If Napoleon was anxious for the future of his power, he concealed it well; his face showed nothing but serenity, good nature, and confidence. He found time to converse at length with Goethe and Wieland; he found time to act the suave host to lords and ladies; he was as firm with Alexander as he had been at Tilsit; and when the conference broke up, he had arranged everything as completely to his satisfaction.
In the Memoirs of Marshal Oudinot, we find the following anecdote of the Erfurth meeting:—
“Napoleon had occasional fits of forgetfulness which prevented him from displaying, in his relations with the sovereigns, all the forethought expected in a host.
“One day we were riding into the country, the two Emperors, Napoleon and Alexander, riding side by side. At a given moment, the former, carried away by his thoughts, took the lead, whistling, and seeming to forget those he was leaving behind. I shall always remember Alexander, turning stiffly toward his neighbor, and asking, ‘Are we to follow?’ ‘Yes, sire.’ I rejoined Napoleon and told him of this little scene. He fell back, offered an explanation, and that was the end of it.”
So Marshal Oudinot thought, but as the compiler of the Memoirs asks, who knows what influence this trifling incident may have had upon the proud, sensitive, suspicious, and wavering Czar?
By the terms of the new agreement, Alexander was to have a free hand on the Danube to take Moldavia and Wallachia; that much had been understood at Tilsit, perhaps, but “Constantinople, never! That is the empire of the world!” In return for the liberty to seize the Danubian provinces, the Czar was to keep central Europe quiet, while Napoleon conquered Spain and Portugal. Prussia was notified by the Czar that she must remain quiet, bow to Napoleon’s will, and agree to his demands, one of which was that Stein should be dismissed.
To Germans, generally, the heavy hand of the Czar, coming down upon Frederick William in this imperative fashion, must have suggested the thought that it was high time the Lord’s Anointed autocrat of Russia was being sworn to friendship to Prussia, once more, at the tomb of the great Frederick. The two oaths already taken seemed to have slipped their hold.
Suppose that Napoleon had solemnly gone in state to the Escorial and there, at night, had taken in his own the hand of the Spanish king, and had, over the bones of dead Spanish monarchs, sworn eternal friendship to Spain; suppose he had broken this vow as soon as made; suppose he had gone the second time and sworn it all over again; suppose he had violated his oath a second time:—would royalist and clerical authors ever have found ink black enough to fill their righteously indignant pens?
If we would correctly judge Napoleon, let us keep our equilibrium and our standards of comparison; let us throw him into contrast, not with the ideal man, but with other rulers of his own time. By so doing we may hope to come, in the humblest spirit and manner, to know the great Corsican as he actually was.
Once more an effort was made to put an end to war. The two Emperors sent couriers,—one French and the other Russian,—to England, bearing offers of peace. These couriers were treated almost as spies by the English, were kept under surveillance, and were finally sent back with a note which gave no encouragement to the monarchs who sent them.