of forming the new Court. From the frame of the old German Empire he borrowed half-a-dozen high-sounding dignities, and he is said to have been much mortified when Napoleon failed to bestow one of those on himself. It is explained that Napoleon did not care to put any minister in an "immovable" position. He was, however, made Grand Chamberlain to the new Emperor, receiving nearly 500,000 francs a year and a much closer association with Napoleon's monarchical ways than he cared for. As Foreign Minister he had the difficult task of inducing Pius VII to come for the coronation-" a miracle of Napoleon's destiny," he calls it. In July he accompanied Napoleon and Josephine to the camp at Boulogne, and then to Aix la Chapelle, where Napoleon posed as the modern Charlemagne to a crowd of small German princes. In November the Pope arrived. The suspicious pontiff did not feel his apprehensions allayed when, at their first meeting, Napoleon deliberately tricked him into taking the second seat in the carriage. Nor was Napoleon too pleased when Josephine appealed to the Pope to have her marriage made secure by a religious ceremony. Cardinal Fesch married them, but the Bonapartists always held that it was invalid as the parish priest was not present. When Rogers asked Talleyrand afterwards whether Napoleon had really married Josephine, he answered: "Not altogether."

Talleyrand witnessed the last act in the drama of the Revolution when, on December 2nd (1804), the three Bonapartes and Josephine, preceded by Murat

and twenty brilliant squadrons of cavalry, drove in a gorgeous chariot to the door of Notre Dame. Where reason and humanity had been enthroned a few years before, a glittering pageantry of Church and State now gathered about the altar for the coronation of a more absolute autocrat than Louis XVI. A Pope, convinced in his conscience of the utter impiety and immorality of Napoleon, solemnly intoned the "Veni, Creator Spiritus," and received Napoleon's profession of faith. In the interest of peace and of the Church, Pius VII stooped to acts that nearly broke his heart. And when the supreme moment came in which he was to crown Napoleon, and thus assert at length and for ever his own ascendancy, Napoleon snatched the crown from its cushion and put it on his own head. For several months the Pope and his ministers remained at Paris. Talleyrand speaks in the memoirs with great respect and sympathy of the Pope, and says that he refused any presents for his family and asked no advantage of a material kind for the Church. We know that he did press for the restoration of the temporal power, and was met with the mocking assurance that "Napoleon must keep what God has given him." So Pius VII returned to Rome empty-handed, with a bitter consciousness of his futile sacrifices and compromises.

CHAPTER XII

THE RENEWAL OF WAR

We have now to resume the story of work at the Foreign Office, and examine—in so far as Talleyrand figures in them-the complicated events that led to the resumption of hostilities in 1805. The peace with England had not even an illusory appearance of solidity. Napoleon described it as "a short armistice; George III said it was "an experimental peace. Napoleon was irritated when Talleyrand used to say that he would have been willing to leave Malta to the English if he could have had the treaty signed by Fox or Pitt instead of the less clear and resolute Addington. But whether or no Napoleon himself regarded the Peace of Amiens as a stage in the conquest of Europe, it undoubtedly presented itself in that light very shortly. Once clothed with the Imperial purple, the mantle of Charlemagne, Napoleon would see the splendid strategic position he occupied in Europe. We must go back a little, however, to understand clearly the negotiations in which Talleyrand was engaged before the second campaign against Austria.

The pretty theory of sharing the world between the Mistress of the Sea and the Mistress of the Land

soon ceased to impose. England was far from willing to surrender Europe to Napoleon. Such an abandonment would have meant the closing of all European ports against her commerce, the closing of the route to India and a descent upon it through Russia, and the loss of Egypt. She therefore watched Napoleon closely in Europe, and clung to Malta on the plea that it was to have been put under the guarantee of the six Powers and four of them would not now carry out the agreement. Thiers blames Talleyrand for not securing this action on the part of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Spain, but it is incredible either that Talleyrand should neglect to press for so serious a guarantee of peace or that Napoleon should allow him to do so. It was the sight of Napoleon's empire creeping out yearly beyond the borders of France that lit the flame-first of suspicion, finally of war. With this fatal ambition Talleyrand had no sympathy.

We have already seen how, after the conclusion of peace, Napoleon annexed Piedmont and Elba, and virtually subjugated Switzerland. Talleyrand declares that he made every effort to dissuade Napoleon from incorporating Piedmont, and we have the evidence of Luchesini that he threatened to resign if Napoleon made himself President of the Swiss Republic. But Piedmont was Napoleon's own conquest, as well as the base of operations in Italy. When England protested against the invasion of Switzerland, and sent agents there to intrigue against the French, he caused Talleyrand

to write a despatch to the French envoy at London, in which he unfolded the whole plan of a conquest of Europe, and the closing of all its ports against England. It is certain that Talleyrand averted the consequences of this by modifying the message before it was actually presented at London. Napoleon also complained bitterly of the protection afforded to royalist conspirators and libellists at London; and he said that, as Piedmont and Switzerland were not mentioned in the Treaty of Amiens, England had nothing to do with them.

In the early part of 1803 the strain became greater and greater, and led quickly to rupture. The English Ambassador at Paris, Lord Whitworth, was a firm and dignified noble, with instructions to be firm and dignified rather than accommodating. Napoleon had, in January, published in the French papers a report on the mission of General Sebastiani to Egypt, the tenor of which was clearly to point to the practicability of a seizure by the French. When, therefore, Talleyrand approached Lord Whitworth on the subject of Malta at the close of the month, he found that England was more determined than ever to keep that island. Talleyrand made a desperate effort to represent the mission as commercial, but Napoleon now took up the matter, confessed that it was not wholly commercial, and made his famous project of an arrangement between England and France to govern the world. He had received news of the miscarriage of his West Indian expedition, and now seemed to contemplate a brilliant venture in the East; but he