But his explanations and appeals did not satisfy every Frenchman.  Many were appalled at the frightful drain on the nation’s strength.  They asked in private how the deficit of 1812 and the further expenses of 1813 were to be met, even if he allotted the communal domains to the service of the State.  They pointed to allies ruined or lost; to Spain, where Joseph’s throne still tottered from the shock of Salamanca; to Poland, lying mangled at the feet of the Muscovites; to Italy, desolated by the loss of her bravest sons; to the Confederation of the Rhine, equally afflicted and less resigned; to Austria and Prussia, where timid sovereigns and calculating Courts alone kept the peoples true to the hated French alliance.  Only by a change of system, they averred, could the hatred of Europe be appeased, and the formation of a new and vaster Coalition avoided.  Let Napoleon cease to force his methods of commercial warfare on the Continent:  let him make peace on honourable terms with Russia, where the chief Minister, Romantzoff, was ready to meet him halfway:  let him withdraw his garrisons from Prussian fortresses, soothe the susceptibilities of Austria—­and events would tend to a solid and honourable peace.

To all promptings of prudence Napoleon was deaf.  His instincts and his experience of the Kings prevented him yielding on any important point.  He determined to carry on the war from the Tagus to the Vistula, to bolster up Joseph in Spain, to keep his garrisons fast rooted in every fortress as far east as Danzig.  Russia and Prussia, he said, had more need of peace than France.  If he began by giving up towns, they would demand kingdoms, whereas by yielding nothing he would intimidate them.  And if they did form a league, their forces would be thinly spread out over an immense space; he would easily dispose of their armies when they were not aided by the climate; and a single victory would undo the clumsy knot (ce noeud mal assorti).[282]

In truth, if he left Spain out of his count, the survey of the military position was in many ways reassuring.  England’s power was enfeebled by the declaration of war by the United States.  In Central Europe his position was still commanding.  He held nearly all the fortresses of Prussia, and though he had lost a great army, that loss was spread out very largely over Poles, Germans, Italians, and smaller peoples.  Many of the best French troops and all his ablest generals had survived.  His Guard could therefore be formed again, and the brains of his army were also intact.  The war had brought to light no military genius among the Russians; and all his past experience of the “old coalition machines” warranted the belief that their rusty cogwheels, even if oiled by English subsidies, would clank slowly along and break down at the first exceptional strain.  Such had been the case at Marengo, at Austerlitz, at Friedland.  Why should not history repeat itself?