them at his estate
of Valencay, and amuse them with actors and the charms of female
society. Thus the choicest humorist of the age was told off to
entertain three uninteresting exiles; and the ex-Minister of Foreign
Affairs, who disapproved of the treachery of Bayonne, was made to
appear the Emperor's accomplice.

Such were the means whereby Napoleon gained the crowns of Spain and
the Indies, without striking a blow.

His excuse for the treachery as expressed at the time was as follows:
"My action is not good from a certain point of view, I know. But my
policy demands that I shall not leave in my rear, so near to Paris, a
dynasty hostile to mine." From this and from other similar remarks, it
would seem that his resolve to dethrone the Bourbons was taken while
on his march to Jena, but was thrust down into the abyss of his
inscrutable will for a whole year, until Junot's march to Lisbon
furnished a safe means for effecting the subjugation of Spain. This
end he thenceforth pursued unswervingly with no sign of remorse, or
even of hesitation--unless we accept as genuine the almost certainly
spurious letter of March 29th, 1808. That letter represents him as
blaming Murat for entering Madrid, when he had repeatedly urged him to
do so; as asking his advice after he had all along kept him in
ignorance as to his aims; and as writing a philosophical homily on the
unused energies of the Spanish people, for whom in his genuine letters
he expressed a lofty contempt.[192]

The whole enterprise is, indeed, a masterpiece of skill, but a
masterpiece marred by ineffaceable stains of treachery. And at the
close of his life, he himself said: "I embarked very badly on the
Spanish affair, I confess: the immorality of it was too patent, the
injustice too cynical, and the whole thing wears an ugly look since I
have fallen; for the attempt is only seen in its hideous nakedness
deprived of all majesty and of the many benefits which completed my
intention."

That he hoped to reform Spain is certain. Political and social reforms
had hitherto consolidated the work of conquest; and those which he
soon offered to the Spaniards might possibly have renovated that
nation, had they not been handed in at the sword's point; but the
motive was too obvious, the intervention too insulting, to render
success possible with the most sensitive people in Europe. On May 2nd
he wrote to Murat that he intended King Joseph of Naples to reign at
Madrid, and offer