with domestic affairs, and his rebuff to Napoleon’s oriental schemes had not yet reached Paris.  As for the British Ministry, it was trembling from the attacks of the Grenvilles and Windhams on the one side, and from the equally vigorous onslaughts of Fox, who, when the Government proposed an addition to the armed forces, brought forward the stale platitude that a large standing army “was a dangerous instrument of influence in the hands of the Crown.”  When England’s greatest orator thus impaired the unity of national feeling, and her only statesman, Pitt, remained in studied seclusion, the First Consul might well feel assured of the impotence of the Island Power, and view the bickering of her politicians with the same quiet contempt that Philip felt for the Athens of Demosthenes.

But while his prospects in Europe and the East were roseate, the western horizon bulked threateningly with clouds.  The news of the disasters in St. Domingo reached Paris in the first week of the year 1803, and shortly afterwards came tidings of the ferment in the United States and the determination of their people to resist the acquisition of Louisiana by France.  If he persevered with this last scheme, he would provoke war with that republic and drive it into the arms of England.  From that blunder his statecraft instinctively saved him, and he determined to sell Louisiana to the United States.

So unheroic a retreat from the prairies of the New World must be covered by a demonstration towards the banks of the Nile and of the Indus.  It was ever his plan to cover retreat in one direction by brilliant diversions in another:  only so could he enthrall the imagination of France, and keep his hold on her restless capital.  And the publication of Sebastiani’s report, with its glowing description of the fondness cherished for France alike by Moslems, Syrian Christians, and the Greeks of Corfu; its declamation against the perfidy of General Stuart; and its incitation to the conquest of the Levant, furnished him with the motive power for effecting a telling transformation scene and banishing all thoughts of losses in the West.[243]

The official publication of this report created a sensation even in France, and was not the bagatelle which M. Thiers has endeavoured to represent it.[244] But far greater was the astonishment at Downing Street, not at the facts disclosed by the report—­for Merry’s note had prepared our Ministers for them—­but rather at the official avowal of hostile designs.  At once our Government warned Whitworth that he must insist on our retaining Malta.  He was also to protest against the publication of such a document, and to declare that George III. could not “enter into any further discussion relative to Malta until he received a satisfactory explanation.”  Far from offering it, Napoleon at once complained of our non-evacuation of Alexandria and Malta.