It may even be questioned whether Austerlitz itself was not a misfortune to him.

Just before that battle he thought of treating Austria leniently, taking only Verona and Legnago, and exchanging Venetia against Salzburg.

This would have detached her from the Coalition, and made a friend of a Power that is naturally inclined to be conservative.
After Austerlitz, he rushed to the other extreme and forced the Hapsburgs to a hostility in which the Marie Louise marriage was only a forced and uneasy truce.

His motives are not, in my judgment, to be assigned to mere lust of domination, but rather to a reasoned though exaggerated conviction of the need of Prussia and Russia to his Continental System.

Above all things, he now sought to humble England, so that finally he might be free for his long-deferred Oriental enterprise.