ussia at the sword's point.

For most men a great victory such as Austerlitz would have brought a
brief spell of rest, especially after the ceaseless toils and
anxieties of the previous fortnight. Yet now, after ridding himself of
all fear of Austria, Napoleon at once used every device of his subtle
statecraft to dissolve the nascent coalition. And Fortune had willed
that, when flushed with triumph, he should have to deal with a
timorous time-server.

It is the curse of a policy of keeping up a dainty balance in a
hurricane that it unmans the balancer, until at last the peacemaker
resembles a juggler. A decade of compromise and evasion of
difficulties had enfeebled the spirit of Prussia, until the hardest
trial for her King was to take any step that could not be retraced. He
had often spoken "feelingly, if not energetically," of the
predicaments of his position between France, England, and Russia.[45]
And, as in the case of that other _bon pere de famille_, Louis XVI.,
whom Nature framed for a farmhouse and Fate tossed into a revolution,
his lack of foresight and resolution took the heart out of his
advisers and turned statesmen into trimmers. Even before the news of
Austerlitz reached the ears of Talleyrand and Haugwitz at Vienna, the
bearer of Prussia's ultimatum was posing as the friend of France. On
all occasions he wore the cordon of the Legion of Honour; and while
the hosts of East and West were in the death-grapple on the
Pratzenberg, he strove to convince the French Foreign Minister that
the Prussians had entered Hanover only in order to keep the peace in
North Germany; that, as Russians had traversed Prussian territory, the
French would, of course, be equally free to do so; that Frederick
William objected to the descent of any English force in Hanover, which
belonged _de facto_ to France; and finally that the Treaty of Potsdam
was not a treaty at all, but merely a declaration with the "offer of
Prussia's good offices and of mediation, but without any mingling of
hostile intentions." Well might Talleyrand write to Napoleon: "I am
very satisfied with M. Haugwitz."[46]

Napoleon's victory over Prussian diplomacy was therefore won, even
before the lightning-stroke of Austerlitz blasted the Third Coalition.
Haugwitz began his conference with the victor at Schoenbrunn on
December 13th, by offering Frederick William's congratulations on his
triumph at Austerlitz, to which the Emperor replied by a sarcastic
query w