So far the Emperor had made no exhibition of the temerity about which so much was later to be said. But he had deceived himself and had taken a wild resolution. Moreover, it is amazing that he should have felt a baseless confidence in Bluecher's remaining inert. This hallucination is, however, clearly expressed in a despatch to Marmont of the very same date. Yet, nevertheless, the alternative is not left out of consideration, for he ordered that marshal, in case Bluecher should resume the offensive, to abandon Paris and hasten to Chalons. This fatal decision was not taken suddenly: the contingency had been mentioned in a letter of February eighth to Joseph, and again from Rheims emphatic injunctions to keep the Empress and the King of Rome from falling into Austrian hands were issued to the same correspondent. "Do not abandon my son," the Emperor pleaded; "and remember that I would rather see him in the Seine than in the hands of the enemies of France. The fate of Astyanax, prisoner to the Greeks, has always seemed to me the unhappiest in history." The messenger had been gone but a few hours when word was brought that Bluecher had resumed the offensive, and a swift courier was despatched summoning Marmont to Chalons. In this ultimate decision Napoleon showed how cosmopolitan he had grown: he had forgotten, if he had ever understood, the extreme centralization of France; he should have known that, Paris lost, the head of the country was gone, and that the dwarfed limbs could develop little or no national vitality.