This reply of August 8th nearly severed the negotiations on the spot:  but Talleyrand persistently refused to grant the passports which Lauderdale demanded—­evidently in the hope that the Czar’s ratification of Oubril’s treaty would cause us to give up Sicily.[88] He was in error.  On September 3rd the news reached Paris that Alexander scornfully rejected his envoy’s handiwork.  Nevertheless, Napoleon refused to forego his claims to Sicily; and the closing days of Fox were embittered by the thought that this negotiation, the last hope of a career fruitful in disappointments, was doomed to failure.  After using his splendid eloquence for fifteen years in defence of the Revolution and its “heir,” he came to the bitter conclusion that liberty had miscarried in France, and that that land had bent beneath the yoke in order the more completely to subjugate the Continent.  He died on September 13th.

French historians, following an article in the “Moniteur” of November 26th, have often asserted that the death of Fox and the accession to power of the warlike faction changed the character of the negotiations.[89] Nothing can be further from the truth.  Not long before his end, Fox thus expressed to his nephew his despair of peace: 

“We can in honour do nothing without the full and bona fide consent of the Queen and Court of Naples; but, even exclusive of that consideration and of the great importance of Sicily, it is not so much the value of the point in dispute as the manner in which the French fly from their word that disheartens me.  It is not Sicily, but the shuffling, insincere way in which they act, that shows me that they are playing a false game; and in that case it would be very imprudent to make any concessions, which by any possibility could be thought inconsistent with our honour, or could furnish our allies with a plausible pretence for suspecting, reproaching, or deserting us.”

It is further to be noted that Lauderdale stayed on at Paris three weeks after the death of Fox; that he put forward no new demand, but required that Talleyrand should revert to his first promise of renouncing all claim to Sicily, and should treat conjointly with England and Russia.  It was in vain.  Napoleon’s final concessions were that the Bourbons, after losing Sicily, should have the Balearic Isles and be pensioned by Spain; that Russia should hold Corfu (as she already did); and that we should recover Hanover from Prussia, and keep Malta, the Cape, Tobago, and the three French towns in India; but, except Hanover, all of these were in our power.  On Sicily he would not bate one jot of his pretensions.  The negotiations were therefore broken off on October 6th, twelve days after Napoleon left Paris to marshal his troops against Prussia.[90] The whole affair revealed Napoleon’s determination to trick the allies into signing separate and disadvantageous treaties, and thus to regain by craft the ground which he had lost in fair fight at Maida.