Nor was Napoleon free from his thorn in the flesh. In a bulletin published by him after the retreat from Moscow was a passage which implied some censure of Murat for his lack of stability. This both the King of Naples and his spouse bitterly resented, the latter roundly abusing her brother in their correspondence. This was an excellent pretext for desertion when the general crash appeared imminent, and at Erfurt the dashing and gallant, but weak and testy, monarch decamped. Hastening south, he entered at once into alliance with Austria, and then, putting himself at the head of eighty thousand Neapolitans, set out for Rome, waging a terrific warfare of proclamations. Eugène, too,--and this was an elemental disaster,--was virtually checkmated by the defection of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, which opened the Tyrol to the allies. All Italy was consequently lost. Augereau, whose feeble loyalty to Napoleon was already at the vanishing-point, had been appointed to take forty thousand conscripts, collect any straggling soldiers he could find in southeastern France, and keep open the door out of Italy for some or all of Eugène's veterans, with whose assistance it was hoped the marshal could form an army for the defense of the Vosges Mountains. But Eugène, having fought the indecisive battle of Roverbello, and finding himself in a sorry plight from both the military and political points of view, could send no reinforcements until April, when finally he concluded an armistice releasing his army. Augereau therefore found himself opposite Bubna at Geneva with an ineffective force, and with very little heart to wield what he had. This ended Napoleon's grand scheme for uniting the forces of Italy, Naples, Switzerland, and France.
Prussia was now the ablest as well as the bitterest of Napoleon's foes, Stein, Blücher, Gneisenau, and their friends aiming at nothing short of annihilating the Napoleonic power. This was, no doubt, due in part to a thirst for revenge; but in the main it was due to the longing for such a leadership in Germany as would spread abroad the new doctrines of liberal and constitutional monarchy, in order to restrain Austria's ever-increasing influence. The councils of the allies presented an amusing spectacle. The Prussians urged an immediate advance by the best line for invasion, that, namely, from Liège and Brussels; but the Austrians, except Radetzky, drew back, fearing Prussia almost equally with France. The Czar held the balance, but his scales were very sensitive, inclining often toward Prussia, but settling in the end to a compromise suggested by Schwarzenberg and Metternich. Having imitated Napoleon in his practice of war requisitions, the allies now determined to imitate him in contempt for international law, and to violate Swiss neutrality. The plan which they adopted was to throw their main army into France by way of Basel, and thus turn the line of frowning fortresses behind the Rhine, as well as the Vosges Mountains. Blücher was to cross the middle Rhine, and Bülow, with thirty thousand men, was to coöperate with the English troops under Graham in the Netherlands. The whole scheme was unmilitary, but it exactly suited Metternich, who, having on January thirteenth first learned of Bernadotte's understanding with the Czar about the crown of France, was very uneasy. Both he and Schwarzenberg desired to end the war on the frontier, if possible; Prussia's power and Alexander's ambitions for European preponderance were far more dangerous to Austria than a Napoleonic empire confined to France.