Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (24 page)

This timely discovery had come from a Saxon officer who had just arrived in Vienna from London bringing news of his recent meeting with the prince regent, who clearly shared Talleyrand’s concerns. Other sources had confirmed this discovery, including one of King Louis’ ministers in Paris, who had had a revealing conversation with the British ambassador to France, the Duke of Wellington. In other words, Castlereagh, at best, had no authorization for his actions, and quite likely could be exposed for disregarding the wishes of his own government.

While Talleyrand was figuring out how best to use this information, Castlereagh worked frantically with Prussian leaders in their plan to lure the Prussian king away from the Russian tsar.

Indeed, the whole tense and uncertain situation exploded at a dramatic dinner in early November in Tsar Alexander’s private suites at the Hofburg Palace. The tsar and the king of Prussia were dining alone, and toward the end of the meal, Alexander turned the discussion to foreign policy, reminding his ally about the importance of reestablishing the Kingdom of Poland. Then, after swearing that he would never yield on this question, the tsar expressed his surprise, disappointment, and anger that the king of Prussia, his “dearest friend,” had been scheming against him.

Startled at this accusation, the king uttered a “thousand protestations” and begged his complete innocence. He swore that he had supported the tsar, just as he had promised, and this went for Poland, or any other matter that his ally desired. They had declared their oaths of eternal friendship. Nothing had changed.

“It is not enough that you should be of this mind,” Tsar Alexander replied. “Your ministers must agree to support me too!”

“But of course my ministers will support what I choose to support!” the king answered defensively.

At that point, the Prussian chancellor, Hardenberg, was summoned to the dinner table. The aged and sophisticated statesman, who “knew how to make time fly by his charming conversation,” found himself in a most uncomfortable and unpleasant situation.

The tsar immediately bombarded him with a series of facts and questions. Russia and Prussia, Alexander said, had reached a “definite and unshakable” agreement about Poland. Will you or will you not listen to the orders of your king, the tsar demanded to know. The Prussian king just sat there, indifferent to his minister’s plight.

When Hardenberg tried to explain, at one point, the importance of international consensus on Poland, the tsar said, bluntly, “Those are the arguments of Monsieur Metternich,” and then, out of the blue, alleged that Metternich had offered to betray the Prussians. Hardenberg was rightly skeptical. Metternich might have been unpredictable, but this wild assertion was highly unlikely. The Austrian minister was far too upset with the tsar, while Alexander, on the other hand, appeared angry and desperate enough that he might just resort to any means at his disposal to have his way.

What right did the tsar have to treat another king’s minister this way? Gentz said afterward that the Prussian chancellor was so shaken by the experience that some friends “feared for his health.” When his colleagues on the British and Austrian staffs heard of the dinner, they hoped that he would resign in protest.

The Prussian chancellor was ordered to break off his “intrigues” with Britain and Austria immediately. He would now be bound to carrying out Prussian policy as determined by his king, and that meant, in practice, supporting a policy that he personally felt threatened his country and the stability of the entire continent.

Hardenberg was deeply upset, reportedly afterward denouncing the tsar as “the most perfidious, treacherous, usurping character, and infinitely more dangerous than Bonaparte.” Yet he was uncertain about how exactly to proceed. He scribbled his impression in his diary: “Russia, supported by the King [of Prussia] on all points, is wrong. But what to do?”

When Metternich found out about the tsar’s accusations, he immediately wrote to Hardenberg to affirm that the allegations were not true: “I deny not only the fact but I am also ready to maintain the opposite in the presence of the Tsar himself.”

Another person particularly troubled by this development was Lord Castlereagh. He had been trying to establish a united front with Hardenberg for months—both of them, in fact, working against their own governments for something that they felt would better serve the future peace. Still, their cooperation was a deliberate act of disobedience, and, unfortunately for them, it had backfired. The Russian tsar and the king of Prussia had only been brought closer together.

On November 7, Hardenberg unhappily but officially notified his colleagues that Prussia would now have to support Russia. Castlereagh read this note with a great deal of concern and despondency. “Unless the Emperor of Russia can be brought to a more moderate and sound course of public conduct,” Castlereagh sighed, “the peace which we have so dearly purchased will be of short duration.”

Chapter 15

P
URSUING
P
HANTOMS

The triumphal chariot of the congress is stuck in the mud.

—B
ARON
F
RANZ VON
G
ÄRTNER, IN A LETTER TO
C
OUNT
E
RBACH,
M
AY
16, 1815,
INTERCEPTED BY THE POLICE

S
even miles off the coast of northern Italy, Napoleon was still trying to adjust to his life as the emperor of Elba. After staying only one night on the island, he had realized that his current “palace” in the town hall was not working out. Sounds of the city square, with its lively chatter and strumming guitars, wafted up to Napoleon’s window late into the night. For such a small capital, the residents of Portoferraio could make a lot of noise.

Rivaling the commotion of the square was the odor that stemmed from the unfortunate habit of simply tossing the trash into the streets. While many cities at that time relied on a similar approach, Elba had far too little rain for most of the year to sweep it away, and the garbage ended up rotting in the gutters. The stench could be overpowering. The first order of business, back in May, had been to find a new place to live.

Obviously, there was nothing on the island that could rival the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Saint-Cloud, or any of the other palaces Napoleon had known back in France. There wasn’t anything close. After discounting a couple of possible residences, none of which was particularly enticing, Napoleon had settled for a house on the outskirts.

It was a modest single-story house with eight rooms, four of which had been added in a renovation some fifty years before. Its name, Casa il Mulini, derived from a pair of windmills that had turned there until their destruction in 1808. The house itself, about ninety years old, had originally served as the residence of a Medici gardener. The outside facade was strikingly pink and adorned with emerald green shutters.

What Napoleon particularly liked about the house was the location. On a remote cliff some one hundred feet above the sea, Napoleon could sit comfortably in the villa’s breezy garden and scan the blue horizon for incoming ships. With the bay, the fort, and the reefs, no large ship arriving on his island could escape a trained spyglass.

Napoleon’s interest in the horizon was not, of course, idle curiosity. He was concerned for his personal safety, and with good reason. During the last twenty years, Napoleon’s policies of heavy taxation, forced conscription, mandated legal reforms, and undisguised looting had made many enemies in France and occupied Europe. Royalists, radicals, patriots, and even monks with daggers in their robes—there were many people who nursed grudges and wished to settle vendettas. In addition to aspiring assassins, there was the threat that pirates swarming the Mediterranean might try to kidnap the emperor and ransom him for the rumored treasures stored somewhere on his island. Napoleon was, in other words, potentially in a great deal of danger.

So while guards were posted to keep watch on incoming ships, Napoleon set about immediately to improve the island’s dilapidated state of defenses. He was to rebuild the ruined watchtowers, fortify the walls protecting the harbor, and strengthen the firepower atop its ramparts. The best harbor, the only one for sizable ships, must be as secure as possible.

The emperor had been especially glad, too, when his faithful Imperial Guard had arrived safely in the early summer. Four hundred men had been permitted, though their number had already risen to over one thousand. These soldiers were the last remnants of his once invincible Grande Armée. Now they formed the core of his army on Elba, though their functions had to change with the circumstances. The Polish lancers, for instance, who would now have little opportunity for ferocious cavalry charges, were to be retrained for artillery duty.

Napoleon had surrounded himself with loyal followers. Antoine Drouot, a baker’s son who had risen to the rank of general, was appointed minister of defense and governor of Elba. Nicknamed the “Wise Man of the Grande Armée,” Drouot was looking forward to spending time on his studies. He was learning Italian, reading the Bible daily, and playing chess with Napoleon.

General Pierre-Jacques Cambronne, leader of the Guard, was far less content. “A desperate, uneducated ruffian” who had been wounded so many times that he looked “completely tattooed with scars,” Cambronne was a restless soldier bored out of his mind. Another high-ranking loyalist who was frustrated with the lack of action was General Count Henri Bertrand. This engineer turned administrator was now the grand chamberlain at the Elban court, presiding over the etiquette that would be as elaborate as it had been back in imperial France. Bertrand’s career advancement seemed to have come to a standstill since moving to Elba, and his wife, Fanny, who had joined him, felt that they had made a mistake.

As for the navy, Napoleon had the small sixteen-gun
Inconstant
(which he used as his flagship), the three-masted
Etoile,
and the twenty-six-ton
Caroline.
In addition, Napoleon was setting up another line of defense with a new police force. A fellow Corsican, Poggi di Talavo, was named chief of police and given the main responsibility for watching all traffic to and from Elba. Permits would be needed for travel, and all newcomers would have to register at the Star Fort, beside the harbor. Police officers piloting small, fast feluccas patrolled the island’s isolated beaches. Strangers and suspicious characters were questioned thoroughly. Elba, small and exposed, would be turned into a fortress island.

There were, however, two people that Napoleon deeply wanted to see arrive on his shores: his wife, Marie Louise, and their three-year-old son, the former king of Rome. She had promised to join him on Elba, and Napoleon had been waiting since May, lamenting her absence, his “daily sorrow.” At the beginning, he had written her almost every day. He had also started preparing a special wing for them in his palace, repainting and refurbishing it for the expected arrival. Napoleon had everything he needed in his little kingdom, he wrote. “Only you, my dear Louise, are missing, you and my son.”

M
EANWHILE, BACK IN
Vienna, Marie Louise was avoiding the celebrations of the peace conference as much as possible. “Festivities go on every day, so they tell me,” Marie Louise wrote to Napoleon, adding that she was “scarcely informed of them” and had no interest in them whatsoever.

All those parties hosted by her husband’s conquerors must have seemed distasteful. They must also have highlighted the frustrating new uncertainties over the duchies that she had been promised by treaty. Rumors swirled about how eager some of the treaty’s signatories were to break those agreements. “Each day there was a fresh story,” her secretary, Baron Claude-François de Méneval, wrote. “To-day Parma was assured to her, on the morrow it had been given to somebody else.” The result was that Marie Louise’s mood swung rapidly between hope and fear, and all of this, in turn, only increased her anxieties and made her much more willing to submit to the wishes of her father.

While she waited for the congress to decide her future, Marie Louise filled her days by riding in the park, strolling in the gardens, learning Italian, dining with her suite, taking drawing lessons—anything that took her mind away from her worries. One favorite pastime was music, and there was increasingly a new man found at the piano in her salon, a newcomer with a beautiful tenor voice: the handsome and debonair general Count Adam Albert von Neipperg. He had a black silk patch over his right eye as a result of a saber blow received in battle, and a reputation as a ladies’ man. Neipperg had been placed in her suite that summer by no less than Emperor Francis. Neipperg was supposed to prevent Marie Louise from going to Elba, and he was instructed to use “any means whatsoever.” He had succeeded.