tained his fame at the high level to which it soared at
Castiglione. Then came Napoleon's favourite aide-de-camp, Duroc, a
short, stern, war-hardened man, well known in Berlin, where twice he
had sought to rivet close the bonds of the French alliance.

Above all, the gaze of the awe-struck crowd was fixed on the figure of
the chief, now grown to the roundness of robust health amidst toils
that would have worn most men to a shadow; and on the face, no longer
thin with the unsatisfied longings of youth, but square and full with
toil requited and ambition wellnigh sated--a visage redeemed from the
coarseness of the epicure's only by the knitted brows that bespoke
ceaseless thought, and by the keen, melancholy, unfathomable eyes.

NOTE ADDED TO THE FOURTH EDITION

Several facts of considerable interest and importance respecting
the Anglo-French negotiations of 1806 have been brought to light
by M. Coquelle in his recently published work "Napoleon and
England, 1803-1813," chapters xi.-xvii. (George Bell and Sons,
1904).

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM: FRIEDLAND

"I know full well that London is a corner of the world, and that
Paris is its centre."--_Letter of Napoleon_, August 18th, 1806.

On the 21st of November, 1806, Napoleon issued at Berlin the decree
which proclaimed open and unrelenting war on English industry and
commerce, a war that was to embroil the whole civilized world and
cease only with his overthrow. After reciting his complaints against
the English maritime code, he declared the British Isles to be in a
state of blockade, interdicted all commerce with them, threatened
seizure and imprisonment to English goods and subjects wherever found
by French or allied troops, forbade all trade in English and colonial
wares, and excluded from French and allied ports any ship that had
touched at those of Great Britain; while any ship that connived at the
infraction of the present decree was to be held a good prize of
war.[113] This ukase, which was binding for France, Italy,
Switzerland, Holland, and the Rhenish Confederation, formed the
foundation of the Continental System, a term applicable to the sum
total of the measures that aimed at ruining England by excluding her
goods from the Continent.

The plan of strangling Britain by her own wealth was not peculiar to
Napoleon. In common with much of his political stock-in-trade h