While he was marking time, Napoleon was sending him despatches instinct with pride.  “I have made 30,000 to 40,000 prisoners,” he wrote on the 17th:  “I have taken 200 cannon, a great number of generals, and destroyed several armies, almost without striking a blow.  I yesterday checked Schwarzenberg’s army, which I hope to destroy before it recrosses my frontier.”  And two days later, after hearing the allied terms, he wrote that they would make the blood of every Frenchman boil with indignation, and that he would dictate his ultimatum at Troyes or Chatillon.  Of course, Caulaincourt kept these diatribes to himself, but his painfully constrained demeanour betrayed the secret that he longed for peace and that his hands were tied.

On all sides proofs were to be seen that Napoleon would never give up Belgium and the Rhine frontier.  When the allies (at the suggestion of Schwarzenberg, and with the approval of the Czar) sued for an armistice, he forbade his envoys to enter into any parleys until the allies agreed to accept the “natural frontiers” as the basis for a peace, and retired in the meantime on Alsace, Lorraine, and Holland.[419] These last conditions he agreed three days later to relax; but on the first point he was inexorable, and he knew that the military commissioners appointed to arrange the truce had no power to agree to the political article which he made a sine qua non.

Accordingly, no armistice was concluded, and his unbending attitude made a bad impression on the Emperor Francis, who, on the 27th, replied to his son-in-law in terms which showed that his blows were welding the Coalition more firmly together.[420]

In fact, while the plenipotentiaries at Chatillon were exchanging empty demands, a most important compact was taking form at Chaumont:  it was dated from the 1st of March, but definitively signed on the 9th.  Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia thereby bound themselves not to treat singly with France for peace, but to continue the war until France was brought back to her old frontiers, and the complete independence of Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Spain was secured.  Each of the four Powers must maintain 150,000 men in the field (exclusive of garrisons); and Britain agreed to aid her allies with equal yearly subsidies amounting in all to L5,000,000 for the year 1814.[421] The treaty would be only defensive if Napoleon accepted the allied terms formulated at Chatillon:  otherwise it would be offensive and hold good, if need be, for twenty years.

Undoubtedly this compact was largely the work of Castlereagh, whose tact and calmness had done wonders in healing schisms; but so intimate a union could never have been formed among previously discordant allies but for their overmastering fear of Napoleon.  Such a treaty was without parallel in European history; and the stringency of its clauses serves as the measure of the prowess and perversity of the French Emperor.