Besides, Great Britain, his hated rival,
scorning the terms he had offered, disdaining the continental
blockade, anchored in her strength by the control of Western seas,
was vulnerable in India, and there alone. These considerations
returned with overpowering allurement to his imagination, and four
millions of francs were appropriated to improve the harbor and restore
somewhat the splendors of Venice.

New Year's day found the Emperor again at the Tuileries, in time to
receive a new courier from Russia with still more vigorous
representations of Alexander's desires. The idea of a general
partition of Turkish lands grew stronger, and in an interview with
Metternich, Napoleon hinted that Austria should have a share.
Instructions were sent to Caulaincourt that he should hold out hopes
in order to gain time and to learn whether it was definitely
impossible that matters should remain as the treaty of Tilsit, taken
literally, had arranged them. This procrastinating attitude of mind
had a twofold cause. One appears to have been a gradual realization in
Napoleon's consciousness that dreams and schemes must materialize,
that in the mystery of a life like his one step inevitably leads to
another, that his career must encircle the vast globe, while he
himself was but mortal, finite, and already verging to the utmost
limit of his powers. A year before he had written to Josephine that he
was of all men the most enslaved; "my master has no bowels, and that
master is the nature of things." The other cause was the fearless and
warlike attitude taken in Great Britain by both crown and Parliament
and announced with threats of eternal war at the opening of the
legislative session of 1807. It appears probable, likewise, that
whatever answer should be given by Alexander to his pregnant question,
he felt his only safety now to be in the alliance with the Czar.

Time, time, time--that was the prime necessity; there were only
twenty-four hours in the day, and only a certain quantity of nerve
force in his own system. Before the partition of Turkey, if
Alexander's reply should make it inevitable, two weighty matters must
be settled: first, the road to an Oriental empire must be secured; and
second, the already existing Western empire of Europe must be rounded
out by the "regulation" of Spanish affairs--the appropriation, if it
should seem best, of the whole Iberian peninsula. Any tyro in
geography could see by a glance at the map that as navi