waxed warm; for Napoleon saw that, unless the Court of Vienna were coerced, England would persist in aiding the Spanish patriots; and Alexander showed an unexpected obstinacy.  Napoleon’s plea, that peace could only be assured by the entire discouragement of England, Austria, and the Spanish “rebels,” had no effect on him:  in fact, he began to question the sincerity of a peacemaker whose methods were war and intimidation.  Finding arguments useless, Napoleon had recourse to anger.  At the end of a lively discussion, he threw his cap on the ground and stamped on it.  Alexander stopped, looked at him with a meaning smile, and said quietly:  “You are violent:  as for me, I am obstinate:  anger gains nothing from me:  let us talk, let us reason, or I go.”  He moved towards the door, whereupon Napoleon called him back—­and they reasoned.

It was of no avail.  Though Alexander left his ally a free hand in Spain, he refused to join him in a diplomatic menace to Austria; and Napoleon saw that “those devilish Spanish affairs” were at the root of this important failure, which was to cost him the war on the Danube in the following year.

As a set-off to this check, he disappointed Alexander respecting Prussia and Turkey.  He refused to withdraw his troops from the fortresses on the Oder, and grudgingly consented to lower his pecuniary claims on Prussia from 140,000,000 francs to 120,000,000.  Towards the Czar’s Turkish schemes he showed little more complaisance.  After sharp discussions it was finally settled that Russia should gain the Danubian provinces, but not until the following year.  France renounced all mediation between Alexander and the Porte, but required him to maintain the integrity of all the other Turkish possessions, which meant that the partition of Turkey was to be postponed until it suited Napoleon to take up his oriental schemes in earnest.  The golden visions of Tilsit were thus once more relegated to a distant future, and the keenness of the Czar’s disappointment may be measured by his striking statement quoted by Caulaincourt in one of his earlier reports from St. Petersburg:  “Let the world be turned upside down provided that Russia gains Constantinople and the Dardanelles."[203]

The Erfurt interview left another hidden sore.  It was there that the divorce from Josephine was officially discussed, with a view to a more ambitious alliance.  Persistent as the rumours of a divorce had been for seven years past, they seem to have emanated, not from the husband, but from jealous sisters-in-law, intriguing relatives, and officious Ministers.  To the most meddlesome of these satellites, Fouche, who had ventured to suggest to Josephine the propriety of sacrificing herself for the good of the State, Napoleon had lately administered a severe rebuke.  But now he caused Talleyrand and Caulaincourt to sound the Czar as to the feasibility of an alliance with one of his sisters.  The response was equally vague and discreet.