Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (11 page)

After the meeting, a good two-hour event in which the French delegate had “rated them soundly,” Gentz and Metternich cooled down with a casual stroll through the villa’s gardens. Austria’s foreign minister was showing the preparations that were well under way for an upcoming celebration in honor of Allied victory the previous year at Leipzig. What particularly surprised Gentz, however, was Metternich’s attitude. He seemed strangely oblivious to “the embarrassment and the dreadful state of our position.”

L
EAVING THE SUMMER
villa, Prussian ambassador Wilhelm von Humboldt made his way back to the Spielmann mansion on the Graben, a central street lined with boutiques, cafés, and restaurants. Routine business for the embassy would be conducted there on the mansion’s second floor. This was a much better environment for concentrating on work than his first temporary lodgings, which were in a room adjacent to Princess Bagration’s lively suites in the Palm Palace, where Vienna’s beau monde was already gathering.

Forty-seven years old with light hair prematurely turning white, Humboldt was regarded as one of the hardest-working delegates in town. Diplomatic dispatches, memoranda, and drafts of protocols jostled haphazardly on his desk, next to many other projects in progress. When he was not working on another memorandum outlining Prussian policy, Humboldt relaxed by polishing his massive study of Basque languages, already a good decade into the work.

Humboldt was also busy translating the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus’s tragedy
Agamemnon.
He would tinker with the text almost every day of the congress, and, at this point, he was almost happy with the prologue. The challenges of ancient Greek would help Humboldt relieve stress from the day’s work around the diplomacy table. “Wars and peace come and go,” Humboldt once said, “but a good verse lasts forever.”

It is no surprise that Humboldt had made many enemies in the course of his career. His negotiation style was aggressive, and he was blunt for a diplomat. Erudite and intellectually sharp, Humboldt also had a high-handed approach that often manifested itself in a stubborn and inflexible disposition. He was also criticized for appearing overambitious, a tad elitist, and far too much concerned about showing he was right. As he put it himself, he lived for ideas. To many of his colleagues, Humboldt was too enamored by his own “subtleties and paradoxes,” which, however delightful to himself, soon wearied them ad nauseam.

Indeed, some wondered if Humboldt, with his scholarly air, would have been better suited to a university, like Berlin University, which he had earlier founded, than the manic high-stakes intrigues that he would encounter at the Vienna Congress. Worse than his pedantic tendencies, which stood out at that worldly conference, some noted a shocking, even chilling detachment to his personality. How could he tour the grim battlefields, strewn with the aftermath of slaughter, and still calmly carry on a discussion of Aristotle’s
Poetics?
Like a calculating abstractician, one colleague said, Humboldt only “toys with the world and with human beings as though it were a game.”

But the Prussian delegation was in no mood for toys or games in the autumn of 1814. By far the weakest of the Big Four, Prussia was usually viewed as a dangerous and probably the most unsettling delegation at the congress, armed with ambitious, hardworking, and brilliant minds like Humboldt. They seemed aggressive, and they had a formidable scholarly apparatus to back up their belligerency.

No major power had lost such a high percentage of its own territory as Prussia, and, with the exception of Austria, no other power had suffered as many humiliations at the hands of the French. But unlike other victors, who had already made gains during the war, or in the Treaty of Paris, the Kingdom of Prussia remained only a shell of its former self, a “parceled-out territory” that was barely half the size it was on the eve of the war.

Besides that, there was an acute sense of vulnerability that had dogged Prussian rulers for centuries. Flatlands of pine forests, sand dunes, and marshy coastlands in the north afforded no obstacle whatsoever to a determined invader. There were no mountains, oceans, or other natural frontiers demarcating its territory, and this lack of natural defenses only increased the militaristic bent of the kingdom in the exposed center of the Continent. Long before the current king, Frederick William III, Prussian rulers had been notorious for putting their trust in the army.

For several years now, and especially after the embarrassing defeats at Auerstedt and Jena in 1806, Prussia had been reforming its institutions. The army copied French tactics, drill, and conscription, and the government centralized its administration—no longer, as Metternich joked, “a conspiracy of mediocrities held together by the fear of taking a single step.” Peasants had been emancipated, education revamped, and the whole tax system made more efficient. Prussia was determined to play a greater role in central Europe.

Like its soldiers, who were feared for looting and destroying more than other armies on campaign, Prussia’s diplomats were earning a reputation for their intensity in the conference room. They were the “lions of diplomacy.” Humboldt and Hardenberg were among a select few diplomats who would earn a coveted Iron Cross, the famous military honor that had been instituted a few years before by Frederick William III. In fact, both were awarded an Iron Cross First Class with a white band, and they were the only ones ever to receive this honor.

What Prussia wanted most of all at the Vienna Congress was to annex a region that many, including Lord Castlereagh, literally had trouble placing on the map. This was the Kingdom of Saxony, located right in the middle of the Continent. Draw two straight lines, one north-south from Copenhagen to Rome and the other east-west from Warsaw to Paris, and they intersect in Saxony. Castlereagh was no master of geography and the issue of Saxony sounded pretty obscure, but it was soon to be hugely important to the peace conference, and also to the future of the continent.

In the early nineteenth century, Saxony had been a thriving region of towns, farms, and mining, including silver and jade. The capital of the kingdom, Dresden, straddled the Elbe River, and boasted many fine palaces, some “the size of towns,” which earned it the distinction of being the “Florence of the Elbe,” renowned for its beautiful Renaissance and baroque architecture.

Now this Saxony was under great threat at the Vienna Congress—and that is why the king of Saxony appears in a caricature of the “dancing congress” as the figure desperately “clutching his crown.” The problem with Saxony, as far as the Prussians were concerned, was that it had fought on the wrong side of the war. While the Russians, the Austrians, and even the Prussians had also supported Napoleon at one time or another, they had all eventually rallied to the Allies and helped the coalition obtain its victory. The Saxon king, however, had rejoined Napoleon in 1813 after a brief attempt at neutrality, and now many members of the victorious alliance wanted his throne.

Prussia was demanding the entire region, claiming it by right of its sacrifices in the war. Chancellor Karl von Hardenberg asked simply: “Has not Prussia, who made the greatest efforts and the greatest sacrifices in the common cause, the right to claim acquisitions proportionate to those of her neighbors?”

But others were not so sure. Although Prussia had certainly sacrificed, many like Talleyrand feared that this annexation of lands in its immediate south would give Prussia too much influence and upset the balance of power in central Europe. Besides, what right did the Prussians have to dethrone a king and annex an entire kingdom, including Dresden and Leipzig? The king of Saxony was outraged, sending ministers to Vienna to plead his case. He was unfortunately not able to come himself because the Prussians had captured him in October 1813 and locked him away in the Schloss Friedrichsfeld, a fortress prison outside Berlin. As the congress set out to debate his future, the king was still a prisoner of war.

Chapter 7

“E
UROPE,
U
NHAPPY
E
UROPE
”

Politics is the art of making war without killing anyone.

—P
RINCE DE
L
IGNE

A
ll throughout September, Prince Metternich was spending as much time as possible with the Duchess of Sagan. He was as deeply in love with her as he had ever been. Emperor Francis was not merely humoring him when he had said, “I consider her one of the most essential ingredients of the Congress.” The duchess was becoming an indispensable part of Metternich’s life.

The foreign minister looked forward to each meeting with the duchess, every morning at eleven—“our hour,” as he called it—when he came into her pink and white salon in the Palm Palace and they discussed affairs over a cup of chocolate. Metternich was not discreet, and they talked about everything. He respected her opinion so much that he wanted to make her his “secret advisor.” “You know—and understand—our problems far better than any of [my] Ministers,” he had once confessed to her.

When they were not together, and that was unfortunately too often as far as Metternich was concerned, he would yearn to see her. He would retire to his desk, and late at night, by candlelight, he would plead, in arching swirls: “If the love of my heart grants me another night I shall be repaid for the pains of a lifetime.” Wilhelmine would write back, saying that she would be waiting for him, and thinking only of him.

Yet the Duchess of Sagan had many other things on her mind. Behind her glamorous facade, she sometimes seemed melancholy, even depressed. Congress gossipers—and historians, too—had long believed that she was very much concerned about losing properties or income in the territories ruled by the tsar. The duchess was anxious about them, of course, but she had another, much deeper concern that almost no one at the Vienna Congress knew, not even the baron’s spies.

Her secret was revealed only in 1949 when the Czech scholar Maria Ullrichová was visiting an old Cistercian abbey at Plass, one of Metternich’s Bohemian estates. Underneath the abbey’s brewery was a wall—a fake wall, it turned out, that blocked the entrance to a hidden cellar. When Ullrichová noticed the decoy and managed to push it aside, she found a number of blue cardboard boxes marked “Acta Clementina,” and among them a small black box with gilded edges. On its side were the words, in Metternich’s clear handwriting, “Letters of the Duchess of Sagan.”

Metternich scholars knew, of course, of his affair with the duchess, but no one realized that the letters had survived, or had any idea of how close the two lovers had been. The letters tied with a small white ribbon had been hidden by Metternich’s descendants sometime in the mid to late 1930s, just before the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia. Fortunately, they survived intact, all 616 letters, and they reveal a great deal about the private life of Metternich, the duchess, and her salon at the center of the congress.

What few realized was that fourteen years before, the Duchess of Sagan had given birth to a daughter, and then, under pressure from her mother, given her away. Wilhelmine had only been eighteen years old at the time. Her difficult pregnancy and heartbreaking surrender of her child were explained to her younger sisters as a recuperation from a carriage accident.

The father of the child was unfortunate. It had been the Swedish nobleman and former cavalry officer Gustav Armfelt, who had been forced out of his country in the early 1790s (and the same man who had encouraged Dorothée in her studies). Armfelt had drifted down to the duchess’s estate, Sagan, and stayed on as a guest of the family. He looked like a cavalry officer, and his conversation was as glittering as the medals on his uniform. The Swedish gentleman was charming, dashing, and, at that time, regrettably also the lover of Wilhelmine’s mother.

Wilhelmine’s affair had been discovered in a cruel way. One night before going to bed, her mother, the Duchess of Courland, noticed that a candlestick had been taken from its holder, and wondered who would be stirring at that hour. Following the trail, she entered a room in the large castle, and found the forty-two-year-old man and her teenage daughter in a compromising situation. Shocked, she had slapped her daughter across the face, the sharp edges of her sapphire ring scratching into her skin.

Over the following months, Wilhelmine was forced by her mother into a marriage to Prince Louis de Rohan, a high aristocrat who had fled France during the revolution. Ruined by large debts, he cared little about his rich fiancée who happened to be pregnant with another man’s child.