It was not till the middle of July that he appointed them his plenipotentiaries at the Congress; and, even then, he retained the latter at Dresden, while the former fretted in forced inaction at Prague.

"I send you more _powers_ than _power_," wrote Maret to Narbonne with cynical jauntiness: "you will have your hands tied, but your legs and mouth free so that you may walk about and dine."[334] At last, on the 26th, Caulaincourt received his instructions; but what must have been the anguish of this loyal son of France to see that Napoleon was courting war with a united Europe.

Austria, said his master, was acting as mediator: and the mediator ought not to look for gains: she had made no sacrifice and deserved to gain nothing at all: her claims were limitless; and every concession granted by France would encourage her to ask for more: he was disposed to make peace with Russia on satisfactory terms so as to punish Austria for her bad faith in breaking the alliance of 1812.[335] Such trifling with the world's peace seems to belong, not to the sphere of history, but to the sombre domain of Greek tragedy, where mortals full blown with pride rush blindly on the embossed bucklers of fate.

For what did Austria demand of him?
She proposed to leave him master of all the lands from the swamps of the Ems down to the Roman Campagna: Italy was to be his, along with as much of the Iberian Peninsula as he could hold.

His control of Illyria, North Germany, and the Rhenish Confederation he must give up.