[Footnote 6:  Count Mollien.]

[Footnote 7:  The Duke of Gaeta.]

This minister was listened to; the emperor surveyed him with a smiling air, accompanied with one of his familiar caresses.  He imagined that he had secured conviction, but Napoleon said to him,—­“So you think that I shall not be able to find a paymaster to discharge the expenses of the war?” The duke endeavoured to learn upon whom the burden was to fall, when the emperor, by a single word, disclosing all the grandeur of his designs, closed the lips of his astonished minister.

He estimated, however, but too accurately all the difficulties of his enterprise.  It was that, perhaps, which drew upon him the reproach of availing himself of a method which he had rejected in the Austrian war, and of which the celebrated Pitt had set the example in 1793.

Towards the end of 1811, the prefect of police at Paris learnt, it was said, that a printer was secretly counterfeiting Russian bank-bills; he ordered him to be arrested; the printer resisted; but in the result his house was broken into, and himself taken before the magistrate, whom he astonished by his assurance, and still more by his appeal from the minister of police.  This printer was instantly released:  it has even been added, that he continued his counterfeiting employment; and that, from the moment of our first advance into Lithuania, we propagated the report that we had gained possession at Wilna of several millions of Russian bank-bills in the military chests of the hostile army.

Whatever may have been the origin of this counterfeit money, Napoleon contemplated it with extreme repugnance; it is even unknown whether he resolved on making any use of it; at least, it is certain that during the period of our retreat, and when we abandoned Wilna, the greater part of these bills were found there untouched, and burnt by his orders.

CHAP.  II.

Prince Poniatowski, however, to whom this expedition appeared to hold out the prospect of a throne, generously united his exertions with those of the emperor’s ministers in the attempt to demonstrate its danger.  Love of country was in this Polish prince a great and noble passion; his life and death have proved it; but it never infatuated him.  He depicted Lithuania as an impracticable desert; its nobility as already become half Russian; the character of its inhabitants as cold and backward:  but the impatient emperor interrupted him; he required information for the sake of conducting the enterprise, and not to be deterred from it.