most of these Germans disbanded themselves.  At sight of the disasters of the army returning from Moscow, the tried soldiers of Macdonald were themselves shaken.  Notwithstanding this corps d’armee, and the completely fresh division of Heudelet preserved their unity.  All these remains were speedily collected into Dantzic; thirty-five thousand soldiers from seventeen different nations, were shut up in it.  The remainder, in small numbers, did not begin rallying until they got to Posen and upon the Oder.

Hitherto it was hardly possible for the King of Naples to regulate our flight any better; but at the moment he passed through Marienwerder on his way to Posen, a letter from Naples again unsettled all his resolutions.  The impression which it made upon him was so violent, that by degrees as he read it, the bile mixed itself with his blood so rapidly, that he was found a few minutes after with a complete jaundice.

It appeared that an act of government which the queen had taken upon herself had wounded him in one of his strongest passions.  He was not at all jealous of that princess, notwithstanding her charms, but furiously so of his royal authority; and it was particularly of the queen, as sister of the Emperor, that he was suspicious.

Persons were astonished at seeing this prince, who had hitherto appeared to sacrifice every thing to glory in arms, suffering himself to be mastered all at once by a less noble passion; but they forgot that, with certain characters, there must be always a ruling passion.

Besides, it was still the same ambition under different forms, and always entering completely into each of them; for such are passionate characters.  At that moment his jealousy of his authority triumphed over his love of glory; it made him proceed rapidly to Posen, where, shortly after his arrival, he disappeared, and abandoned us.

This defection took place on the 16th of January, twenty-three days before Schwartzenberg detached himself from the French army, of which Prince Eugene took the command.

Alexander arrested the march of his troops at Kalisch.  There, the violent and continued war, which had followed us all the way from Moscow, slackened:  it became only, until the spring, a war of fits, slow and intermittent.  The strength of the evil appeared to be exhausted; but it was merely that of the combatants; a still greater struggle was preparing, and this halt was not a time allowed to make peace, but merely given to the premeditation of slaughter.

CHAP.  XII.

Thus did the star of the North triumph over that of Napoleon.  Is it then the fate of the South to be vanquished by the North?  Cannot that subdue it in its turn?  Is it against nature that that aggression should be successful? and is the frightful result of our invasion a fresh proof of it?