Napoleon received the Austrian Foreign Minister in one of the Residenzschloss palace’s smaller salons the night Metternich arrived from Vienna. Despite the season he felt cold and a fire was burning in the grate, creating a comfortable fug in the room which was enhanced by the rosy hue cast by the steady flames glowing on the candelabras. Ever since he had returned from Russia Napoleon had found that he was more sensitive than before to the cold and had developed a relish for being in the warm. The scars of that campaign had been borne across every sphere of life in France. Of the six hundred thousand men he had led into Russia the previous summer, scarcely ninety thousand had returned, and many of those had been crippled by frostbite. Others were broken men, unable to face the rigours of another campaign. Only the very strongest and the bravest had endured, and for a while they were all that stood between the forces of the Tsar and France’s German territories.

In the months after his return to Paris Napoleon had been forced to scrape together every available man to rebuild his forces to face the threat from the east. The eighty thousand men of the National Guard were inducted into the army by imperial decree, as were tens of thousands of youths who were not due to be conscripted for another two years. Discharged veterans were recalled to serve under the eagles once again, and the marines and gunners of the navy were reassigned to fill out the ranks of the army’s corps of artillery. Whatever their quality, there had been enough men to provide Napoleon with an army of a quarter of a million men when spring returned.

However, it was rather harder to find new mounts. Only a few thousand horses had survived the Russian campaign, and once Frederick William had switched sides and joined the Tsar the horse-breeding estates of northern Prussia were denied to France. Napoleon had felt their loss immediately when the year’s campaign had opened. Murat’s forces had been unable to adequately screen the movements of the French army. Nor had they been able to scout effectively, often leaving Napoleon in the dark as to the whereabouts of the enemy. Worse still, they were too few to prevent units of Cossacks from raiding the French supply lines.