and precedence which starched the men and agitated the minds of their consorts!  Yet, while soaring above these rules with easy grace, the First Consul imposed them rigidly on the crowd of eager courtiers.  On these burning questions he generally took the advice of M. de Remusat, whose tact and acquaintance with Court customs were now of much service; while the sprightly wit of his young wife attracted Josephine, as it has all readers of her piquant but rather spiteful memoirs.  In her pages we catch a glimpse of the life of that singular Court; the attempts at aping the inimitable manners of the ancien regime; the pompous nullity of the second and third Consuls; the tawdry magnificence of the costumes; the studied avoidance of any word that implied even a modicum of learning or a distant acquaintance with politics; the nervous preoccupation about Napoleon’s moods and whims; the graceful manners of Josephine that rarely failed to charm away his humours, except when she herself had been outrageously slighted for some passing favourite; above all, the leaden dullness of conversation, which drew from Chaptal the confession that life there was the life of a galley slave.  And if we seek for the hidden reason why a ruler eminently endowed with mental force and freshness should have endured so laboured a masquerade, we find it in his strikingly frank confession to Madame de Remusat:  It is fortunate that the French are to be ruled through their vanity. <

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CHAPTER XIV

THE PEACE OF AMIENS

The previous chapter dealt in the main with the internal affairs of France and the completion of Napoleon’s power:  it touched on foreign affairs only so far as to exhibit the close connection between the First Consul’s diplomatic victory over England and his triumph over the republican constitution in his adopted country.  But it is time now to review the course of the negotiations which led up to the Treaty of Amiens.

In order to realize the advantages which France then had over England, it will be well briefly to review the condition of our land at that time.  Our population was far smaller than that of the French Republic.  France, with her recent acquisitions in Belgium, the Rhineland, Savoy, Nice, and Piedmont, numbered nearly 40,000,000 inhabitants:  but the census returns of Great Britain for 1801 showed only a total of 10,942,000 souls, while the numbers for Ireland, arguing from the rather untrustworthy return of 1813, may be reckoned at about six and a half millions.  The prodigious growth of the English-speaking people had not as yet fully commenced either in the motherland, the United States, or in the small and struggling settlements of Canada and Australia.  Its future expansion was to be assured by industrial and social causes, and by the events considered in this and in subsequent chapters.  It was a small people that had for several months faced with undaunted front the gigantic power of Bonaparte and that of the Armed Neutrals.