NAPOLEON RECEIVING QUEEN LOUISE OF PRUSSIA, JULY 6, 1807.
By Gosse. Versailles gallery.
Just before the negotiation were completed, Queen Louise arrived, and tried to use her influence with Napoleon to obtain at least Magdeburg. Napoleon accused the queen to Las Cases of trying to win him at first by a scene of high tragedy. But when they came to meet at dinner, her policy was quite another. “The Queen of Prussia dined with me to-day,” wrote Napoleon to the empress on July 7th. “I had to defend myself against being obliged to make some further concessions to her husband; ...” and the next day, “The Queen of Prussia is really charming; she is full of coquetterie towards me. But do not be jealous; I am an oilcloth, off which all that runs. It would cost me too dear to play the galant.”
The intercessions of the queen really hurried on the treaty. When she learned that it had been signed, and her wishes not granted, she was indignant, wept bitterly, and refused to go to the second dinner to which Napoleon had invited her. Alexander was obliged to go himself to decide her. After the dinner, when she withdrew, Napoleon accompanied her. On the staircase she stopped.
“Can it be,” she said, “that after I have had the happiness of seeing so near me the man of the age and of history, I am not to have the liberty and satisfaction of assuring him that he has attached me for life?...”
“Madame, I am to be pitied,” said the emperor gravely. “It is my evil star.”
By the treaty of Tilsit the map of the continent was transformed. Prussia lost half her territory. Dantzic was made a free town. Magdeburg went to France. Hesse-Cassel and the Prussian possessions west of the Elbe went to form the kingdom of Westphalia. The King of Saxony received the grand duchy of Warsaw. Finland and the Danubian principalities were to go to Alexander in exchange for certain Ionian islands and the Gulf of Cattaro in Dalmatia.
Of far more importance than this change of boundaries was the private understanding which the emperors came to at Tilsit. They agreed that the Ottoman Empire was to remain as it was unless they saw fit to change its boundaries. Russia might occupy the principalities as far as the Danube. Peace was to be made, if possible, with England, and the two powers were to work together to bring it about. If they failed, Russia was to force Sweden to close her ports to Great Britain, and Napoleon was to do the same in Denmark, Portugal, and the States of the Pope. Nothing was to be done about Poland by Napoleon.
According to popular belief, the secret treaty of Tilsit included plans much more startling: the two emperors pledged themselves to drive the Bourbons from Spain and the Braganzas from Portugal, and to replace them by Bonapartes; give Russia Turkey in Europe and as much of Asia as she wanted; end the temporal power of the Pope; place France in Egypt; shut the English from the Mediterranean; and to undertake several other equally ambitious enterprises.