[46] It is scarcely necessary to say that the letter which Napoleon is said to have sent Murat on March 29, and which is printed in the _Mémorial de Ste-Hélène_, is (as Lanfrey and Count Murat have shown) a forgery composed by Napoleon himself long after. It is quite inconsistent with the offer to Louis Bonaparte, and with other letters to Murat of the same week.
This state of semi-suspended relations lasted for a fortnight, from Ferdinand’s arrival in Madrid on March 24, down to his departure from it on April 10. They were very uncomfortable weeks for the new king, who grew more alarmed as each day passed without a letter from Paris ratifying his title, while French troops continued to pour into Madrid till some 35,000 were assembled in it and its suburbs.
A very few days after his accession Ferdinand was informed that it was probable that Napoleon was intending a visit to Madrid, and was at any rate coming as far as Bayonne. He immediately sent off his eldest brother Don Carlos (the hero of the unhappy wars of 1833-40) to compliment his patron, and if necessary to receive him at the frontier [April 5]. Two days later there appeared in Madrid a new French emissary, General Savary--afterwards Duke of Rovigo--who purported to come as Bonaparte’s harbinger, charged with the duty of preparing Madrid for his arrival. He carried the farce so far that he asked for a palace for the Emperor’s residence, produced trunks of his private luggage[47], and began to refurnish the apartments granted him. That he bore secret orders for Murat we know from the latter’s dispatches, but this was only half his task. Napoleon had confided to him verbal instructions to lure Ferdinand to come out to meet him in the north of Spain, among the French armies massed in Biscay and Navarre--if possible even to get him to Bayonne on French soil. In his St. Helena memoirs Napoleon denies this, and Savary in his autobiography also states that he did not act the part of tempter or make any promises to the young king: the journey to Bayonne, he says, was a silly inspiration of Ferdinand’s own. But neither Bonaparte nor Savary are witnesses whom one would believe on their most solemn oath. The former we know well: the latter had been one of the persons most implicated in the shocking murder of the Duc d’Enghien. When we find the Spanish witnesses, who conversed with Savary during his short stay in Madrid, agreeing that the general promised that Napoleon would recognize Ferdinand as king, give him an imperial princess as wife, and take him into favour, we need not doubt them. It is not disputed that Savary, unlike Murat and Beauharnais, regularly addressed his victim by the royal title, and it is certain that he started in his company and acted as his keeper during the journey[48]. The move that he at first proposed was not a long one: the general said that according to his advices the Emperor must be due at Burgos on April 13: it would be time enough to start to meet him on the tenth. Burgos lies well inside the frontiers of Castile, and if it was packed with French troops, so was Madrid: one place was no more dangerous than the other.