to keep his sword in the scabbard.  The change, it is true, sadly dulled the warlike ardour of his army; but it could not be called desertion of Russia and Austria.[44] The disgrace came later, when, on Christmas Day, Haugwitz reached Berlin, and described to the King and Ministers his interview with Napoleon in the palace of Schoenbrunn, and the treaty which the victor then and there offered to Prussia at the sword’s point.

For most men a great victory such as Austerlitz would have brought a brief spell of rest, especially after the ceaseless toils and anxieties of the previous fortnight.  Yet now, after ridding himself of all fear of Austria, Napoleon at once used every device of his subtle statecraft to dissolve the nascent coalition.  And Fortune had willed that, when flushed with triumph, he should have to deal with a timorous time-server.

It is the curse of a policy of keeping up a dainty balance in a hurricane that it unmans the balancer, until at last the peacemaker resembles a juggler.  A decade of compromise and evasion of difficulties had enfeebled the spirit of Prussia, until the hardest trial for her King was to take any step that could not be retraced.  He had often spoken “feelingly, if not energetically,” of the predicaments of his position between France, England, and Russia.[45] And, as in the case of that other bon pere de famille, Louis XVI., whom Nature framed for a farmhouse and Fate tossed into a revolution, his lack of foresight and resolution took the heart out of his advisers and turned statesmen into trimmers.  Even before the news of Austerlitz reached the ears of Talleyrand and Haugwitz at Vienna, the bearer of Prussia’s ultimatum was posing as the friend of France.  On all occasions he wore the cordon of the Legion of Honour; and while the hosts of East and West were in the death-grapple on the Pratzenberg, he strove to convince the French Foreign Minister that the Prussians had entered Hanover only in order to keep the peace in North Germany; that, as Russians had traversed Prussian territory, the French would, of course, be equally free to do so; that Frederick William objected to the descent of any English force in Hanover, which belonged de facto to France; and finally that the Treaty of Potsdam was not a treaty at all, but merely a declaration with the “offer of Prussia’s good offices and of mediation, but without any mingling of hostile intentions.”  Well might Talleyrand write to Napoleon:  “I am very satisfied with M. Haugwitz."[46]

Napoleon’s victory over Prussian diplomacy was therefore won, even before the lightning-stroke of Austerlitz blasted the Third Coalition.  Haugwitz began his conference with the victor at Schoenbrunn on December 13th, by offering Frederick William’s congratulations on his triumph at Austerlitz, to which the Emperor replied by a sarcastic query whether, if the result of that battle had been different, he would have spoken at all about the friendship of his