Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (6 page)

Alexander had yet to specify his exact plans for the region, though privately he had promised to re-create the Kingdom of Poland—that is, he would combine the slice of Poland he had inherited from Catherine the Great with the lands of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw, which his army had occupied since the end of the war. The tsar seemed genuine enough, and many Polish patriots took him at his word. But there was a nagging concern that he might not be able to deliver on these grand promises. Even if he had the best intentions, would the tsar, in the end, allow this creation to be free and independent?

Certainly, no one was comfortable having Russia’s enormous realm stretching so far to the west with this satellite kingdom of Poland, and the touchy, unpredictable tsar as a neighbor. Castlereagh and Metternich alike feared the implications. Would this not make Russia the new unrivaled power, potentially enjoying a dominance that not even Napoleon had commanded?

Alexander already had the support of his traveling companion and old friend, the king of Prussia. The tsar and the king had developed a close working relationship, which had been sealed with a melodramatic act, even for that melodramatic age. When Alexander had visited Berlin in 1805, the tsar and the king had descended into the crypt of the enlightened despot Frederick the Great, and, beside the tomb of the dead king, they had sworn oaths of eternal friendship.

Of course, during the stress of the war, the emotional scene had been forgotten, and the two powers had betrayed each other. But later, when the tide had turned in their favor, both had acknowledged their mistakes. This time, they swore that they would stick together, and cemented their renewed alliance with a deal: Russia would gain a free hand in Poland, and Prussia, in return for its support (and surrender of its Polish territory), would receive a part of central and eastern Germany known as Saxony. They had written their promises, in the secret Treaty of Kalisch, signed back in February 1813, and pledged to support each other no matter what.

“Y
OU CANNOT BELIEVE
how beautiful my rooms are when the sun shines through them,” Metternich had once said, admiring the tall, well-designed oriental windows of his office study at the Foreign Ministry. The challenge, he knew, was finding the time to enjoy them properly.

By late September 1814, the congress had not yet opened and the foreign minister was appalled to see the staggering amount of work already piling up. There were dispatches to read, protocols to draft, and agendas to juggle, never mind the endless logistical matters of launching the peace conference, for which Metternich was already serving, unofficially, as president. “Interminable chores,” it all seemed to the foreign minister in one of his weak moments.

Just as he had feared, visitors were beating down a path to the white stone Chancellery building, home of the Foreign Ministry, a large, early eighteenth-century structure adorned with Corinthian columns and facing out onto the northern end of the Hofburg Palace. The Chancellery was also known as the Ballhaus, after its previous use as a Habsburg tennis court. This was only appropriate, Metternich’s critics pointed out, given the foreign minister’s frivolous gamelike approach to diplomacy.

Metternich’s offices with the lovely large windows were on the second floor. Green damask covered the walls in the main negotiating room, from the parquet floor to the new stucco ceiling. There were dark woodwork, oil paintings in gilt frames, and white marble busts resting on pedestals. The room had been redecorated with a new marble fireplace and many new pieces of furniture that Metternich had purchased a few months before in Paris. He had given the matter some thought, Metternich said, because he feared he would probably be spending a lot of time there.

The large anteroom, with its high, eighteen-foot ceilings, was regularly filled up to capacity. Petitioners hoping to have a word with Metternich found themselves facing what seemed like an interminable wait, and passed the time the best they could, exchanging stories or just staring at the walls, which were lined with mahogany bookshelves holding handsome volumes in red morocco.

One morning that month, for example, Metternich found this room packed yet again with people eager to press some case or other. Prussia’s chancellor, Karl August von Hardenberg, who had arrived in Vienna a few days before, had come to request an audience. He was already complaining about the difficulty of gaining a meeting with Metternich the Invisible, as he dubbed him. A representative of the king of Bavaria, Field Marshal Prince Karl Wrede, was also there waiting, probably with his trusty maps in hand. Four officials in long black robes with a shining silver Maltese cross also stood out, representing the Knights of Malta, an elite chivalric order that dated back to the twelfth century.

No doubt the knights wanted to have their treasures returned after Napoleon’s plundering in 1798. He had sacked their island, running off with gold and silver chalices, goblets, and jewels from a treasure vault that had been accumulated since the thirteenth century. The knights also wanted their island, Malta, returned. The British had promised a prompt restoration after they liberated it from Napoleon, but they had not yet complied and, in the opinion of the Grand Master of the Order, showed no signs of doing so. The Grand Master was correct. The British had grown attached to the beautiful strategic island with the excellent naval base, and they had secured it in the Treaty of Paris.

Countless other people filled the crowded room, including two or three dozen German noblemen, all former knights of the now defunct Holy Roman Empire. Many of these aristocrats had lost ancient privileges, and often also family property, when Napoleon dismantled the empire and parceled out its western edges, awarding territory to his vassal kingdoms of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Westphalia. Some of the knights would press for restoration of their rights and property, and others went further, hoping for nothing less than the revival of the Holy Roman Empire itself.

“I found all of Europe in my anteroom,” Metternich said with vanity and frustration, as he eyed the many petitioners with their bulging leather portfolios and the endless amount of work that they represented. Metternich was not looking forward to the hard wrangling ahead. It was sure to be, he predicted, “four or six weeks of hell.”

W
HEN THE SHEER
magnitude of the problems seemed overwhelming, Metternich could shuffle down a private staircase, cross a cobbled lane, and escape into an eighteenth-century mansion at 54 Schenkengasse.

This was the Palm Palace, and for the past year Metternich had been drawing on all his finesse in arranging a love affair with a woman who occupied one of its large suites: Wilhelmine, the Duchess of Sagan. Metternich had had many liaisons in the past, but this one was different. The duchess was one of the most desirable matches of the day, and Metternich was clearly succumbing to her charms.

The Duchess of Sagan was a slim and petite thirty-three-year-old with dark-blonde hair and deep brown eyes—a ravishing and restless beauty who also happened to be heiress to one of the largest fortunes in Europe. She owned castles all over eastern and central Europe, including Sagan, built by the mercenary of the Thirty Years War, Count Wallenstein, and located a hundred miles south of Berlin.

When Metternich met the duchess, through a mutual friend during his carefree days as a diplomat in Dresden, he had been intrigued. She had grown up in Courland in the Baltic (today’s Latvia), traveled all over Europe, and spoke half a dozen languages fluently. She was in her second unhappy marriage, and soon to be her second divorce. “I am ruining myself with husbands,” she was said to have quipped.

The duchess had kept her own name, and managed her own estates, a somewhat daunting prospect given her extensive property. She had used some of her fortune for charity, even financing a private hospital for wounded soldiers. At one time, when a maid in her household went into premature labor, Wilhelmine had stepped in as an emergency midwife and helped deliver a healthy baby girl.

The relationship between Metternich and the Duchess of Sagan had first started to heat up in the summer of 1813 when he was working on arranging a peace with Napoleon. The peace at that time failed, but the romance thrived. Metternich saw the duchess as much as he could, and in the midst of the crisis, wrote his first long love letter to her:

I watched you for years. I found you beautiful; my heart remained silent; why has that sweet peace deserted me? Why out of nothing have you become for me everything?

The duchess was surprised and frankly flattered by the attentions of this dashing statesman, but she had not been won over, at least not yet. Metternich, however, had persisted. One month later, he wrote:

I am writing because I shall not see you this morning, and I must tell you that I love you more than my life—that my happiness is nothing unless you are very much a part of it.

The duchess could fill a room in her palace with all the gifts Metternich would send, everything from books bound in red morocco to lamps made of lava. Metternich, in turn, cherished every gift that he received. On one shelf in his study was a special black box that had a lock of her hair.

Metternich liked her mind, her judgment, her generosity. He liked how beautiful she looked in her formal gown that sparkled in the ballroom, and he liked the baggy flannels that she wore when she was only lounging around her suite, including her personal favorite, an old “wadded gown with holes in the elbows.” Metternich liked the little things, such as the way she drank her cognac, balancing a sugar cube onto the small silver spoon, gently dipping it into the amber drink, and then, at the end, slurping down the rest. “What,” he once wrote to her, “don’t I like about you.”

By the end of that summer, the duchess had finally come around, and confessed her love for Metternich as well: “I do not know how I love you, but I love you very much, and with my whole heart.” Metternich had been thrilled with the news—making love was one thing, confessing it was another. He wrote back immediately, feeling like he had been suddenly “transported into the loveliest, most blessed spot on earth.”

You have made me drunk with happiness. I love you, I love you a hundred times more than my life. I do not live, I shall not live except for you.

Their relationship was impossible to keep completely secret, and the Palm Palace was certainly going to be a fascinating place that autumn. With the Duchess of Sagan hosting her fashionable salon on its second floor, there was another woman, in a parallel wing, just as intelligent, witty, rich, beautiful, and it must be said, controversial. This was Princess Catherine Bagration, the thirty-one-year-old widow of Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration, a Russian general and war hero who had fallen at Borodino. She was blonde with light blue eyes and pinkish white skin that one admirer compared to alabaster. Her scandalous evening gowns, very low cut, earned her the nickname “the beautiful naked angel.”

For many years now, Princess Catherine Bagration and the Duchess of Sagan had been sworn enemies. The reasons for the hostility were many, buried under many layers of gossip, intrigue, and counterintrigue, though no small part of this animosity stemmed from a long rivalry for honor and influence in high society. They certainly had a lot in common.

Nearly the same age, both had come from the Baltic, and both were the oldest daughters of rich, high aristocratic families, who had traveled and lived all over the continent. Both, after marrying young, were now single and surrounded by many admirers. Both had now ended up in Vienna at the time of the congress, and by “a curious and fatal chance,” as one salon regular put it, the two young divas had ended up in the same palace, immediately opposite each other. The windows, in fact, overlooked a shared courtyard.

All throughout the autumn, eyes would peer out from behind silk curtains, keeping careful tabs on the carriages coming and going, and who went to which salon. The two women would compete for everything, from the most prized guests to the greatest social esteem for their evening soirees. They were two queen bees, trying to share the same hive, and their rivalry would both enliven and embitter relations at the congress. Many intrigues would be spun in the corridors, staircases, and drawing rooms of this palace.

Vienna society would effectively have to make a choice, either taking the left staircase up to Princess Bagration, the “Russian siren,” or the right staircase to the Duchess of Sagan, “the Cleopatra of Courland.” As for the outcome of the competition between the two women of the north, one society watcher reported, “the bets were open.”

But there was something else the two ladies shared: Both had been Metternich’s lover. And now, both women, it seemed, were attracting the attentions of Russia’s flamboyant tsar.

Chapter 4