“He is excessively ugly, with a fat swollen sallow face, very corpulent, besides short and entirely without figure.  His great eyes roll gloomily around; the expression of his features is severe; he looks like the incarnation of fate:  only his mouth is well shaped, and his teeth are good.  He was extremely polite, talked to the Queen a long time alone....  Again, after dinner, he had a long conversation with the Queen, who also seemed pretty well satisfied with the result."[150]

Queen Louisa’s verdict about his appearance was more favourable; she admired his head “as that of a Caesar.”  With winsome boldness inspired by patriotism, she begged for Magdeburg.  Taken aback by her beauty and frankness, Napoleon had recourse to compliments about her dress.  “Are we to talk about fashion, at such a time?” was her reply.  Again she pleaded, and again he fell back on vapidities.  Nevertheless, her appeals to his generosity seemed to be thawing his statecraft, when the entrance of that unlucky man, her husband, gave the conversation a colder tone.  The dinner, however, passed cheerfully enough; and, according to French accounts, Napoleon graced the conclusion of dessert by offering her a rose.  Her woman’s wit flew to the utterance:  “May I consider it a token of friendship, and that you grant my request for Magdeburg?” But he was on his guard, parried her onset with a general remark as to the way in which such civilities should be taken, and turned the conversation.  Then, as if he feared the result of a second interview, he hastened to end matters with the Prussian negotiators.[151]

He thus described the interview in a letter to Josephine: 

    “I have had to be on my guard against her efforts to oblige me to
    some concessions for her husband; but I have been gallant, and
    have held to my policy.”

This was only too clear on the following day, when the Queen again dined with the sovereigns.

“Napoleon,” says the Countess von Voss, “seemed malicious and spiteful, and the conversation was brief and constrained.  After dinner the Queen again conversed apart with him.  On taking leave she said to him that she went away feeling it deeply that he should have deceived her.  My poor Queen:  she is quite in despair.”

When conducted to her carriage by Talleyrand and Duroc, she sank down overcome by emotion.  Yet, amid her tears and humiliation, the old Prussian pride had flashed forth in one of her replies as the rainbow amidst the rain-storm.  When Napoleon expressed his surprise that she should have dared to make war on him with means so utterly inadequate, she at once retorted:  “Sire, I must confess to Your Majesty, the glory of Frederick the Great had misled us as to our real strength”—­a retort which justly won the praise of that fastidious connoisseur, Talleyrand, for its reminder of Prussia’s former greatness and the transitoriness of all human grandeur.[152]