“The Russian emperor,” he said, “was the only sovereign who pressed upon the summit of that colossal edifice.  Replete with youth and animation, the strength of his rival was constantly augmenting, while his was already on the decline.”  It seemed to him that Alexander, on the banks of the Niemen, only waited the intelligence of his death, to possess himself of the sceptre of Europe, and snatch it from the hands of his feeble successor.  “While all Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Prussia, and the whole of Germany, were marching under his banners, why should he delay to anticipate the danger, and consolidate the fabric of the great empire, by driving back Alexander and the Russian power, enfeebled as they would be by the loss of all Poland, beyond the Boristhenes?”

Such were his sentiments, pronounced in secret confidence; they, doubtless, comprised the true motives of that terrible war.  As to his precipitation in commencing it, he was, it would seem, hurried on by the instinct of his approaching death.  An acrid humour diffused through his blood, and to which he imputed his irascibility, ("but without which,” added he, “battles are not to be gained,”) undermined his constitution.

A profound knowledge of the organization and mysteries of the human frame would probably enable us to decide whether this concealed malady was not one of the causes of that restless activity which hurried on the course of events, and in which originated both his elevation and his fall.

This internal enemy testified its presence, more and more, by an internal pain, and by the violent spasms of the stomach which it inflicted.  Even in 1806, at Warsaw, during one of its agonizing crises, Napoleon was[15] heard to exclaim, “that he carried about with him the germ of premature dissolution; and that he should die of the same malady as his father.”

[Footnote 15:  By the count Lobau.]

Short rides in hunting, even the most gentle gallop of his horse, already began to fatigue him:  how then was he to support the long journeys, and the rapid and violent movements preparatory to battles?  Thus it was, that while the greater part of those who surrounded him concluded him to be impelled into Russia by his vast ambition, by his restless spirit and his love of war, he in solitude, and almost unobserved, was poising the fearful responsibilities of the enterprise, and urged by necessity, he only made up his mind to it after a course of painful hesitation.

At length, on the 3d of August, 1811, at an audience in the midst of all the ambassadors of Europe, he declared himself; but the burst of indignation which was the presage of war, was an additional proof of his repugnance to commence it.  It might be that the defeat which the Russians had just sustained at Routschouk had inflated his hopes; perhaps he imagined that he might, by menace, arrest the preparations of Alexander.