Chapter VIII · (continued 2)

Talleyrand had just quitted Brünn, which had become unhealthy through the overcrowding of the hospitals; the negotiations were being carried on at Presburg. In spite of the wise and prudent counsels of his minister, Napoleon was resolved on exacting from Austria still more than he had declared before Ulm. The defection of Prussia had thoroughly disheartened the plenipotentiaries of the Emperor Francis. The French armies concentrated afresh around Vienna. Napoleon was doubly imperious, threatening to recommence the war; the negotiators at length yielded to necessity. On the 26th of December, 1805, peace was signed at Presburg between France and Austria. The Emperor Francis abandoned to the conqueror Venice, Istria, Frioul, and Dalmatia, which were to become part of the kingdom of Italy; the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, of which Napoleon made a present to Bavaria; the outlying territories of Suabia, handed over to Wurtemberg; the Brisgau, Ortenau, and the city of Constance, which were added to the territories of the Elector of Baden. Napoleon ceded to the Emperor the Principality of Wurtzburg for one of the archdukes; the secularization of the Teutonic Order was agreed upon to the profit of Austria; the latter power was to pay a war indemnity of forty millions.

The small German princes, who beheld their possessions increased and their titles made more glorious by the powerful hand of the conqueror, were in their turn to pay the price of the terrible alliance which weighed upon them. The new Kings of Wurtemberg and Bavaria found themselves obliged to give their daughters to Jerome Bonaparte and to Eugène de Beauharnais; the marriage that the former had contracted in America, and the betrothal of the Princess of Bavaria to the son of the Elector of Baden, weighed nothing in the balance in comparison with the iron will of Napoleon. Intimidated and restless, the Elector of Baden himself broke off the marriage of his son, accepting for him the hand of Stéphani de Beauharnais, niece of the Empress Josephine. Before taking the road to France, the Emperor was present at the marriage of the vice-King of Italy with the princess whose portrait he had seen a few days before upon a porcelain cup. Everything had yielded to his power,—sovereigns, families, and hearts. Russia and England alone remained openly enemies. "Rest awhile, my children," said the Archduke Charles in disbanding his army; "rest awhile, until we begin again."

I have been desirous of conducting General Bonaparte, now become the Emperor Napoleon, up to the popular summit of his glory. He had already tainted it by many acts of violence, and by an exclusive devotion to personal ends, in defiance of justice and liberty. Henceforward and under the disastrous inspirations of a mad ambition, victory itself was to become a fatal seduction which by inevitable degrees draws us on to ruin. Great and terrible lesson of Divine justice on the morality of nations! Starting from the violation of the peace of Amiens, and in spite of the glory of the sun of Austerlitz, the history of the glory of the conqueror includes in germ the history of his fall, and of the ever-increasing misfortunes of France.