he
might take to himself a woman not merely royal but imperial.

At first he sought the sister of the Czar of Russia; but Alexander
entertained a profound distrust of the French emperor, and managed to
evade the tentative demand. There was, however, a reigning family far
more ancient than the Romanoffs--a family which had held the imperial
dignity for nearly six centuries--the oldest and the noblest blood in
Europe. This was the Austrian house of Hapsburg. Its head, the Emperor
Francis, had thirteen children, of whom the eldest, the Archduchess
Marie Louise, was then in her nineteenth year.

Napoleon had resented the rebuff which the Czar had given him. He
turned, therefore, the more eagerly to the other project. Yet there
were many reasons why an Austrian marriage might be dangerous, or, at
any rate, ill-omened. Only sixteen years before, an Austrian
arch-duchess, Marie Antoinette, married to the ruler of France, had met
her death upon the scaffold, hated and cursed by the French people, who
had always blamed "the Austrian" for the evil days which had ended in
the flames of revolution. Again, the father of the girl to whom
Napoleon's fancy turned had been the bitter enemy of the new regime in
France. His troops had been beaten by the French in five wars and had
been crushed at Austerlitz and at Wagram. Bonaparte had twice entered
Vienna at the head of a conquering army, and thrice he had slept in the
imperial palace at Schonbrunn, while Francis was fleeing through the
dark, a beaten fugitive pursued by the swift squadrons of French
cavalry.

The feeling of Francis of Austria was not merely that of the vanquished
toward the victor. It was a deep hatred almost religious in its fervor.
He was the head and front of the old-time feudalism of birth and blood;
Napoleon was the incarnation of the modern spirit which demolished
thrones and set an iron heel upon crowned heads, giving the sacred
titles of king and prince to soldiers who, even in palaces, still
showed the swaggering brutality of the camp and the stable whence they
sprang. Yet, just because an alliance with the Austrian house seemed in
so many ways impossible, the thought of it inflamed the ardor of
Napoleon all the more.

"Impossible?" he had once said, contemptuously. "The word 'impossible'
is not French."

The Austrian alliance, unnatural though it seemed, was certainly quite
possible. In the year 1809 Napoleon had finished his fifth war with
Austria by