quette and precedence which starched the men and agitated the minds
of their consorts! Yet, while soaring above these rules with easy
grace, the First Consul imposed them rigidly on the crowd of eager
courtiers. On these burning questions he generally took the advice of
M. de Remusat, whose tact and acquaintance with Court customs were now
of much service; while the sprightly wit of his young wife attracted
Josephine, as it has all readers of her piquant but rather spiteful
memoirs. In her pages we catch a glimpse of the life of that singular
Court; the attempts at aping the inimitable manners of the _ancien
regime_; the pompous nullity of the second and third Consuls; the
tawdry magnificence of the costumes; the studied avoidance of any word
that implied even a modicum of learning or a distant acquaintance with
politics; the nervous preoccupation about Napoleon's moods and whims;
the graceful manners of Josephine that rarely failed to charm away his
humours, except when she herself had been outrageously slighted for
some passing favourite; above all, the leaden dullness of
conversation, which drew from Chaptal the confession that life there
was the life of a galley slave. And if we seek for the hidden reason
why a ruler eminently endowed with mental force and freshness should
have endured so laboured a masquerade, we find it in his strikingly
frank confession to Madame de Remusat: _It is fortunate that the
French are to be ruled through their vanity._ <

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIV

THE PEACE OF AMIENS

The previous chapter dealt in the main with the internal affairs of
France and the completion of Napoleon's power: it touched on foreign
affairs only so far as to exhibit the close connection between the
First Consul's diplomatic victory over England and his triumph over
the republican constitution in his adopted country. But it is time now
to review the course of the negotiations which led up to the Treaty of
Amiens.

In order to realize the advantages which France then had over England,
it will be well briefly to review the condition of our land at that
time. Our population was far smaller than that of the French Republic.
France, with her recent acquisitions in Belgium, the Rhineland, Savoy,
Nice, and Piedmont, numbered nearly 40,000,000 inhabitants: but the
census returns of Great Britain for 1801 showed only a total of
10,942,000 souls, while the numbers for Ireland, arguing