The whole gist of his words now was obviously to glorify himself and to insult Alexander, precisely what he had least intended doing at the beginning of the interview.

“I am told you have concluded a peace with the Turks?”

Balashov bent his head affirmatively. “Peace has been concluded…” he began. But Napoleon did not allow him to speak. He clearly did not wish any one to speak but himself, and he went on with the unrestrained volubility and irritability to which people spoilt by success are so prone. “Yes, I know you have made peace with the Turks without gaining Moldavia and Wallachia. I would have given your Emperor those provinces just as I gave him Finland. Yes,” he went on, “I promised, and would have given the Emperor Alexander Moldavia and Wallachia, but now he will not possess those fair provinces. He might have united them to his empire, however, and he would have enlarged the frontiers of Russia from the Gulf of Bothnia to the mouth of the Danube. Catherine the Great could have done no more,” Napoleon declared, growing hotter and hotter as he walked up and down the room, and repeated to Balashov almost the words he had used to Alexander himself at Tilsit. “All that he would have owed to my friendship. Ah, what a fine reign! what a fine reign might have been that of the Emperor Alexander. Oh, what a grand reign,” he repeated several times. He stopped, took a gold snuffbox out of his pocket, and greedily put it to his nose.

He turned a commiserating glance on Balashov, and as soon as he would have made some observation, he hurriedly interrupted him again.

“What could he desire and look for that he would not have gained from my friendship?…” said Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders with an air of perplexity. “No, he has thought better to surround himself with my enemies. And with whom?” he went on. “He has gathered round him the Steins, the Armfeldts, the Bennigsens, the Wintzengerodes. Stein is a traitor, driven out of his own country; Armfeldt an intriguing debauchee; Wintzengerode a renegade French subject; Bennigsen is, indeed, rather more of a soldier than the rest, but still he’s incompetent; he could do nothing in 1807, and I should have thought he must recall painful memories to the Emperor Alexander.… Even supposing he might make use of them if they were competent,” Napoleon went on, his words hardly able to keep pace with the rush of ideas that proved to him his right or his might (which to his mind meant the same), “but they are not even that! They are no use for war or for peace! Barclay, I’m told, is more capable than all of them, but I shouldn’t say so, judging from his first manœuvres. And what are they doing, what are all these courtiers doing? Pfuhl is making propositions, Armfeldt is quarrelling, Bennigsen is considering, while Barclay, who has been sent for to act, can come to no decision, and is wasting time and doing nothing. Bagration is the only one that is a real general. He is stupid, but he has experience, judgment, and determination.… And what part does your young Emperor play in this unseemly crowd? They compromise him and throw upon him the responsibility of all that happens. A sovereign ought not to be with the army except when he is a general,” he said, obviously uttering these words as a direct challenge to the Tsar. Napoleon knew how greatly Alexander desired to be a great general. “It’s a week now since the campaign commenced, and you haven’t even succeeded in defending Vilna. You have been divided in two and driven out of the Polish provinces. Your army is discontented…”

“On the contrary, your majesty,” said Balashov, who scarcely had time to recollect what had been said to him, and had difficulty in following these verbal fireworks, “the troops are burning with eagerness…”

“I know all that,” Napoleon cut him short; “I know all that, and I know the number of your battalions as exactly as I know my own. You have not two hundred thousand troops, while I have three times as many. I give you my word of honour,” said Napoleon, forgetting that his word of honour could carry no weight—“my word of honour that I have five hundred and thirty thousand men this side of the Vistula. The Turks will be no help to you; they are good for nothing, and have proved it by making peace with you. As for the Swedes, it’s their destiny to be governed by mad kings. Their king was mad. They changed him for another, Bernadotte, who promptly went mad; for no one not a madman could, being a Swede, ally himself with Russia.”