Napoleon docked a few seconds before Alexander Pavlovich, quickly got on the raft, and, passing through the pavilion, received the sovereign as he disembarked from the boat. The emperors bowed to each other from afar, and when they were on the raft, they shook hands with each other, embraced in a friendly manner, kissed and silently entered the large pavilion. At that moment, a boat with a crew of 20 armed soldiers set sail from the left bank of the Neman and stood between the raft and the Russian bank.

The meeting of the emperors lasted 1 hour and 55 minutes. The main topic of the negotiations was the fate of Prussia. Napoleon wanted to defeat Prussia and expel the Hohenzollerns. He offered the tsar the Vistula as a joint frontier. Alexander rejected it because it would have been against his honor and the honor of Russia to allow his friend and ally to be destroyed. Napoleon then offered him all the Prussian-Polish territories together with the Polish crown in case Alexander gave his consent to the destruction of Prussia. For the same reasons the sovereign again refused. He was so insistent that, in his own words, he sometimes forgot that he was Russian. Eventually Napoleon resigned himself to the idea of the continued existence of Prussia. To the Prussian minister Holtz he said,