a compliment.

The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge
of Bonaparte's for your mandate of blockade. Rumour states that this
measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of
your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our
Napoleon. For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination,
Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any
objections or representations. "But what absurdities do I not sign!"
exclaimed the pliant Minister.

Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor. Charlemagne
had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
before,--an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but
to gratify his impertinent vanity. Every spot where Charlemagne had
walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with
great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign
representatives, and by his side his wife. To a peasant who presented
him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave
nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small
crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he
bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand
louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter,
but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the
manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National Institute
for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by Charlemagne, who many
believed was not able to write; and a German Baron, Krigge, was
registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor
to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of
sixty years' standing. But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt
about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe! A German professor,
Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise,
addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his
intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne
were impositions on the credulous