on this scheme.  He was irritated by the continued resistance of Great Britain, and thought to terrify us into surrender by means of those oriental enterprises which convinced our statesmen that we must fight on for dear life.  He also desired to restore the harmony of his relations with Alexander.  For, in truth, the rapturous harmonies of Tilsit had soon been marred by discord.  Alexander did not withdraw his troops from the Danubian provinces; whereupon Napoleon declined to evacuate Silesia; and the friction resulting from this wary balancing of interests was increased, when, at the close of 1807, a formal proposal was sent from Paris that, if Russia retained those provinces, Silesia should be at the disposal of France.[197] The dazzling vistas opened up to Alexander’s gaze at Tilsit were thus shrouded by a sordid and distasteful bargain, which he hotly repelled.  To repair this false step, Napoleon now wrote the alluring letter quoted above; and the Czar exclaimed on perusing it:  “Ah, this is the language of Tilsit.”

Yet, it may be questioned whether Napoleon desired to press on an immediate partition of the Ottoman Power.  His letter invited the Czar to two great enterprises, the conquest of Finland and the invasion of Persia and India.  The former by itself was destined to tax Russia’s strength.  Despite Alexander’s offer of a perpetual guarantee for the Finnish constitution and customs, that interesting people opposed a stubborn resistance.  Napoleon must also have known that Russia’s forces were then wholly unequal to the invasion of India; and his invitation to Alexander to engage in two serious enterprises certainly had the effect of postponing the partition of Turkey.  Delay was all in his favour, if he was to gain the lion’s share of the spoils.  Russian troops were ready on the banks of the Danube; but he was not as yet fully prepared.  His hold on Dalmatia, Ragusa, and Corfu was not wholly assured.  Sicily and Malta still defied him; and not until he seized Sicily could he gain the control of the Mediterranean—­“the constant aim of my policy.”  Only when that great sea had become a French lake could he hope to plant himself firmly in Albania, Thessaly, Greece, Crete, Egypt, and Syria.

For the present, then, the Czar was beguiled with the prospect of an eastern expedition; and, while Russian troops were overrunning Finland, Napoleon sought to conquer Sicily and reduce Spain to the rank of a feudatory State.  From this wider point of view, he looked on the Iberian Peninsula merely as a serviceable base for a greater enterprise, the conquest of the East.  This is proved by a letter that he wrote to Decres, Minister of Marine and of the Colonies, from Bayonne on May 17th, 1808, when the Spanish affair seemed settled:  “There is not much news from India.  England is in great penury there, and the arrival of an expedition [from France] would ruin that colony from top to bottom.  The more I reflect on this step, the less inconvenience I see in taking it.”  Two days later he wrote to Murat that money must be found for naval preparations at the Spanish ports:  “I must have ships, for I intend striking a heavy blow towards the end of the season.”  But at the close of June he warned Decres that as Spanish affairs were going badly, he must postpone his design of despatching a fleet far from European waters.[198]