fo r its full propaganda worth in the London broadsheets, where it was
claimed that Napoleon himself had been worsted.
A facile moment of opportunism by the Emperor had plunged the
Grande Armee into the maelstrom. To an extent he was protected from
the immediate consequences of his own error, for news of Bailen did not
catch up with him until he was almost back at St-Cloud. After leaving
Bayonne on 21 July he made the most leisurely progress back to Paris,
visiting Toulouse, Montauban, Agen, Bordeaux, Rochefort, Niort,
Nantes, Tours and Blois as if he were a nineteenth-century tourist of the
most ambling sort. But the news ofBailen shook him from his torpor, for
he immediately realized that he had plunged himself into a deadly
struggle in Spain; the shock news of Bail en would give fresh heart to his
enemies in Germany and perhaps even tempt the spirits of Prussian and
Austrian revanchism.
Preoccupied with the thought of keeping Austria quiet, so that if
necessary he could shift further corps of the Grande Armee to Spain,
Napoleon at once made arrangements for another 'summit' meeting with
Czar Alexander. Meanwhile he made contingency plans for transferring
wo,ooo men under Ney, Victor and Mortier from the Elbe to the
Peninsula. Intense diplomatic activity then went on to set up the earliest
possible reunion of the two most powerful men in Europe: a venue was
agreed at Erfurt, a temporary French enclave in Thi.iringen. Napoleon set
out from St-Cloud on 22 September for another encounter with the man
he thought he had overcome with charm. He had two objectives: securing
his rear against Austria and achieving a dynastic marriage with the Czar's
sister.
The Erfurt conference was not destined to be a success. There were
two main reasons: the parties had not been honest with each other at
Tilsit; and since then clouds had gathered over the makeshift relation
ship. Both Napoleon and Alexander had always regarded the Tilsit treaty
as a way of buying time; there is the clearest possible statement of
Napoleon's position in a cynical letter he sent to his ambassador in St
Petersburg, Louis de Caulaincourt, on 29 January 1808. But he saw the
need to keep the Czar sweet and four days later (2 February) he sent
Alexander a long letter offering to share a dismembered Ottoman empire
with him. As he explained in a letter to his brother Louis a fortnight
later, he was deeply influenced by the speech from the throne at the
beginning of 1 8o8 when George III made clear his determination to
continue the war. Angered by Albion's intransigence, Napoleon tried to