en Alexander and the Porte, but required
him to maintain the integrity of all the other Turkish possessions,
which meant that the partition of Turkey was to be postponed until it
suited Napoleon to take up his oriental schemes in earnest. The golden
visions of Tilsit were thus once more relegated to a distant future,
and the keenness of the Czar's disappointment may be measured by his
striking statement quoted by Caulaincourt in one of his earlier
reports from St. Petersburg: "Let the world be turned upside down
provided that Russia gains Constantinople and the Dardanelles."[203]

The Erfurt interview left another hidden sore. It was there that the
divorce from Josephine was officially discussed, with a view to a more
ambitious alliance. Persistent as the rumours of a divorce had been
for seven years past, they seem to have emanated, not from the
husband, but from jealous sisters-in-law, intriguing relatives, and
officious Ministers. To the most meddlesome of these satellites,
Fouche, who had ventured to suggest to Josephine the propriety of
sacrificing herself for the good of the State, Napoleon had lately
administered a severe rebuke. But now he caused Talleyrand and
Caulaincourt to sound the Czar as to the feasibility of an alliance
with one of his sisters. The response was equally vague and discreet.
Alexander expressed his gratification at the friendship which
proffered such a request and his desire for the founding of a
Napoleonic House. Further than this he did not go: and eight days
after his return to St. Petersburg his only marriageable sister,
Catherine, was affianced to the heir to the Duchy of Oldenburg. This
event, it is true, was decided by the Dowager Empress; but no one,
least of all Napoleon, could harbour any doubts as to its
significance.

In truth, Napoleon's chief triumphs at Erfurt were social and
literary. His efforts to dazzle German princes and denationalize two
of her leading thinkers were partly successful. Goethe and Wieland
bowed before his greatness. To the former Napoleon granted a lengthy
interview. He flattered the aged poet at the outset by the words, "You
are a man": he then talked about several works in a way that Goethe
thought very just; and he criticised one passage of the poet's
youthful work, "Werther," as untrue to nature, with which Goethe
agreed. On Voltaire's "Mahomet" he heaped censure, for its unworthy
portraiture of the conqueror of the East and its ineffective fatalism