Alexander expressed his gratification at the friendship which proffered such a request and his desire for the founding of a Napoleonic House.  Further than this he did not go:  and eight days after his return to St. Petersburg his only marriageable sister, Catherine, was affianced to the heir to the Duchy of Oldenburg.  This event, it is true, was decided by the Dowager Empress; but no one, least of all Napoleon, could harbour any doubts as to its significance.

In truth, Napoleon’s chief triumphs at Erfurt were social and literary.  His efforts to dazzle German princes and denationalize two of her leading thinkers were partly successful.  Goethe and Wieland bowed before his greatness.  To the former Napoleon granted a lengthy interview.  He flattered the aged poet at the outset by the words, “You are a man”:  he then talked about several works in a way that Goethe thought very just; and he criticised one passage of the poet’s youthful work, “Werther,” as untrue to nature, with which Goethe agreed.  On Voltaire’s “Mahomet” he heaped censure, for its unworthy portraiture of the conqueror of the East and its ineffective fatalism.  “These pieces belong to an obscure age.  Besides, what do they mean with their fatalism?  Politics is fatalism.”  The significance of this saying was soon to be emphasized, so that misapprehension was impossible.  After witnessing Voltaire’s “La Mort de Cesar,” Napoleon suggested that the poet ought to write a tragedy in a grander style than Voltaire’s, so as to show how the world would have benefited if the great Roman had had time to carry out his vast plans.

Finally, Goethe was invited to come to Paris, where he would find abundant materials for his poetic creations.  Fortunately, Goethe was able to plead his age in excuse; and the world was therefore spared the sight of a great genius saddled with an imperial commission and writing a Napoleonized version of Caesar’s exploits and policy.  But the pressing character of the invitation reveals the Emperor’s dissatisfaction with his French poetasters and his intention to denationalize German literature.  He had a dim perception that Teutonic idealism was a dangerous foe, inasmuch as it kept alive the sense of nationality which he was determined to obliterate.  He was right.  The last and most patriotic of Schiller’s works, “Wilhelm Tell,” the impassioned discourses of Fichte, the efforts of the new patriotic league, the Tugendbund, and last, but not least, the memory of the murdered Palm, all these were influences that baffled bayonets and diplomacy.  Conquer and bargain as he might, he could not grapple with the impalpable forces of the era that was now dawning.  The younger generation throbbed responsive to the teachings of Fichte, the appeals of Stein, and the exploits of the Spaniards; it was blind to the splendours of Erfurt:  and it heard with grief, but with no change of conviction, that Goethe and Wieland had accepted from Napoleon the cross of the Legion of Honour, and that too on the anniversary of the Battle of Jena.