hopes of
both Emperors. At the close of May, the Sultan Selim was violently
deposed by the Janissaries who clamoured for more vigorous measures
against the Russians. Never did news come more opportunely for
Napoleon than this, which reached him at Tilsit on, or before, June
the 24th. He is said to have exclaimed to the Czar with a flash of
dramatic fatalism: "It is a decree of Providence which tells me that
the Turkish Empire can no longer exist."[146]

Certain it is that the most potent spell exerted by the great
conqueror over his rival was a guarded invitation to share in some
future partition of the Turkish Empire. That scheme had fascinated
Napoleon ever since the year 1797, when he gazed on the Adriatic.
Though laid aside for a time in 1806, when he roused the Turks against
Russia, it was never lost sight of; and now, on the basis of a common
hatred of England and a common desire to secure the spoils of the
Ottoman Power, the stately fabric of the Franco-Russian alliance was
reared.

On his side, Alexander required some assurance that Poland should not
be reconstituted in its integrity--a change that would tear from
Russia the huge districts stretching almost up to Riga, Smolensk, and
Kiev, which were still Polish in sympathy. Here Napoleon reassured
him, at least in part. He would not re-create the great kingdom of
Poland: he would merely carve out from Prussia the greater part of her
Polish possessions.

These two important questions being settled, it only remained for the
Czar to plead for the King of Prussia, to acknowledge Napoleon's
domination as Emperor of the West, while he himself, as autocrat of
the East, secured a better western boundary for Russia. At first he
strove to gain for Frederick William the restoration of several of his
lands west of the Elbe. This championship was not wholly
disinterested; for it is now known that the Czar had set his heart on
a great part of Prussian Poland.

In truth, he was a sufficiently good disciple of the French
revolutionists to plead very cogently his claims to a "natural
frontier." He disliked a "dry frontier": he must have a riverine
boundary: in fact, he claimed the banks of the Lower Niemen, and,
further south, the course of the rivers Wavre, Narew and Bug. To this
claim he had perhaps been encouraged by some alluring words of
Napoleon that thenceforth the Vistula must be the boundary of their
empires. But his ally was now determined to keep Russia away f