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the Grand Duke Michael. Nor was Czartoryski the only Pole to indulge in such dreams. The government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, for example, had been deeply alienated by the incessant demands of war, and the complete ruin faced by the nobles. ‘Of the 600,000 livres in rents that I had in Lithuania, ’ complained one countess, ‘nothing is left but the earth and the sky: all the rest has perished. For the next twenty years I can expect nothing from my erstwhile fortune.’49 In Warsaw, then, Alexander knew that he would find plenty of more or less willing collaborators, and this again drew him on, especially as the acquisition of the whole of the old kingdom of Poland did not clash with his liberationist rhetoric. But if the Russians were coming, they were doing so on their own terms. As Alexander wrote to Czartoryski on 13 January 1813:

The successes with which Providence has decided to bless my efforts and my perseverance have in no way changed either my sentiments or my intentions in respect of Poland. Your compatriots, then, need have no fear: vengeance is a sentiment that is unknown to me and my greatest pleasure is to pay back bad with good . . . Let me speak with complete frankness: in order to realize my favourite ideas on the subject of Poland, I am first going to have to overcome certain difficulties . . . First of all, there is the question of opinion in Russia, the manner in which the Polish army conducted itself, the sack of Smolensk and Moscow, and the devastation of the entire country having reawakened old hatreds. Secondly, at the present moment to publicize my intentions in respect of Poland would be to throw Austria straight into the arms of France . . . With sagacity and prudence, these difficulties will be overcome. However, it is necessary that you yourselves must help me accustom the Russian people to my plans and justify the predilection that everyone knows that I have for the Poles . . . I must advise you, however, that the idea of my brother Michael [becoming king] cannot be entertained. Do not forget that Lithuania, Podolia and Volhynia are all regarded here as Russian provinces and that no logic in the world will ever be able to persuade Russia to allow them to be ruled by any monarch other than the one that sits on her own throne.50

This message was hardly reassuring for the Poles, but their fate was now sealed. On 12 January 1813 the Russian forces crossed the Niemen and marched into Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. And what of Napoleon? Far from putting out the peace feelers that the circumstances suggested, he responded with defiance. Passing through Warsaw en route for Paris in the wake of his abandonment of the grande armée, he treated Dufour de Pradt to a tirade that is all too suggestive of his state of mind:

Raise 10,000 Polish Cossacks - all that is needed is a lance and a horse per man - and the Russians will be stopped . . . The army is superb: I have 120,000 men. And I have always beaten the Russians. They will not dare to do anything. They are no longer the soldiers of Friedland and Eylau. They will hang around at Vilna, while I go off and raise 300,000 men. Then success will render them audacious, but I will defeat them in two or three battles on the Oder, and in six months I will once again be on the Niemen . . . All that has taken place is nothing: it is a mere setback, the result of the climate. The enemy is nothing: I beat them everywhere. They tried to cut me off at the Berezina, but I made that imbecile admiral [i.e. Chichagov] look a fool . . . I had good troops and good cannon, while my position, which was protected by a river and a marsh 1,500 fathoms across, was superb . . . At Marengo I was beaten at six o’clock in the evening, but the next morning I was master of Italy . . . As for Russia, I could not help that it froze . . . Our Norman horses are weaker than the Russian ones: they cannot withstand nine degrees of frost. The same goes for our men. Look at the Bavarians: there is not a single one left!51

Almost equally self-deluding are the remarks