Such was the news which our envoy heard, after forcing his way to Oubril’s presence, just as the latter was hurrying off to St. Petersburg.  At that city an important change had taken place; Czartoryski had retired in favour of Baron Budberg, who was less favourable to a close alliance with England; and it appears certain that Oubril would not have broken through his instructions had he not known of this change.  What other motives led him to break faith with England, Sicily, and Spain are not clearly known.  He claimed that the new order of things in Germany rendered it highly important to get the French troops out of that land.  Doubtless this was so; but even that benefit would have been dearly bought at the price of disgrace to the Czar.[83]

Leaving for the present Oubril to face his indignant master, we turn to notice an epoch-making change, the details of which were settled at Paris in the midst of the negotiations with England and Russia.  On July 17th was quietly signed the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine, that destroyed the old Germanic Empire.

Some such event had long been expected.  The Holy Roman Empire, after a thousand years of life, had been stricken unto death at Austerlitz.  The seizure of Hanover by Prussia had led the King of Sweden to declare that he, for his Pomeranian lands, would take no more share in the deliberations of the senile Diet at Ratisbon which took no notice of that outrage.  Moreover, Ratisbon was now merely the second city of Bavaria, whose King might easily deny to that body its local habitation; and the use of the term Germanic Confederation in the Treaty of Pressburg sounded the death-knell of an Empire which Voltaire with equal wit and truth had described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.  In the new age of trenchant realities how could that venerable figment survive—­where the election of the Emperor was a sham, his coronation a mere parade of tattered robes before a crowd of landless Serenities, and where the Diet was largely concerned with regulating the claims of the envoys of princes to sit on seats of red cloth or on the less honourable green cloth, or with apportioning the traditional thirty-seven dishes of the imperial banquet so that the last should be borne by a Westphalian envoy?[84]

Among these spectral survivals of an outworn life the incursion of Napoleon across the Rhine had aroused a panic not unlike that which the sturdy form of AEneas cast on the gibbering shades of the Greeks in the mourning fields of Hades.  And when, on August 1st, 1806, the heir to the Revolution notified to the Diet at Ratisbon that neither he nor the States of South and Central Germany any longer recognized the existence of the old Empire, feebler protests arose than came from the straining throats of the scared comrades of Agamemnon.  The Diet itself uttered no audible sound.  The Emperor, Francis II., forthwith declared that he laid down his crown, absolved all the electors and princes from their allegiance, and retired within the bounds of the Austrian Empire.