In March, 1811, this plan was modified, possibly because, as in 1804, he found the difficulties of a descent on our coasts greater than he first imagined.  He now seeks merely to weary out the English in the present year.  But in the next year, or in 1813, he will send an expedition of 40,000 men from the Scheldt, as if to menace Ireland; and, having thrown us off our guard, he will divide that force into four parts for the recovery of the French and Dutch colonies in the West Indies.  He counts also on having a part of his army in Spain free for service elsewhere:  it must be sent to seize Sicily or Egypt.

But this was not all.  His thoughts also turn to the Cape of Good Hope.  Eight thousand men are to sail from Brest to seize that point of vantage at which he had gazed so longingly in 1803.  Of these plans, the recovery of Egypt evidently lay nearest to his heart.  He orders the storage at Toulon of everything needful for an Egyptian expedition, along with sixty gun-vessels of light draught suitable for the navigation of the Nile or of the lakes near the coast.[242] Decres is charged to send models of these craft; and we may picture the eager scrutiny which they received.  For the Orient was still the pole to which Napoleon’s whole being responded.  Turned away perforce by wars with Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Spain, it swung round towards Egypt and India on the first chance of European peace, only to be driven back by some untoward shock nearer home.  In 1803 he counted on the speedy opening of a campaign on the Ganges.  In 1811 he proposes that the tricolour shall once more wave on the citadel of Cairo, and threaten India from the shores of the Red Sea.  But a higher will than his disposed of these events, and ordained that he should then be flung back from Russia and fight for his Empire in the plains of Saxony.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXII

THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN

Two mighty and ambitious potentates never fully trust one another.  Under all the shows of diplomatic affection, there remains a thick rind of reserve or fear.  Especially must that be so with men who spring from a fierce untamed stock.  Despite the training of Laharpe, Alexander at times showed the passions and finesse of a Boyar.  And who shall say that the early Jacobinism and later culture of Napoleon was more than a veneer spread all too thinly over an Italian condottiere of the Renaissance age?  These men were too expert at wiles really to trust to the pompous assurances of Tilsit and Erfurt.  De Maistre tells us that Napoleon never partook of Alexander’s repasts on the banks of the Niemen.  For him Muscovite cookery was suspect.