By his retreat to Troyes on February twenty-second, Schwarzenberg had avoided a decisive conflict, saving his own army, and leaving Napoleon to exhaust himself against the army of Silesia; by his decision of March nineteenth he had confirmed Napoleon in the conviction that the allies were overawed, and had thus led his desperate foe into the greatest blunder conceivable--this chimerical scheme of concentrating his slender, scattered force on the confines of France, and leaving open a way for the great army of invaders to march direct on Paris. Of such stuff are contemporary reputations sometimes constructed. But this was not enough: a third time the Austrian general was to stumble on greatness. Napoleon's movements of concentration had thus far met with no resistance, in spite of their temerity; and throughout the nineteenth the enemy's outposts, wherever found, fled incontinently. It appeared a certainty that the allies were abandoning the line of the Seine in order to avoid a blow on their flank. That evening Napoleon began to vacillate, gradually abandoning his notion of an offensive move near Troyes, and deliberating how best to reach Vitry for a further advance toward his eastern fortresses. To avoid any appearance of retreat, he rejected the safer route by way of Fere-Champenoise to Sommesous, and determined to follow the course of the Aube for a while before turning northward to Sommepuis. He might run across the enemy's rear-guard, but he counted on their pusillanimity for the probable retreat of the very last man to Troyes. When Ney and Sebastiani began on the twentieth to push up the south bank of the Aube, they expected no opposition. That very morning Napoleon had announced to his minister of war, "I shall neglect Troyes, and betake myself in all haste to my fortresses."