Note Back to Main Text — Chapter V

To the last moment of their intercourse the Czar appeared to be under the spell of Napoleon's seductive powers. He came as a conquered prince; he left with an honorable peace, with the friendship of his magnanimous conqueror, and with an unsmirched imperial dignity. He had saved his recent ally from destruction, and had secured a small increase of territory for himself; for the future there were Finland and the fairest portion of Turkey. But in a few days the magic began to pass. He had not secured Constantinople, and he had promised to evacuate Wallachia and Moldavia; he had not secured the complete evacuation of Prussia; he had risked a rupture with England; he had, above all, submitted to the creation of a state which, under the thin disguise of another name, was but the germ of a reconstructed Poland. It began to appear as if he had been wheedled. There is sufficient evidence that such bitter reflections made their appearance very soon; but they were repressed, at first from pure shame, and afterward from stern necessity, when England began to vent her anger. But the Russians themselves could not be repressed. Before long Savary was hated and abused by the public, the more because he maintained his ascendancy over the Czar. The reports sent home by the former police agent were clever and instructive, but their pictures of factional disputes and Oriental plots at court, of aristocratic luxury and general poverty, of popular superstition and barbarous manners, were not reassuring, and confirmed in his Emperor's mind doubts felt from the beginning as to the stability of the alliance consummated at Tilsit, an alliance outwardly fair, but, like all Talleyrand's diplomacy, more showy than substantial.[12]