Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/82

1803. to come; and what was more important to Bonaparte, France could not justly say that he had illegally and ignobly sold national territory except for a sufficient and national object.

The real reasons which induced Bonaparte to alienate the territory from France remained hidden in the mysterious processes of his mind. Perhaps he could not himself have given the true explanation of his act. Anger with Spain and Godoy had a share in it, as he avowed through Talleyrand's letter of June 22; disgust for the sacrifices he had made, and impatience to begin his new campaigns on the Rhine,—possibly a wish to show Talleyrand that his policy could never be revived, and that he had no choice but to follow into Germany,—had still more to do with the act. Yet it is also reasonable to believe that the depths of his nature concealed a with to hide forever the monument of a defeat. As he would have liked to blot Corsica, Egypt, and St. Domingo from the map, and wipe from human memory the record of his failures, he may have taken pleasure in flinging Louisiana far off, and burying it forever from the sight of France in the bosom of the only government which could absorb and conceal it.

For reasons of his own, which belonged rather to military and European than to American history, Bonaparte preferred to deal with Germany before crossing the Pyrenees; and he knew that meanwhile Spain could not escape. Godoy on his side could neither drag King Charles into a war with France,