make sure of this acquisition and hand it on to his heir,
he seems for a moment to have dreamed of standing forth as the
pacificator of Europe. He actually withdrew the mass of his troops
from Germany for use in Spain, leaving only enough to watch Prussia
and guard Westphalia; with the former power he finally formulated his
pecuniary demands, as if thus to put an end to strife. The "rebellion"
in Spain he intended to crush out by the pacific operations of a
commercial warfare with England, which he felt certain would bring
Great Britain to terms, now that for the first time since the outbreak
of hostilities the blood of her soldiers "was flowing in a stream." He
was probably strengthened in this conviction by the reluctant consent
of the cabinet of St. James to open negotiations for the exchange of
prisoners on the very basis he had suggested long before. Believing,
moreover, that European princes had by this time lost their delicate
sensibility, it seemed no monstrous crime to consolidate his empire
for its commercial siege by the simple expedient of removing the Duke
of Oldenburg from his hereditary domains which bordered on the ocean
and offering him the inland sovereignty of Erfurt, or by adopting the
alternative expedient of leaving him to enjoy the former under French
protection. It seems presumptuous to attempt any revelation of his
feelings, but surely he might hope that then, controlling every inlet
to European commerce from Corfu around by Triest, Italy, Spain, and
the Texel as far as Luebeck, his wall of protection for French
manufactures would do its work, that in a few years France would be
the industrial and commercial center of continental Europe. With Paris
the capital of a new Western empire, the true relation between the
secular and ecclesiastical heads of the world would be reestablished,