The moment had at last arrived when more than ordinary satisfaction was to be done to the wounded pride of the Duke of Friedland.  Fate itself had been his avenger, and an unbroken chain of disasters, which had assailed Austria from the day of his dismissal, had wrung from the Emperor the humiliating confession that with this general he had lost his right arm.  Every defeat of his troops opened afresh this wound; every town which he lost revived in the mind of the deceived monarch the memory of his own weakness and ingratitude.  It would have been well for him, if, in the offended general, he had only lost a leader of his troops, and a defender of his dominions; but he was destined to find in him an enemy, and the most dangerous of all, since he was least armed against the stroke of treason.  Removed from the theatre of war and condemned to irksome inaction, while his rivals gathered laurels on the field of glory, the haughty duke had beheld these changes of fortune with affected composure, and concealed, under a glittering and theatrical pomp, the dark designs of his restless genius.  Torn by burning passions within, while all without bespoke calmness and indifference, he brooded over projects of ambition and revenge, and slowly, but surely, advanced toward his end.  All that he owed to the Emperor was effaced from his mind; what he himself had done for the Emperor was imprinted in burning characters on his memory.  To his insatiable thirst for power, the Emperor’s ingratitude was welcome, as it seemed to tear in pieces the record of past favors, to absolve him from every obligation toward his former benefactor.  In the disguise of a righteous retaliation, the projects dictated by his ambition now appeared to him just and pure.  In proportion as the external circle of his operations was narrowed, the world of hope expanded before him, and his dreamy imagination revelled in boundless projects, which, in any mind but such as his, madness alone could have given birth to.  His services had raised him to the proudest height which it was possible for a man, by his own efforts, to attain.  Fortune had denied him nothing which the subject and the citizen could lawfully enjoy.  Till the moment of his dismissal, his demands had met with no refusal, his ambition had met with no check; but the blow which, at the diet of Ratisbon, humbled him, showed him the difference between original and deputed power, the distance between the subject and his sovereign.  Roused from the intoxication of his own greatness by this sudden reverse of fortune, he compared the authority which he had possessed with that which had deprived him of it; and his ambition marked the steps which it had yet to surmount upon the ladder of fortune.  From the moment when he had so bitterly experienced the weight of sovereign power, his efforts were directed to attain it for himself; the wrong which he himself had suffered made him a robber.  Had he not been outraged by injustice, he might have obediently moved in his orbit round the majesty of the throne, satisfied with the glory of being the brightest of its satellites.  It was only when violently forced from its sphere, that his wandering star threw in disorder the system to which it belonged, and came in destructive collision with its sun.