of breaking the naval tyranny of England. He suggested to Alexander that he should seize Turkey, spoke of the Turks as barbarians, and proposed that the two monarchs, after having destroyed the power of England by an attack upon India, should share between them the dominion of the world. He urged that they should conclude at the same time a treaty of peace and a treaty of alliance which provided for their co-operation throughout the world. Taking advantage of the Czar's easily aroused enthusiasm and of his lack of guile, Napoleon deliberately fooled Alexander the First and tricked him into an alliance with France by which all the advantages fell to Napoleon. How the Czar was treated is described as follows in his 'Memoirs' by Talleyrand, who drafted the Treaty of Tilsit:
In the course of the conferences preceding the Treaty of Tilsit the Emperor Napoleon often spoke to the Czar Alexander of Moldavia and Wallachia as provinces destined some day to become Russian. Affecting to be carried away by some irresistible impulse, and to obey the decrees of Providence, he spoke of the division of European Turkey as inevitable. He then indicated, as if inspired, the general basis of the sharing of that empire, a portion of which was to fall to Austria in order to gratify her pride rather than her ambition.
A shrewd mind could easily notice the effect produced upon the mind of Alexander by all those fanciful dreams. Napoleon watched him attentively and, as soon as he noticed that the prospects held out allured the Czar's imagination, he informed Alexander that letters from Paris necessitated his immediate return and gave orders for the treaty to be drafted at once.
My instructions on the subject of that treaty were that no allusion to a partition of the Ottoman Empire should appear in it, nor even to the future fate of the two provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. These instructions were strictly carried out. Napoleon thus left Tilsit, having made prospective arrangements which could serve him as he pleased for the accomplishment of his other designs. He had not
