About the beginning of a year, at one of the Emperor’s levees, I happened to be next to the Chamberlain, Count d’Arberg, who had been doing duty at Valencey, near the persons of the princes of Spain. When the Emperor approached, he enquired if these princes conducted themselves with propriety, and added; “You have brought me a very pretty letter; but between ourselves, it was you who wrote it for them.” D’Arberg assured him, that he was altogether unacquainted even with the nature of its contents. “Well,” said the Emperor, “a son could not write more cordially to his father.”
“When our situation in Spain,” observed the Emperor, “proved dangerous, I more than once proposed to Ferdinand to return and reign over his people; that we should openly carry on war against each other: and that the contest should be decided by the fate of arms.” “No,” answered the prince, who seems to have been well advised, and never deviated from that way of thinking. “My country is agitated by political disturbances; I should but multiply its embarrassments: I might become their victim, and lose my head upon the scaffold. I remain; but, if you will choose a wife for me, if you will grant me your protection and the support of your arms, I shall set out and prove a faithful ally.”
"At a later period, during our disasters, and towards the end of 1813, I yielded to that proposal, and Ferdinand’s marriage with Joseph’s eldest daughter was decided; but circumstances were then no longer the same, and Ferdinand was desirous that the marriage should be deferred. “You can no longer,” he observed, support me with your arms, and I ought not to make my wife a title of exclusion in the eyes of my people." “He left me,” continued the Emperor, “as it seemed, with every intention of good faith, for he adhered to the principles which he avowed on his departure, until the events of Fontainebleau.”
The Emperor declared that, had the affairs of 1814 turned out differently, he would unquestionably have accomplished his marriage with Joseph’s daughter.
The Emperor, in reverting to these affairs, said, that the impolicy of his own conduct was irrevocably decided by the results; but that independently of this kind of proof, depending upon consequences, he had to reproach himself with serious faults in the execution of his plans. One of the greatest was that of considering the dethronement of the dynasty of the Bourbons as a matter of importance, and of maintaining as the basis of this system, for its successor, precisely that man, who from his qualities and character, was certain to cause its failure.
During the meeting at Bayonne, Ferdinand’s former preceptor and his principal counsellor (Escoiquiz) at once perceiving the vast projects entertained by the Emperor, and pleading the cause of his master, said to him: "You wish to create for yourself a kind of Herculean labour, when you have but child’s play in hand. You wish to rid yourselves of the Bourbons of Spain; why should you be apprehensive of them? They have ceased to exist; they are no longer French. You have nothing to fear from them; they are altogether aliens with respect to your nation and your manners. You have here Madame de Montmorency, and some new ladies of your Court; they are not more acquainted with the one than with the other, and view them all with equal indifference." The Emperor unfortunately formed a different resolution.
I took the liberty of telling him, I had been assured by some Spaniards, that, if the national pride had been respected, and the Spanish junta held at Madrid instead of Bayonne, or even, if Charles IV. had been sent off and Ferdinand retained, the revolution would have been popular, and affairs would have taken another turn. The Emperor entertained no doubt of it, and agreed that the enterprize had been imprudently undertaken, and that many circumstances might have been better conducted. “Charles IV.,” said he, "was, however, too stale for the Spaniards. Ferdinand should have been considered in the same light. The plan most worthy of me, and the best suited to my project, would have been a kind of mediation like that of Switzerland. I ought to have given a liberal constitution to the Spanish nation, and charged Ferdinand with its execution. If he had acted with good faith, Spain must have prospered and harmonized with our new manners. The great object would have been obtained, and France would have acquired an intimate ally and an addition of power truly formidable. Had Ferdinand, on the contrary, proved faithless to his new engagements, the Spaniards themselves would not have failed to dismiss him, and would have applied to me for a ruler in his place.
“At all events,” concluded the Emperor, "that unfortunate war in Spain was a real affliction, and the first cause of the calamities of France. After my conferences at Erfurt with Alexander, England ought to have been compelled to make peace by the force of arms or of reason. She had lost the esteem of the continent; her attack upon Copenhagen had disgusted the public mind, while I distinguished myself at that moment by every contrary advantage, when that disastrous affair of Spain presented itself to effect a sudden change against me and reinstate England in the public estimation. She was enabled, from that moment, to continue the war; the trade with South America was thrown open to her; she formed an army for herself in the peninsula, and next became the victorious agent, the main point, of all the plots which were hatched on the continent. All this effected my ruin.
"I was then assailed with imputations, for which, however, I had given no cause. History will do me justice. I was charged in that affair with perfidy, with laying snares, and with bad faith, and yet I was completely innocent. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, never have I broken any engagement, or violated my promise, either with regard to Spain or any other power.
"The world will one day be convinced, that in the principal transactions relative to Spain I was completely a stranger to all the domestic intrigues of its Court: that I broke no promise made either to Charles IV. or to Ferdinand VII.: that I violated no engagement with the father or the son: that I made use of no falsehoods to entice them both to Bayonne, but that they both strove which should be the first there. When I saw them at my feet and was enabled to form a correct opinion of their total incapacity, I beheld with compassion the fate of a great people; I eagerly seized the singular opportunity, held out to me by fortune, for regenerating Spain, rescuing her from the yoke of England, and intimately uniting her with our system. It was, in my conception, laying the fundamental basis of the tranquillity, and security of Europe. But I was far from employing for that purpose, as it has been reported, any base and paltry stratagems. If I erred, it was, on the contrary, by daring openness and extraordinary energy. Bayonne was not the scene of premeditated ambush, but of a vast master-stroke of state policy. I could have preserved myself from these imputations by a little hypocrisy, or by giving up the Prince of the Peace to the fury of the people; but the idea appeared horrible to me, and struck me as if I was to receive the price of blood. Besides, it must also be acknowledged that Murat did me a great deal of mischief in the whole affair.