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 AWAY FROM ROME!

that a synod was to convene without the Pope against the Papacy. Napoleon's voluminous correspondence on the subject unconsciously threw a revealing light upon the significance of the tiara. The vilest means were employed in order to mislead the sick and isolated old man at Savona. It was, for example, told him that he might go back to Rome, but the condition was that he must take an oath of loyalty to the Emperor. A ctltjation consisting of bishops and officials friendly to Bonaparte and of the bribed physician of the Pope were unable to get much out of him but did succeed in wringing from him the concession that within six months he would confirm the bishops that Napoleon had appointed. But when the delegation left, he spent days of repentance in a state of spiritual collapse.

On June ijth, iSio, the Council assembled one hundred six bishops (six of them were Germans), and then remained in session until Oc- tober. The Church saw that many weak, and few strong, prophets of its freedom had convened. It was the Bishop of Miinster in Westphalia, who urged most courageously the liberation of the Pope. But in spite of even-thing Napoleon obtained nothing excepting a Brief from Savona which permitted the Metropolitan to install the bishops appointed by the government, in the name of the Pope. He then declared that the Concordat was no longer in force.

On the road to Moscow he was still pondering the ancient question of the two powers. According to Thiers, he declared that when he had conquered Russia he would also triumph over the religious opposi- tion of the priesthood and even over the resistance of the human intel- lect itself. During May 1812, he gave orders in Dresden that the Pope was to be brought to Fontainebleau. After a harrowing trip, Pius entered the rooms he had occupied previously and dwelt in them a sick man. When the Emperor wrote some courteous lines and had his subordinates accord Papal honours, the Pontiff saw through these things too clearly to derive any pleasure from them.

On January i9th, 1813, Napoleon, having been defeated, visited his prisoner, embraced him, kissed him and called him his Father. On the next day negotiations concerning the future were inaugurated and the conqueror became the philosopher of Papal history. The great changes which had come about in the world, he said, necessitated also that the Papacy should give up its temporal power. What could not

NAPOLEON