In the early part of 1806 Napoleon might flatter himself with his brilliant success as a match-maker.  Yet, after all, he was less concerned with the affairs of Hymen than with those of Mars and Mercury.  He longed to be at Paris for the settlement of finances; and he burned to hear of the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples.  For this last he had already sent forth his imperious mandates from Vienna; and, after a brief sojourn at the Swabian capitals, he set out for Paris, where he arrived incognito at midnight of January 26th.  During his absence of one hundred and twenty-five days he had captured or destroyed two armies, stricken a mighty coalition to the heart, shattered the Hapsburg Power, and revolutionized the Germanic system by establishing two Napoleonic kingdoms in its midst.

Yet, as if nothing had been done, and all his hopes and thoughts lay in the future, he summoned his financial advisers to a council for eight o’clock in the morning.  Scarcely did he deign to notice their congratulations on his triumphs.  “We have,” he said, “to deal with more serious questions:  it seems that the greatest dangers of the State were not in Austria:  let us hear the report of the Minister of the Treasury.”  It then appeared that Barbe-Marbois had been concerned in risky financial concerns with the Court of Spain, through a man named Ouvrard.  The Minister therefore was promptly dismissed, and Mollien then and there received his post.  The new Minister states in his memoirs that the money, which had sufficed to carry the French armies from the English Channel to the Rhine, had been raised on extravagant terms, largely on loans on the national domains.  In fact, it had been an open question whether victory would come promptly enough to avert a wholesale crash at Paris.

So bad were the finances that, though 40,000,000 francs were poured every year into France as subsidies from Italy and Spain, yet loans of 120,000,000 francs had been incurred in order to meet current expenses.[64] It would exceed the limits of our space to describe by what forceful means Napoleon restored the financial equilibrium and assuaged the commercial crisis resulting from the war with England.  Mollien soon had reason to know that, so far from avoiding Continental wars, the Emperor thenceforth seemed almost to provoke them, and that the motto—­War must support war—­fell far short of the truth.  Napoleon’s wars, always excepting his war with England, supported the burdens of an armed peace.  In this respect his easy and gainful triumph over Austria was a disaster for France and Europe.  It beckoned him on to Jena and Tilsit.