of the Emperor; he had an existence separate and his own; he had stood aloof at the great and decisive crisis of Napoleon’s fate; he might be entrusted and employed afterwards—­he could never be loved.  The proposal of the Diet, therefore, was the reverse of agreeable to him whose favour it was expressly designed to conciliate.  Bernadotte, however, was powerful in the esteem of a great party in the French army, as well as among the old republicans of the state:  to have interfered against him would have been to kindle high wrath and hatred among all those officers who belonged to the ante-Buonapartean period; and, on the other hand, to oppose the free-will of the Swedes would have appeared extraordinary conduct indeed on the part of a sovereign who studiously represented himself as owing everything to the free-will of the French.  Sweden, finally, was still an independent state; and the events of the Peninsula were likely to impress the Emperor with a lively sense of the dangers of exciting a spirit of national aversion at the other extremity of Europe.  Napoleon consented to the acceptance of the proffered dignity by Bernadotte.  The Marshal was called on to sign a declaration, before he left Paris, that he would never bear arms against France.  He rejected this condition as incompatible with the connexion which Napoleon himself had just sanctioned him in forming with another state, and said he was sure the suggestion came not from the Emperor, who knew what were the duties of a sovereign, but from some lawyer.  Napoleon frowned darkly, and answered with an air of embarrassment, “Go; our destinies are about to be fulfilled.”  Bernadotte said he had not heard his words distinctly:  Napoleon repeated them; and they parted.  Bernadotte was received with an enthusiastic welcome in Stockholm; and, notwithstanding the unpleasant circumstances under which Napoleon had dismissed him, the French alliance continued to be maintained.  The private history of the transaction was not likely to be divulged at the time; and the natural as well as universal notion was, that Sweden, governed in effect by Marshal Bernadotte as crown prince, had become almost as mere a dependence of France as Naples under King Joachim Murat, or Westphalia under King Jerome Buonaparte.

The war, meanwhile, continued without interruption in the Peninsula; whither, but for his marriage, Napoleon would certainly have repaired in person after the peace of Schoenbrunn left him at ease on his German frontier.  Although the new alliance had charms enough to detain him in France, it by no means withdrew his attention from the state of that fair kingdom which still mocked Joseph with the shadow of a crown.  In the open field, indeed, the French appeared everywhere triumphant, except only where the British force from Portugal interfered, and in almost every district of Spain the fortresses were in their hands; yet the spirit of the people remained wholly unsubdued.  The invaders could not count an inch of soil their own beyond their outposts.  Their troops continued to be harassed and thinned by the indomitable guerillas or partisan companies; and, even in the immediate neighbourhood of their strongest garrisons, the people assembled to vote for representatives in the Cortes, which had at last been summoned to meet in Cadiz, there to settle the national government, during the King’s absence, on a regular footing.