thither, alone with his con-science, contending with inquisitors
relieving each other, subject to moral tortures as subtile and as keen
as old-time physical tortures, to tortures so steady and persistent
that he sinks, loses his head, "no longer sleeps and scarcely speaks,"
falling into a senile condition and even more than senile condition,
"a state of mental alienation."[115] Then, on issuing from this, the
poor old man is again beset; finally, after waiting patiently for
three years, he is once more brusquely conducted at night, secretly
and incognito, over the entire road, with no repose or pity though
ill, except stopping once in a snow-storm at the hospice on Mount
Cenis, where he comes near dying; put back after twenty-four hours in
his carriage, bent double by suffering and in constant pain; jolting
over the pavement of the grand highway until almost dead and landed at
Fontainebleau, where Napoleon wishes to have him ready at hand to work
upon. "Indeed," he himself says, "he is a lamb, an excellent, worthy
man whom I esteem and am very fond of."[116]

An improvised tête-a-tête may probably prove effective with this
gentle, candid and tender spirit. Pius VII., who had never known ill-
will, might be won by kindly treatment, by an air of filial respect,
by caresses; he may feel the personal ascendency of Napoleon, the
prestige of his presence and conversation, the invasion of his genius.
Inexhaustible in arguments, matchless in the adaptation of ideas to
circumstances, the most amiable and most imperious of interlocutors,
stentorian and mild, tragic and comic by turns, the most eloquent of
sophists and the most irresistible of fascinators, as soon as he meets
a man face to face, he wins him, conquers him, and obtains the
mastery.[117] In effect, after seeing the Pope for six days, Napoleon
obtains by persuasion what he could not obtain afar by constraint.
Pius VII. signs the new Concordat in good faith, himself unaware that,