The Czar was made of more pliable stuff. Moreover, he now cherished one sentiment that brought him into sympathy with Napoleon, namely, hatred of England. He certainly had grave cause for complaint. We had done nothing to help the allies in the Polish campaign except to send a few cruisers and 60,000 muskets, which last did not reach the Swedish and Russian ports until the war was over. True, we had gone out of our way to attack Constantinople at his request; but that attack had failed; and our attitude towards his Turkish policy was one of veiled suspicion, varied with moral lectures.[141] As for the loan of five millions sterling which the Czar had asked us to guarantee, we had put him off, our envoy finally reminding him that it had been of the first importance to help Austria to move. Worst of all, our cruisers had seized some Russian merchantmen coming out of French ports, and despite protests from St. Petersburg the legality of that seizure was maintained. Thus, in a war which concerned our very existence we had not rendered him a single practical service, and yet strained the principles of maritime law at the expense of Russian commerce.[142]
Over against our policy of blundering delay there was that of Napoleon, prompt, keen, and ever victorious. The whole war had arisen out of the conflict of these two Powers; and Napoleon had never ceased to declare that it was essentially a struggle between England and the Continent. After Eylau Alexander was proof against these arguments; but now the triumphant energy of Napoleon and the stolid apathy of England brought about a quite bewildering change in Russian policy. Delicate advances having been made by the two Emperors, an interview was arranged to take place on a raft moored in the middle of the River Niemen (June 25th).
"I hate the English as much as you do, and I will second you in all your actions against them." Such are said to have been the words with which Alexander greeted Napoleon as they stepped on to the raft. Whereupon the conqueror replied: "In that case all can be arranged and peace is made."[143] As the two Emperors were unaccompanied at that first interview, it is difficult to see on what evidence this story rests. It is most unlikely that either Emperor would divulge the remarks of the other on that occasion; and the words attributed to Alexander seem highly impolitic. For what was his position at this time? He was striving to make the best of a bad case against an opponent whose genius he secretly feared. Besides, we know for certain that he was most anxious to postpone his rupture with England for some months.[144] All desire for an immediate break was on Napoleon's side.
We can therefore only guess at what transpired, from the vague descriptions of the two men themselves. They are characteristic enough: "I never had more prejudices against anyone than against him," said Alexander afterwards; "but, after three-quarters of an hour of conversation, they all disappeared like a dream"; and later he exclaimed: "Would that I had seen him sooner: the veil is torn aside and the time of error is past." As for Napoleon, he wrote to Josephine: "I have just seen the Emperor Alexander: I have been very pleased with him: he is a very handsome, good, and young Emperor: he has an intellect above what is commonly attributed to him."[145] The tone of these remarks strikes the keynote of all the conversations that followed. At the next day's conference, also held in the sumptuous pavilion erected on the raft, the King of Prussia was present; but towards him Napoleon's demeanour was cold and threatening. He upbraided him with the war, lectured him on the duty of a king to his people, and bade him dismiss Hardenberg. Frederick William listened for the most part in silence; his nature was too stiff and straightforward to practise any Byzantine arts; but when his trusty Minister was attacked, he protested that he should not know how to replace him. Napoleon had foreseen the plea and at once named three men who would give better advice. Among them was the staunch patriot Stein!
From the ensuing conferences the King was almost wholly excluded. They were held in a part of the town of Tilsit which was neutralized for that purpose, as also for the guards and diplomatists of the three sovereigns. There, too, lived the two Emperors in closest intercourse, while on most days the Prussian King rode over from a neighbouring village to figure as a sad, reproachful guest at the rides, parades, and dinners that cemented the new Franco-Russian alliance. Yet, amid all the melodious raptures of Alexander over Napoleon's newly discovered virtues, it is easy to detect the clinging ground-tone of Muscovite ambition. An event had occurred which excited the hopes of both Emperors. At the close of May, the Sultan Selim was violently deposed by the Janissaries who clamoured for more vigorous measures against the Russians. Never did news come more opportunely for Napoleon than this, which reached him at Tilsit on, or before, June the 24th. He is said to have exclaimed to the Czar with a flash of dramatic fatalism: "It is a decree of Providence which tells me that the Turkish Empire can no longer exist."[146]
Certain it is that the most potent spell exerted by the great conqueror over his rival was a guarded invitation to share in some future partition of the Turkish Empire. That scheme had fascinated Napoleon ever since the year 1797, when he gazed on the Adriatic. Though laid aside for a time in 1806, when he roused the Turks against Russia, it was never lost sight of; and now, on the basis of a common hatred of England and a common desire to secure the spoils of the Ottoman Power, the stately fabric of the Franco-Russian alliance was reared.
On his side, Alexander required some assurance that Poland should not be reconstituted in its integrity—a change that would tear from Russia the huge districts stretching almost up to Riga, Smolensk, and Kiev, which were still Polish in sympathy. Here Napoleon reassured him, at least in part. He would not re-create the great kingdom of Poland: he would merely carve out from Prussia the greater part of her Polish possessions.
These two important questions being settled, it only remained for the Czar to plead for the King of Prussia, to acknowledge Napoleon's domination as Emperor of the West, while he himself, as autocrat of the East, secured a better western boundary for Russia. At first he strove to gain for Frederick William the restoration of several of his lands west of the Elbe. This championship was not wholly disinterested; for it is now known that the Czar had set his heart on a great part of Prussian Poland.
In truth, he was a sufficiently good disciple of the French revolutionists to plead very cogently his claims to a "natural frontier." He disliked a "dry frontier": he must have a riverine boundary: in fact, he claimed the banks of the Lower Niemen, and, further south, the course of the rivers Wavre, Narew and Bug. To this claim he had perhaps been encouraged by some alluring words of Napoleon that thenceforth the Vistula must be the boundary of their empires. But his ally was now determined to keep Russia away from the old Polish capital; and in strangely prophetic words he pointed out that the Czar's claims would bring the Russian eagles within sight of Warsaw, which would be too clear a sign that that city was destined to pass under the Russian rule.[147] Divining also that Alexander's plea for the restoration by France of some of Prussia's western lands was linked with a plan which would give Russia some of her eastern districts,[148] Napoleon resolved to press hard on Prussia from the west. While handing over to the Czar only the small district around Bialystock, he remorselessly thrust Prussia to the east of the Elbe.
From this neither the arguments of the Czar nor the entreaties of Queen Louisa availed to move him. And yet, in the fond hope that her tears might win back Magdeburg, that noble bulwark of North German independence, the forlorn Queen came to Tilsit to crave this boon (July 6th). It was a terrible ordeal to do this from the man who had repeatedly insulted her in his official journals, figuring her, first as a mailed Amazon galloping at the head of her regiment, and finally breathing forth scandals on her spotless reputation.