Yet, as if nothing had been done, and all his hopes and thoughts lay in the future, he summoned his financial advisers to a council for eight o’clock in the morning.  Scarcely did he deign to notice their congratulations on his triumphs.  “We have,” he said, “to deal with more serious questions:  it seems that the greatest dangers of the State were not in Austria:  let us hear the report of the Minister of the Treasury.”  It then appeared that Barbe-Marbois had been concerned in risky financial concerns with the Court of Spain, through a man named Ouvrard.  The Minister therefore was promptly dismissed, and Mollien then and there received his post.  The new Minister states in his memoirs that the money, which had sufficed to carry the French armies from the English Channel to the Rhine, had been raised on extravagant terms, largely on loans on the national domains.  In fact, it had been an open question whether victory would come promptly enough to avert a wholesale crash at Paris.

So bad were the finances that, though 40,000,000 francs were poured every year into France as subsidies from Italy and Spain, yet loans of 120,000,000 francs had been incurred in order to meet current expenses.[64] It would exceed the limits of our space to describe by what forceful means Napoleon restored the financial equilibrium and assuaged the commercial crisis resulting from the war with England.  Mollien soon had reason to know that, so far from avoiding Continental wars, the Emperor thenceforth seemed almost to provoke them, and that the motto—­War must support war—­fell far short of the truth.  Napoleon’s wars, always excepting his war with England, supported the burdens of an armed peace.  In this respect his easy and gainful triumph over Austria was a disaster for France and Europe.  It beckoned him on to Jena and Tilsit.

While reducing his finances to order and newspaper editors to servility, the conqueror received news of the triumph of his arms in Southern Italy.  There the Bourbons of Naples had mortally offended him.  After concluding a convention for the peaceable withdrawal of St. Cyr’s corps and the strict observance of neutrality by the kingdom of Naples, Ferdinand IV. and his Queen Caroline welcomed the arrival at their capital of an Anglo-Russian force of 20,000 men, and intrusted the command of these and of the Neapolitan troops to General Lacy.[65] This force, it is true, did little except weaken the northward march of Massena; but the violation of neutrality by the Bourbons galled Napoleon.  At Vienna he refused to listen to the timid pleading of the Hapsburgs on their behalf, and as soon as peace was signed at Pressburg he put forth a bulletin stating that St. Cyr was marching on Naples to hurl from the throne that guilty woman who had so flagrantly violated all that is sacred among men.  France would fight for thirty years rather than pardon her atrocious act of perfidy:  the Queen of Naples had ceased to reign:  let her go to London and form a committee of sympathetic ink with Drake, Spencer-Smith, Taylor, and Wickham.