Among these he reckoned—­so, at least, he wrote to Melzi—­“nearly 200,000” French soldiers from Arragon, Catalonia, and at Bayonne.  Even if we allow for his desire to encourage his officials in Italy, the estimate is curious.  Wellington at that time, it is true, had lessened his numbers by sending back across the Pyrenees all his Spanish troops, whose atrocities endangered that good understanding with the French peasantry which our great leader, for political motives, was determined to cultivate.[398] Yet, despite the shrinkage in numbers, he drove the French from the banks of the River Nive, and inflicted on them severe losses in desperate conflicts near Bayonne (December 9th-13th).  In fact, the intrenched camp in front of that town was now the sole barrier to Wellington’s advance northwards, and it was with difficulty that Soult clung to this position.  The peasantry, too, finding that they were far better treated by Wellington’s troops than by their own soldiers, began to favour the allied cause, with results that will shortly appear.  Yet these disquieting symptoms did not daunt Napoleon; for he now based his hopes of resisting the British advance on a compact which he had concluded with Ferdinand VII., the rightful King of Spain.

As soon as he returned to St. Cloud after the Leipzig campaign he made secret overtures to that unhappy exile;[399] and by the Treaty of Valencay (December 11th, 1813) he agreed to recognize him as King of the whole of Spain, provided that British and French troops evacuated that land.  His imagination ran riot in picturing the results of this treaty.  Ferdinand was to enter Spain; Suchet, then playing a losing game in Catalonia, was quietly to withdraw his columns through the Pyrenees, while Wellington would have his base of operations cut from under him, and thenceforth be a negligeable quantity.[400] These pleasing fancies all rested on the acceptance of the new treaty by the Spanish Regency and Cortes.  But, alas for Napoleon! they at once rejected it, declaring null and void all acts of Ferdinand while he was a prisoner, and forbidding all negotiations with France while French troops remained in the Peninsula (January 8th).

Equally disappointing were affairs in Italy.  On the 11th of January, Murat made an alliance with Austria, and promised to aid her with a corps of 30,000 Neapolitans, while she guaranteed him his throne and a slice of the Roman territory.  Napoleon directed Eugene, as soon as this bad news was confirmed, to prepare to fall back on the Alps.  But, in order to clog Murat’s movements, the Emperor resolved to make use of the spiritual power, which for six years he had slighted.  He gave orders that the aged Pope should be released from his detention at Fontainebleau, and hurried secretly to Rome.  “Let him burst on that place like a clap of thunder,” he wrote to Savary (January 21st).  But this stagey device was not to succeed.  Even now Napoleon insisted on conditions with which Pius VII. could not conscientiously comply, and he was still detained at Tarrascon when his captor was setting out for Elba.