honour. Even
so, however, Napoleon refused to consider a longer tenure than two or
three years. And in this he was undoubtedly encouraged by the recent
despatch from St. Petersburg, wherein the Czar promised his mediation
in a sense favourable to France. This unfortunate occurrence completed
the discomfiture of the peace party at the Consular Court, and in a
long and heated discussion in a council held at St. Cloud on May 11th
all but Joseph Bonaparte and Talleyrand voted for the rejection of
the British demands.

On the next day Lord Whitworth left Paris. During his journey to
Calais he received one more proposal, that France should hold the
peninsula of Otranto for ten years if Great Britain retained Malta for
that period; but if this suggestion was made in good faith, which is
doubtful, its effect was destroyed by a rambling diatribe which
Talleyrand, at his master's orders, sent shortly afterwards.[256] In
any case it was looked upon by our ambassador as a last attempt to gain
time for the concentration of the French naval forces. He crossed the
Straits of Dover on May 17th, the day before the British declaration of
war was issued.

On May 22nd, 1803, appeared at Paris the startling order that, as
British frigates had captured two French merchantmen on the Breton
coast, all Englishmen between eighteen and sixty years of age who were
in France should be detained as prisoners of war. The pretext for this
unheard-of action, which condemned some 10,000 Britons to prolonged
detention, was that the two French ships were seized prior to the
declaration of war. This is false: they were seized on May 18th, that
is, on the day on which the British Government declared war, three
days after an embargo had been laid on British vessels in French
ports, and seven days after the First Consul had directed his envoy at
Florence to lay an embargo on English ships in the ports of
Tuscany.[257] It is therefore obvious that Napoleon's barbarous decree
merely marked his disappointment at the failure of his efforts to gain
time and to deal the first stroke. How sorely his temper was tried by
the late events is clear from the recital of the Duchesse d'Abrantes,
who relates that her husband, when ordered to seize English residents,
found the First Consul in a fury, his eyes flashing fire; and when
Junot expressed his reluctance to carry out this decree, Napoleon
passionately exclaimed: "Do not trust too far to my friendship: as
soon as I