Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (13 page)

Some would attend the fashionable salons—Mondays at Metternich’s, Tuesdays at Castlereagh’s, and Fridays either at the Duchess of Sagan’s or Princess Bagration’s. Talleyrand, who usually dined later than the other hosts, was also a high priority, though he was not attracting Vienna’s most powerful guests. Society reflected diplomacy: France was isolated.

Spies were instructed to observe all important happenings with “maximum zeal and vigilance” as they sipped champagne, chatted over tea, or played cards at the small round tables. They were to frequent the cafés and the candlelit taverns in the inner city. They were also to mill about the crowds that invariably gathered around the boutiques of the Graben, the parks of the Prater, and the promenades along the old city walls.

With the help of postal lodges across the empire, many official letters were also intercepted and sent over to the Secret Cipher Office in the imperial palace. There, in this “Cabinet Noir,” talented agents pried open the top secret dispatches with a bone knife, copied their contents, and then carefully resealed the envelopes over a smokeless candle. Another team decoded the messages, when necessary, and the spies were always adding to their collection of ciphers.

In addition to tapping into the courier system and covering the ballrooms, drawing rooms, and other meeting places of the plenipotentiaries, Baron Hager was working on extending the reach of his information network around town. Coachmen driving the three hundred imperial carriages were instructed to relay anything they overheard from their distinguished passengers. Porters standing outside the embassies and mansions, staffs in hand, kept tabs on the visitors received and their length of stay. Even some landlords would report on their tenants, such as an editor for the newspaper
Wiener Zeitung,
who would communicate on the activities of Count Anstett of the Russian delegation, who had moved in with him at Weihburgasse 983.

Ideally, the Vienna police would succeed in planting agents inside the main embassies, and, of course, some of the best sources were the servants. Liveried footmen standing behind the chairs at dinner, lackeys carrying the three-branched candlesticks through darkened mansions, observers inside an honor guard attached to a sovereign, and sometimes an assistant to a valet, or even a valet, could be successfully placed near a main delegate.

Some of the most valuable agents of all were the chambermaids, who perused the contents of desks, rummaged through wastepaper baskets, and peered into porcelain stoves and fireplaces looking for any scraps of paper that had not been sufficiently destroyed. These scraps—known in spy parlance as
chiffrons
—were then forwarded to the baron’s office and, when possible, painstakingly reassembled. No one knew if some little piece of paper, however meaningless it might seem, did in fact hold a clue that unlocked a secret that puzzled analysts at headquarters.

Astute delegations, however, were soon taking measures to resist unwanted intrusions. “We have enough proofs of the dishonorable passion for opening letters,” Prussia’s Humboldt wrote back to Berlin, notifying that his delegation was seeking safer channels of communication. One member of his embassy, the influential military strategist General Antoine-Henri Jomini, went further in taking precautions. He had started locking up his papers, and made sure that after changing all his locks, he did not leave the office without taking the set of keys with him.

Castlereagh’s own secretiveness was likewise paying off—his annoying “excess of prudence,” as one spy complained. The British foreign secretary had insisted on hiring his own staff, including doorkeepers, chambermaids, and kitchen hands. The men and women sent over by the police looking for jobs kept being rejected. Castlereagh was also making sure that all stray documents, however bland and unimportant, were collected and methodically destroyed.

Like the British, Talleyrand was also making it difficult for the eavesdroppers. Anyone who knew Talleyrand, one frustrated agent reported, would not fail to understand the difficulties in gaining information from his headquarters. The spies would have to escalate their efforts. Talleyrand was turning Kaunitz Palace into a veritable fortress.

K
INGS AND QUEENS
at the Vienna Congress were not exactly used to living in such close proximity with other sovereigns, and, according to police agents, frustrations were mounting at the Hofburg Palace. Some apparently resented it when one of them gained more attention than the others, and in the eyes of many, the Russian tsar was receiving the most attention of all.

Stories circulated that emphasized his narcissistic behavior: how he ordered a block of ice delivered to his room every morning, rumored to improve his rosy complexion, though in fact it might well have been used to treat a skin disease that he already showed signs of developing. It was also said that he thought only of his uniform, and as he had gained weight over of the summer, he could no longer squeeze into it comfortably, and had been forced to order a replacement wardrobe from St. Petersburg. His delegation did not escape gossip, either, accused of boasting irresponsibly of Russian power, spitting on parquet floors, and, in general, behaving as if they were not “housebroken.”

The tsar had brought a whole team of advisers to Vienna, and of the Great Powers, they were undoubtedly the most diverse and international delegation in town. Of the tsar’s nine most prominent advisers, four came from Germany: Count Nesselrode, Baron Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein, Count Gustav von Stackelberg, and Count Jean Anstett. There was also one from Poland, Prince Adam Czartoryski, and one from Switzerland, Alexander’s former tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe. There was also one from Corfu, Iōannes Antōniou Kapodistrias, and one from Corsica, Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo. The tsar had only one prominent Russian adviser at the Congress, and he was Ukrainian: the former Ambassador to Vienna, Count Andrei Kirilovich Razumovsky.

This cosmopolitan set of advisers was certainly puzzling, and some feared that the tsar had only brought them to find ways to increase Russian influence in their home countries. Others feared their pet projects. Would the tsar, for instance, listen to his advisers who wanted him to encourage national sentiments in Germany, or pressed him to undertake a more active policy toward the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean? Some wondered, too, if the tsar would take up the cause of oppressed national minorities in the Balkans. So if Alexander’s behavior was not difficult enough to predict, Vienna diplomats would also have to gauge which adviser currently had the ear of the impressionable tsar.

Like other monarchs visiting the congress, the tsar did not bother with any special security as he walked the streets—at least not yet. He was spotted slipping into a tavern, ordering a beer, gulping it down, and, then, most unusually, paying for it himself. The tsar was seen, on another occasion, talking to a young Viennese girl he met at a recent ball. Spies were immediately placed on the case. The girl was tracked down, identified, and an agent placed outside her house. Sometimes, indeed, the spies were sent on a wild-goose chase. Nothing else was noted from that address in the bulging dossiers.

The baron’s agents had begun in earnest following other sovereigns on their daily excursions and intercepting letters from the foreign missions—royal mail was no exception. Correspondence of the king of Denmark, Frederick VI, was pilfered unmercifully. The Danish king was also often recognized by his green cape, gold-tipped cane, and almost scholarly air, and easily followed. The king liked to visit a young Viennese flower girl, who would soon cause a scandal when she started calling herself the “Queen of Denmark.”

One of the best places for gathering information was on the busy Graben, a central street that was once the moat for medieval Vienna. Many delegates were staying in rooms or houses there, which was then, as now, an excellent place for rendezvous or impromptu discussions. It was the home of the “open-air club,” as one agent called it, where “loafers, idlers, spouters and disputants” watched the congress go by.

For many people-watchers, the highlight was seeing Prince de Ligne, a delightful seventy-nine-year-old former field marshal from Flanders who, in his long career, had served Frederick the Great, Joseph II, and Catherine the Great. His nickname in Paris salons had been “Prince Charming.” With a million stories, and a “delicately malicious wit,” he was the Oscar Wilde of his day, having known everybody from Voltaire to Rousseau to Casanova. He was one of the first, for instance, to read Casanova’s scandalous memoirs literally as they were written, and one of the last to see the adventurer before his death in 1798.

Prince de Ligne’s latest quips were eagerly devoured. It was this prince who gave the congress its lasting memorial: “The congress does not move forward, it dances.” He should have known, because he did not miss many of the occasions.

Now, however, he was impoverished. He had lost a fortune when the French revolutionaries seized the vast majority of his landed estates, and he had squandered the rest with his lifestyle. At the time of the congress, he lived in a very small apartment near the old city walls. It was one room wide, with the bedroom doubling as his salon; de Ligne called it his “birdcage.” But as its many visitors testified, the pauper prince was still very much the dandy.

The walls were as pink as his cheeks…[and his cheeks were as pink] as his humor which was as pink as his talk. Pink as his talk was his stationery, pink as this was his livery, everything in pink.

His cramped quarters had long hosted Vienna’s elite; everyone wanted to meet the legendary prince, and hear his stories, anecdotes, and repartee, uttered, as he was known to do, with his eyes “nearly shut.” He still drove his old clanky carriage that would have been the height of style a half century before under Louis XV, led by a thin white horse also past its prime. The prince was “the man that time had forgotten.”

Another favorite sighting, though rare, was Anna Protassoff, who had, many years before, served Catherine the Great and rendered her invaluable assistance as her “tester,” that is, the woman who would try out the guardsmen selected for the empress’s bedroom. She was now almost seventy years old and considerably heavier. Prince de Ligne took his protégé, the songwriter Auguste de La Garde-Chambonas, to meet her in her small flat. The young man described his first impressions on meeting this legend: “a huge shape on a sofa” that, when speaking or moving, jingled with jewelry.

On her head, around her neck, covering her arms there was a veritable waterfall of glittering diamonds, bracelets, necklaces, ruby-studded medallions, tremendous earrings that reached down to her very shoulders.

As he looked on, Anna Protassoff and Prince de Ligne conversed, as if they had been magically transported some fifty years into the past—appropriately enough for a congress that would itself sometimes seem anachronistic, and be accused of trying to turn back the clock, as if Napoleon, the French Revolution, and the last two decades of history had only been a bad dream.

W
HILE
T
ALLEYRAND WAS
displeased with the Big Four and their plans for controlling the congress, he was at least satisfied with the early success of the French embassy. The Duke of Dalberg, the Marquis de la Tour du Pin, Comte Alexis de Noailles, and Comte de la Besnardière had been performing as he hoped, keeping him informed, and spreading news that he wished around town. The French chefs were serving up excellent fare, and the musician Neukomm was playing well, too, though he was under close surveillance by the baron’s police, who refused to believe that he was brought along only to play the piano. But Talleyrand was especially pleased with Dorothée.

By her family connections alone, Dorothée had close links to the main delegations. She knew the Russians through her mother, and the Austrians through her sister, Wilhelmine. As for the Prussians, Dorothée was influential in her own right, on account of her own extensive properties in their kingdom. Her mansion in Berlin, built originally by Frederick the Great for his sister and located at 7 Unter den Linden right near the Brandenburg Gate, was one of the most impressive in the capital; in the twentieth century, it would be used as the Soviet embassy.

When Talleyrand had not been invited to the highly sought Monday night soirees at the Metternichs’, he had asked Dorothée to appeal to her older sister, the Duchess of Sagan. One simple request was all that it took. The Austrian foreign minister replied immediately that Dorothée and Talleyrand would of course be welcome. They should also, Metternich added, consider themselves as having a standing invitation to the intimate suppers.

This was, of course, a major breakthrough. Salons were ideal settings for diplomacy as Talleyrand preferred to practice it, subtly and informally advancing his interests in a place, like Metternich’s, that was sure to be crowded with the people who ruled Europe. At such a gathering, it was really a stroke of bad luck, one salon regular put it, “not to encounter an emperor, a king, a reigning prince, or not to knock into a crown prince, a great general, a famous diplomat, a celebrated minister.” On some memorable occasions, too, Metternich would serve on the fine Sèvres china that Napoleon had given him for arranging his marriage to Marie Louise. At Metternich’s, diplomats could wrangle over the spoils of Napoleon’s empire by day, and then dine on his china at night.

Dorothée was indeed proving herself valuable, not least as an excellent hostess at the French embassy. She ran the salon, presided at the table, and generally lit up the room like a magic lantern. She helped everyone feel welcome and stimulated conversation, guiding it skillfully. If someone harped on a subject too controversial, serious, or just unpleasant, she could gracefully redirect it. The songwriter La Garde-Chambonas, who visited the French embassy that autumn, praised her social skills. Even if France was not at this point attracting the most prominent figures to its salon, Dorothée was performing masterfully: She “did the honors of her drawing-room with an enchanting grace.”