It was evident that the Emperor of the West would make no real concession.

In fact, the need of domination was the quintessence of his being.

And Maret, Duc de Bassano, who was now his Foreign Minister, or rather, we should say, the man who wrote and signed his despatches, revealed the psychological cause of the war which cost the lives of nearly a million of men, in a note to Lauriston, the French ambassador at St.Petersburg.Napoleon, he wrote, cared little about interviews or negotiations unless the movements of his 450,000 men caused serious concern in Russia, recalled her to the Continental System as settled at Tilsit, and "brought her back to the state of inferiority in which she was then."[250] This was, indeed, the gist of the whole question.

Napoleon saw that Alexander was slipping out of the leading strings of Tilsit, and that he was likely to come off best from that bargain, which was intended to confirm the supremacy of the Western Empire.

For both potentates that treaty had been, at bottom, nothing more than a truce.