There, too, he met his empress; perhaps he fondly dreamed that she might intercede with her sire; in the long interviews they held he was probably drilling her in the functions of a regent chosen to sustain in Paris the tottering cause of her consort and her child. Fouche, too, was recalled from his suspicious retirement to untangle the thread of Austrian duplicity. But the long hours of consultation, arrangement, and execution were mainly concerned, we may suppose, with the hurrying in of new levies, the raising of cavalry, the creation of artillery, and the general preparation for the life-and-death struggle which was soon to take place. The Danish alliance was strengthened, and Murat by strenuous efforts was kept within the shadowy lines of the vanishing Napoleonic system. Beugnot, then head of the French regency of Berg, was one day called at a moment's notice to act as amanuensis, and in a flurry twice took his Emperor's chair. "So you are determined to sit in my seat," was Napoleon's simple remark; "you have chosen a bad time for it." The mayor of Mainz was St. Andre, a stanch conventional of the old school; another day he and Beugnot, with the Prince of Nassau, accompanied the visitor on a river excursion, and the Emperor, scanning with intense interest the castle of Biberich, leaned far over the boat. "What a curious attitude," whispered the veteran revolutionary to the terrified Beugnot; "the fate of the world depends on a kick or two." The fate of the world was not in jeopardy, and the seat of Napoleon as Emperor of the West was not to be occupied by another; but the affairs of the Continent were to be readjusted, the beneficent work of the Revolution was to be transferred to other hands, and the notion of Western empire was to vanish like other baseless fabrics. The diplomacy of Lord Aberdeen, Castlereagh's envoy at Vienna, had succeeded before Napoleon returned to Dresden, and the treaty of eventual triple alliance, signed at Reichenbach on June twenty-seventh, was made good on August first by Francis, who agreed, in return for an enormous subsidy from Great Britain, to join Russia and Prussia with two hundred thousand men. The rosters of Austria's army had been surreptitiously obtained by French agents in Prague. Napoleon was aghast as he read the proof of her gigantic efforts. At once he redoubled his own, and began to unfold a marvelous diplomatic shrewdness. With Poland's three despoilers thus united in England's pay, his isolation would be complete; a few days only remained until the expiration of the armistice; he had but one arrow left in his quiver, and he determined to speed it: to bribe Austria into neutrality by accepting her conditions and restoring the national equilibrium of Europe.