Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (17 page)

“If it be a matter of course,” Talleyrand responded, “it can do no harm to specify it.”

“What has public law to do here?” Prussia’s Humboldt asked.

It was public law, Talleyrand responded, “that sends you here.”

The tensions were heating up, and Castlereagh, the force of moderation, called Talleyrand aside and discreetly asked him if his colleagues conceded on this point, would he “afterwards be more accommodating”? The French minister agreed.

But the trouble in convincing the Big Four to recognize the authority of law at the peace conference seemed a bad omen. Talleyrand, however, was hopeful that the force of law would help restrain the appetites of the more aggressive powers. Metternich was glad to win another postponement of the congress, and he planned to use the time to find a way to oppose the Russians. He went home to read some poetry, and, as he wrote, think about the Duchess of Sagan.

A
FEW DAYS
before that important meeting, Talleyrand had gone to a dinner party with Dorothée. It was in many ways typical of the dinners held every night in Vienna that autumn: lavish menus, excellent wine, sparkling conversation led by prominent and often fascinating guests. The Duchess of Sagan was hosting the party and putting her talents to use. But what was most surprising about that party was that the person at her side was not Prince Metternich.

In fact, it was an old lover, Prince Alfred von Windischgrätz, a twenty-seven-year-old from an Austrian aristocratic family who was a cavalry officer with a distinguished record in the war as a colonel in a regiment of cuirassiers, the O’Reilly Light Horse Regiment. He was a soldier’s soldier, tall and strong, with a taste for smoking cigars, a habit he picked up in Brussels. Prince Alfred is often credited with popularizing this “Belgian habit,” as it was called, among the Austrian aristocracy.

That evening, the two had carried on, evidently, with more than their usual flirtatious ways, and everyone present had left the party without any doubt that the duchess had rekindled this old flame. The duchess’s relationship with Prince Alfred was on a different level than the one with Metternich. Whereas the foreign minister was a sophisticated, worldly charmer, very much at home in elegant drawing rooms and plush opera boxes, Windischgrätz preferred more simple pleasures.

Prince Alfred von Windischgrätz and the Duchess of Sagan had begun their affair in a way that was somewhat characteristic of their relationship. One afternoon, back in 1810, they had ridden out to a country inn in a beautiful wine district just outside Vienna. While they sat together, the duchess nursed her glass, and the prince, cigar in hand, noticed a ring on her finger. It was a giant, impressively cut ruby. The count asked about the gem, wondering no doubt if it had been given to her by a lover.

Actually, the duchess had purchased the ring herself. She had come across it on display at a Vienna jeweler’s shop and just had to have it. But for a combination of motives—a sense of pride, mischief, and curiosity about what would happen—the duchess did not wish to say that outright. She was vague and noncommittal in her responses, and this promptly sent the decorated cavalry officer out of his mind with jealousy. At one point, the impulsive prince sprung across the table and snatched the ring from her finger.

As he started to look it over, hunting for an engraving or other sign of its sender, the duchess leaped up and quickly circled the table to take it back. A playful wrestling match ensued, like two teenagers in love, when the duchess, determined to win, sank her teeth into his arm. The prince reacted by locking his hold on her, and then with his free hand, for a prank, put the ring between his tobacco-stained teeth. The duchess broke free, and in the process, the prince accidentally swallowed the ruby. The ring was later recovered and returned to the duchess. Anything could happen on an outing with Prince Alfred.

Now, when word of the Duchess of Sagan’s dinner companion made it back to Metternich, he was deeply disturbed. Though he was not unaware of their previous liaison, the thought of them together made him lose his usual cool. He could not stand the idea of anyone taking his place by her side, and wrote to the duchess asking for clarification. Surely, there must be some misunderstanding.

By the time of the emperor’s ball at the Spanish Riding School on October 9, Metternich could still not shake the thought from his mind. He wrote to the duchess that day, in the middle of a meeting. He thought of their past, and how during their relationship he had cried “tears of joy.” He could not wait to see her.

That evening, the duchess looked more beautiful than ever. She arrived with twenty-three other women, who, arranging themselves in four groups, dressed as the Four Elements. Six young ladies wearing blue and green dresses, adorned with pearls, coral, and other seashells, went as Water. Six others in blazing red silk dresses and carrying torches were Fire. Another group of young women wearing wings and the clearest “flimsiest veiling” was the Air. The Duchess of Sagan was with the group representing Earth, and wore a brown velvet dress and a headdress in the form of a “golden basket filled with jeweled fruit.” To Metternich, she outshone everyone.

The ballroom was packed, and maneuvering through the throngs of dancers was challenging. Yet Metternich started to suspect that the duchess was avoiding him. Clearly, she had no time for him, and he never was alone with her. Prince Alfred, on the other hand, seemed to pull off the feat with no problem at all.

Had Metternich been with the duchess, he could have enjoyed the magnificent, glittering spectacle of kings and princes at play in the white stucco hall lit up by silver chandeliers and thousands of candles. The tsar danced, it was said, with fifty women, apparently doing his best to make sure the peace conference earned its reputation as the dancing congress.

Metternich was miserable. Late the following night, he penned a long letter to the Duchess of Sagan describing how he felt: “You have surely been loved, and you will be loved again, but you will never be more loved, and you have never been more loved, than by me.” Metternich was even more unused to losing in love than in diplomacy.

Chapter 11

A L
AWLESS
S
CRAMBLE?

Treason, Sire, that is a question of dates.

—T
ALLEYRAND

W
hile Metternich brooded over the duchess and feared that she was slipping out of his life, Vienna’s diplomats were again facing long waits in his anteroom. Two days after the masked ball, Geneva’s delegates, Jean-Gabriel Eynard and Charles Pictet de Rochemont, appeared at the Chancellery for a meeting scheduled at one in the afternoon. They had been the first to arrive that day—it was a Tuesday, and Metternich’s salons on Monday nights typically lasted until the early morning hours. While they waited for Metternich, a tall, elegant man with a red skullcap, long scarlet gloves, and silk habiliments approached and struck up a conversation.

This man, it turned out, was Cardinal Consalvi, the pope’s secretary of state and delegate at the Vienna Congress. For the last fourteen years, he had guided both foreign policy and domestic affairs for the Vatican. He was known as a reformer, and had, among other things, led the excavation of the Forum and the restoration of the Colosseum. He had also ordered names placed onto streets, and numbers given to individual buildings. Above all, Consalvi was known for his work with Napoleon, including the landmark negotiation of the Concordat (1801) that brought about the reconciliation between the Catholic Church and France after the turmoil of the revolution.

It was also Consalvi who, in 1804, had persuaded the reluctant Pope Pius VII to travel to Paris for Napoleon’s imperial coronation, the first time a pope had participated in such a ceremony in almost three hundred years, the last time being the coronation of Charles V at Bologna in 1530. Consalvi, meanwhile, back at the Vatican, served as the “Papal-Vicar,” the only occasion of this office in the history of the papacy.

Consalvi was indeed a talented diplomat in the league of Metternich, Talleyrand, Castlereagh, and the other giants at the Vienna peace conference. According to the writer Stendhal, Consalvi was actually the greatest of them all because he was “the only honest one” in the lot. Besides his frankness, the pope’s secretary of state had earned a reputation as a tough negotiator, as was shown on many occasions when relations between Napoleon and the Vatican later soured. Napoleon called Consalvi “a lion in sheep’s clothing” and threatened several times to have him shot. (Consalvi, for instance, refused to recognize Napoleon’s divorce from his first wife, Joséphine, and led a group of cardinals in a boycott of the wedding ceremony.)

During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the papacy had fallen to one of its lowest points in modern history. The French army invaded the Papal States several times and seized vast amounts of property, including its richest territory, the Legations (Ferrara, Bologna, and Ravenna). The swampy Marches to the south of Rome had also been lost, along with many other places, including Avignon, which had been papal property since 1309, and Venaissin, since 1228.

Napoleon had also plundered the Vatican shamelessly, stealing some one hundred works of art, selected by French commissioners. One observer described the awful spectacle of French “doctrinaire cannibals running around, catalogues at hand,” selecting the treasures to be brought back to Paris: the Apollo Belvedere, the Dying Gaul, Raphael’s
Transfiguration,
Domenichino’s
Last Communion of St. Jerome,
and
Laocoön and His Sons,
to name a few. The French had forced the pope to sign away ownership of these works of art in the Treaty of Tolentino (1797), and subsequent raids brought many more treasures. Two years later, when the pope refused to relinquish his rights as a ruler, Napoleon had him seized from the Vatican. Pius VI actually died in captivity as a French prisoner, and his successor, Pius VII, was only released in January 1814.

Like many others at the congress, the Vatican had strong arguments for regaining its territory and property, especially given the wide support of the principle of legitimacy. But the pope had signed the treaty, and there was no guarantee that congress dignitaries would accept Consalvi’s argument that it was done under duress, no matter how self-evident it might appear. There were powerful interests at stake. The current holders of the Papal States wanted to keep them: Murat’s army now in the Marches, and the Austrians in the Legations.

Eynard, Pictet de Rochemont, and Consalvi continued to wait on the Austrian foreign minister, who eventually arrived an hour and a half late. Consalvi received the first audience in honor of his position as the pope’s delegate. The second meeting went to the Prussian ambassador, Humboldt, who had just arrived and immediately jumped to the front of the line. Urgent business, he said, though it must have seemed to many who now filled the room as just another instance of Prussian arrogance. By the late afternoon, after three hours of waiting, one of Metternich’s valets de chambre entered and announced that the Austrian foreign minister could no longer see anyone, as he had a dinner appointment and he had not yet dressed for it. Somehow, though, the Swiss delegates managed to gain entrance, probably with the help of a handsome tip.

“It is impossible to have more agreeable manners than Metternich,” Eynard wrote in his diary later that day, after the brief meeting. Metternich, of course, appeared to be on their side—he always seemed on the side of the person he was with. Although the foreign minister was affable and engaging with his usual touch of “lightness and unconcern,” Eynard thought he looked “overwhelmed with fatigue.” He noted the dark circles under Metternich’s eyes, and how the foreign minister fought off yawns. He had no idea about Metternich’s current preoccupations with the Duchess of Sagan.

No one knows for certain what Princess Bagration was doing at this time, either, though many rumors were circulating about the mischief she was making at Metternich’s expense. Evidently, her attempts to win Metternich had not worked, and as several spy reports began to note, the princess was becoming much angrier at her former lover. She was actively pursuing “revenge for Metternich’s neglect,” one informed. Another agent reported that she was “openly revealing all she knows, or has heard, that might hurt Austria.” Guests to her salon were shocked at her outspoken comments, though the details of her tantrums were discreetly omitted from the police reports.