Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (36 page)

Carl Bertuch, who represented German publishing firms and book dealers at the congress, particularly enjoyed the concerts at the Arnstein salon, which were invariably accompanied by generous supplies of “tea, lemonade, almond milk, ice cream, and light pastries.” Another hit was Fanny von Arnstein’s collection of wax figures. On one occasion that January, Arnstein opened her cabinet of wax figures, which depicted the gods of classical, Norse, and Egyptian mythology, along with Odysseus, Daedalus, the Queen of the Night, and the Four Seasons. The lighting was superb, and the wax figures looked lifelike as usual. But toward the end of the evening, the guests were startled when the wax figures suddenly stirred. Everyone marveled at the ability of the actors who posed as wax dolls.

One person who sometimes attended the Arnstein salon was a young assistant for the Hesse-Cassel delegation, the folklorist and philologist Jacob Grimm. Highly critical of the diplomacy and the drawing room, which he was experiencing up close from his apartment near the domes of the Karlskirche, south of the city center, Grimm described the Vienna Congress to his brother as a maze of rudeness and courtesy, recklessness and reserve, that, so far, had very little to show for its efforts.

In his memoirs, Grimm dismissed his stay at the congress as being “without usefulness.” He found his work at the embassy frustrating and mind-numbing, especially the copying of mundane documents. Yet Grimm was also able to spend time hunting for lost manuscripts and pursuing his studies. He was learning Serbian, beginning Czech, and familiarizing himself with the rich traditions of Hungarian and Bohemian folklore. He enjoyed his Wednesday evenings with a group of like-minded writers, intellectuals, and booksellers at the tavern Zum Strobelkopf, where they discussed everything over “a passable roast beef and poor beer and wine.”

Interestingly, in addition to preparing
The Spanish Romances
for publication and translating the Norse
Songs of the Elder Edda,
Grimm found an early manuscript of the medieval German epic
Nibelungenlied
(“the
Hohenems
codici”) that differed from previous known versions. He was also busy extending his contacts among scholars and working to establish an international folklore society to collect, among other things, folk songs, legends, proverbs, jokes, games, superstitions, idioms, customs, nursery rhymes, ghost stories, and, as he put it, “children’s tales about giants, dwarfs, monsters, princes, and princesses, enchanted and redeemed, devils, treasures and wishing-caps.” Despite long hours in the office, Grimm was setting the basis for some highly productive years of scholarship that would follow his stay at the Congress of Vienna.

M
EANWHILE, ON
E
LBA
, Napoleon had not heard from his wife and son for months, and started to fear that they were being held against their will. He suspected that few of his letters were actually reaching them in Vienna. Although he sent multiple copies, with different messengers, and signed the envelopes with fake names, all his efforts to elude police spies continued to fail.

Napoleon first attributed the cruel obstruction of communications to a faceless Austrian bureaucracy. As time passed, however, Napoleon would blame instead his father-in-law, Emperor Francis, and the Austrian foreign minister, Metternich. Indeed, Marie Louise’s secretary, Méneval, soon affirmed that Marie Louise was no longer at liberty to write or receive his letters.

In the meantime, other members of his family had arrived on Elba. His mother, Maria Letizia, had come in early autumn on board the
Grasshopper
and immediately made an impression on the islanders. “I have seen eminent people more intimidated in front of her than in front of the Emperor,” one said of the sixty-four-year-old Corsican matron. Napoleon and his mother often played cards and dominoes, with Napoleon, of course, cheating as he tended to do.

Napoleon’s favorite sister, thirty-four-year-old Pauline, also arrived on Elba, as she had promised. She brought along her reputation as the wild Bonaparte, having twice modeled nude or seminude for the sculptor Canova. One of the works, now at the Borghese Gallery, depicts her as the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch. By a mechanical device inside the base, the sculpture itself used to rotate to reveal her charms from many angles. Canova also added a thin layer of wax that, when the work was viewed by candlelight, added a more glistening lifelike appearance to the marble. Pauline would certainly enliven court festivities, not to mention the island’s social life.

Visitors were coming more frequently to Napoleon’s small empire. One day, back in September, rumors circulated that Marie Louise and the little prince had actually arrived on Elba, landing one night in a secluded olive grove at San Giovanni. Eyewitnesses had reportedly seen them travel with the emperor to a remote mountain hermitage, Madonna del Monte, on the western part of the island. A little boy was said to be calling Napoleon “Papa Emperor.”

What the curious Elbans had witnessed was not the arrival of Marie Louise and the king of Rome, but in fact Napoleon’s Polish mistress, Maria Walewska, and his illegitimate son Alexandre. It is not surprising that the rumors flourished. The two women were of similar age (Maria Walewska was two years older) and looked vaguely similar from a distance; Alexandre was about a year older than the former king of Rome.

Napoleon and Maria Walewska had first met seven years before, when the emperor passed through Warsaw and showed an obvious infatuation with the young Polish woman, then an eighteen-year-old newlywed. Her husband, an elderly patriot, had encouraged her to use Napoleon’s interest to the advantage of Polish independence, and she had reluctantly agreed. They had carried on an affair intermittently ever since, and after Napoleon’s abdication, Walewska had offered to join him on Elba. He had declined, still hoping, of course, that Marie Louise would arrive. Historians have long suspected that her trip had more than romantic or family purposes, and she was secretly carrying messages between Napoleon and Murat in Naples, though no direct evidence has yet surfaced to confirm that. At any rate, it was just a short weekend visit.

Napoleon was busy on many other projects—building roads, devising schemes for a fire brigade, and even building a kiln to fire bricks for future construction on the island. He was planning a new garbage service to remove the filth that rotted in the streets and to combat some nasty diseases, like typhus, that thrived on the island. In addition, Napoleon was planning a series of aqueducts to bring fresh water to the capital and planting mulberry trees along the sides of the road out to the nearby village of San Martino, hoping, in the long run, that they would furnish enough worms to create a new silk industry. Oaks, pines, and olive trees were also planted, as were chestnuts to stem the erosion on the mountainsides. Napoleon was even landscaping along Portoferraio’s main road, striving to create an Elban equivalent of the elegant Champs-Élysées.

Indeed, Napoleon had been running his sixteen-mile-long island with the energy and authority with which he used to rule Europe. Ever since he had arrived, he had marched troops, performed daily maneuvers, and even, on one occasion back in May, brought some forty soldiers and invaded a nearby island. Pianosa, some fifteen miles to the southwest, had been conquered and incorporated into the Elban empire.

This “conquest” was admittedly only a small island, deserted except for its wild goats trampling about some ancient Roman ruins. The island was too dangerous to be settled, and, unlike Elba, it did not have natural defenses and was easily raided. The island was well-named: Pianosa means “flat land.”

What it had was fertile soil. Napoleon intended to create a colony to supply grain to Elba. Also on Pianosa, Napoleon planned a hunting reserve, a stud farm to breed horses, and a retirement home for veterans who had served the state. Loyal Elbans had been sent over to start building the island he envisioned.

Pianosa had at least one other advantage that is often forgotten. Unlike Elba’s harbor, Portoferraio, which lay in a bay that was easy to close and trap, Pianosa’s harbor faced the open sea. If Napoleon were to ever find himself in danger, or wish to leave Elba in secret, he could escape to this island and from there set sail without anyone being too certain of his destination.

Chapter 23

“O
DIOUS AND
C
RIMINAL
T
RAFFICK IN
H
UMAN
F
LESH
”

It is not the business of England to collect trophies but to restore Europe to peaceful habits.

—C
ASTLEREAGH

B
y early February, Vienna’s Carnival season was in full swing. Every night, there was a dinner, ball, concert, play, or some other form of entertainment dreamed up by the Festivals Committee or an embassy around town. Congress dignitaries found themselves shuffling diplomatically from party to party, salon to salon. Big events were pushed later into the evening, to allow everyone to squeeze in as many events as possible, and seldom, it seemed, did any major celebration end before sunrise. It was like “living six weeks in a kettledrum.”

The weather—like the spirits—was also improving. “Magnificent weather, spring temperature,” Gentz scribbled in his diary that February, “the finest sun in the world; winter such as I’ve never seen.” As the delegates bid farewell to their furs and Polish long coats, the strollers came out again in great numbers. The Graben, the Prater, the Bastions—all the main promenades were once again “positively swarming with people.”

At the salon of Princess Bagration, the Russian tsar and Countess Flora Wrbna-Kageneck were in a discussion that somehow veered onto the issue of who could dress the fastest, men or women. The tsar said men were faster, and the countess disagreed. There was one way to find out. And so a few days later, a dressing duel took place at the fashionable salon of Countess Zichy. Both the tsar and the countess showed up in plain attire, giving proof that there were no tricks or cheating. Then, at the given signal, each went into a separate dressing room for the race, or behind a divider placed in the center of the room—eyewitness accounts do not agree.

Several minutes later, the tsar appeared proudly in his full gala uniform shining with “orders and decorations.” Snickers were heard, and he looked around the room to see the countess, already there, looking like a vision of the ancien régime. She had not forgotten powder, perfume, rouge, bouquets, beauty spots, or anything else. The countess, it was clear, had won the wager.

“How clever and amusing all this is!” Humboldt snapped sarcastically, marveling how low the congress had fallen. “I am deadly tired of all this partying,” he had long complained.

It was during the Carnival season, with its masks, costumes, and sophisticated debauchery, that Vienna received the news that Castlereagh’s successor at the congress was to be one of the most popular men alive: the Duke of Wellington, the famous general with a string of victories to his credit in the Spanish campaign, and not a single loss in the war. Vienna society was thrilled.

Wellington was, like Castlereagh, a conservative Tory who had played a vital role in defeating Napoleon. After the war, he had been appointed British ambassador to France, not at first sight the most tactful choice. At any rate, Wellington was well informed. British dispatches between London and Vienna had passed through his office in Paris, the former home of Napoleon’s sister Pauline, which Wellington had bought and turned into the British embassy, as it has remained ever since.

Only named a duke nine months before, Wellington was born Arthur Wesley, the third son and fourth surviving child in a large landowning family that belonged to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland. His father, Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington, was professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin. Like Napoleon, born Napoleone Buonaparte, Arthur had changed his name, taking an old-fashioned form of Wellesley that had been his family’s name for centuries. The duke always played down his origins. Born in Ireland, he once said, did not make one Irish any more than being born in a barn meant you were a horse.

He was tall and lean with broad shoulders, chestnut-brown hair, and blue eyes. When he appeared in his scarlet field marshal uniform, with its “gold-embroidered velvet collar” and his array of medals, Wellington looked like the “Iron Duke” of his later reputation (the nickname only appeared in the 1820s when he set up a new wrought-iron railing in front of his London house). One thing that did not fit the image, though, was his laugh. Wellington reportedly let out a slightly hysterical cackle like a “horse with whooping cough.”