In view of the successive stages of Napoleon's isolation,--namely, the armistice, these two subsidy treaties, and the secret treaty of June twenty-seventh signed at Reichenbach,--it seems futile to discuss the question whether or not Napoleon really wished peace in his famous interview with Metternich on June twenty-seventh--an interview which lasted from a quarter before twelve at midday until nearly nine at night, and has improperly been considered as the turning-point in Napoleon's career. Up to that moment Metternich's intervention had amounted to nothing short of selfish double-dealing. Of this Napoleon had written evidence. No wonder the shifty minister described his interview as "a most curious mixture of most heterogeneous subjects, of intermitting friendliness with the most passionate outbreaks," and strove in his account to deepen the shadows of his picture by discreet silence as to certain points--a trick he may have learned from Whitworth. The unfriendly narrator declares that Napoleon, when told that his soldiers were only boys, flung his hat into a corner, and hissed, "You do not know what passes in a soldier's mind; I grew up in the field, and a man like me troubles himself little about a million men." The Austrian statesman further reported the French emperor to have characterized his second marriage as a piece of stupidity, and to have charged his princely interlocutor with venality! Probably all this is true: the professional soldier's point of view is terrible to the laity. Kossuth declared to a trustworthy witness that he had seen the letters of Maria Louisa which betrayed her husband to her father; and no one has ever denied that Napoleon was a fair judge of character, and called a spade a spade when he was angry. And angry he was. Here was the man who had plumed himself on the Bonaparte-Hapsburg alliance, who had hitherto professed the most ardent personal esteem for Napoleon himself, and who had so far found Austria's highest welfare in supporting the Napoleonic system. And what was his conduct? A complete and sudden reversal of his previous behavior, personal insolence, and public scorn. Then and there he demanded the suspension, at least temporarily, of the treaty of alliance between Austria and France--a paper solemnly negotiated by himself but little more than one short year earlier; then, too, he demanded a further prolongation of the armistice while the peace congress held its sessions, and, coldly throwing every other consideration to the winds, gave his victim to understand that Austria was no longer a mediator, but an armed arbiter, determined to regain her glory by the line of least resistance--that is, by alliance with Russia, in order to secure a continental peace, to which Great Britain should not be a party.