Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (33 page)

L
ATER THAT EVENING
, the Russian diplomat Count Andrei Razumovsky was throwing his eagerly anticipated end-of-the-year bash. The count was a former Russian ambassador to Vienna, renowned for his wit, good looks, cosmopolitan good manners, and, above all, his enormous fortune. He is remembered in music circles today for his love of the arts, patronizing such Viennese luminaries as Haydn and Mozart. At the time of the congress, he was a generous supporter of Beethoven (hence the “Razumovsky Quartets”), and one of the last noblemen to have his own private orchestra.

The count had, in fact, inherited two large fortunes, one from an uncle who had been the lover of Catherine the Great and a second from another uncle, the lover (and perhaps also secret husband) of Empress Elizabeth. Count Razumovsky had built a large mansion—or, more accurately, a palace—on the outskirts of Vienna. With parties during the congress attended by an array of royalty, the Russian host was earning his own honorary title: “King of the Suburbs.”

Some seven hundred guests would make their way out to his palace in the Landstrasse on the thirtieth, where he had turned “a piece of wasteland” into “an Eden of a princely residence.” Carriages passed along his own boulevard, manicured park, and bridge to Vienna’s “new Winter Palace.” Inside, guests marveled at its marble halls, mirrored office, mosaic floor, and library full of rare books and manuscripts, not to mention the hanging staircase. There were galleries of masterpieces, including works by Raphael, Rubens, and Van Dyck, and an entire room devoted to works of the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Razumovsky’s palace seemed like “a temple erected to art.”

The last party at the Razumovskys’, three weeks before, had certainly been memorable. The tsar had himself hosted, and no expense was spared. Sturgeon were brought from the Volga, oysters from Ostend, truffles from France, oranges from Sicily, and strawberries from England. On each table was a bowl of cherries, transported that week across Europe from the tsar’s greenhouses back in Russia. Guests also admired the pineapples, arranged in the form of a pyramid with exuberance “such as had never before been served on any board.” The partygoers danced until dawn, and looked forward to the count’s next bash. Little did they know it would end in tragedy.

Early in the morning hours of December 31, Razumovsky’s palace caught fire, erupting like a “Vesuvius in full blast.” As ringing church bells warned the town of the emergency, Vienna’s fire department galloped out to the Landstrasse as quickly as possible. Smoke and flames were soon everywhere, the copper roof glowing a “fiery red.”

Volunteers hacked their way through the count’s manicured shrubberies to hasten the efforts to fight the fire. Hearing of the emergency, Emperor Francis had come at once, as did other congress members. Talleyrand hurried out as well, because Dorothée had gone to the party with her friend Count Karl Clam-Martinitz, and neither one had yet returned home.

Fortunately, the majority of the partygoers had already left the palace by the time the fire had spread and the “burning beams” began crashing down. But some people were still inside, and the whereabouts of others still unknown. Razumovsky himself could thank a loyal valet and his smelling spices for waking him out of his deep sleep.

Valets and friends alike were frantically tossing the count’s belongings out the second-story windows, dropping “dozens of vests, trousers and coats, one after the other,” down to the “muddy puddles.” Desperate now to save anything, they hurled other goods out the windows. “Expensively bound books, chandeliers, marble tabletops, alabaster vases, silverware, bric-a-brac, paintings, even clocks” crashed down, many shattering on impact, while others were “carted away by the mobs.”

Artistic treasures by the hundreds were lost forever, including those in the splendid Canova Hall, consisting solely of the sculptor’s marble works. “That’s the gallery that held the Dutch genre painting,” Dorothée said, safely outside the palace, as she saw a wing crash down. “I sat in it for supper.” Tragically, two men died that night, daring chimney sweeps who had entered the burning labyrinth with the hope of rescuing at least some of the embassy papers.

The search for the origins of the fire degenerated into a din of confused and animated speculation. Some believed that the blaze began in the kitchen, the bakery, or maybe with the straw in the stables. Others suggested that it was sabotage. Investigators eventually settled on a flaw in the heating system—or, as one fumed, “the
French
heating system”—installed the previous year. Count Razumovsky had added a wooden extension to his palace for the party, and the fire, it was believed, probably started there.

“One of the ducts concealed in the walls had become overheated by the huge fires maintained around the clock,” Friedrich von Schönholz explained, and this “over-heated duct had first charred, then set fire to a wooden beam.” The fire then spread ferociously among the combination of wood, wax, and cloth in so many rooms, and, further, the “tapestries and draperies now became the fuses that carried the fire…to the remotest corners of the palace.”

The tsar had returned to the scene that morning, arriving, it was noted, after the other sovereigns. Walking past the ground, carved with deep ruts made by fire wagons and strewn with plumed hats in the mud, the tsar found Razumovsky, in sable coat and velvet hat, sitting alone under a tree, his head down and sobbing.

All that was left of two decades of the count’s collecting and construction were charred, smoking ruins and a few blackened treasures that had been rescued. “This is truly a great misfortune, but we are all in God’s hands,” the tsar said, trying to comfort the count. But then, in the next breath, he was overheard adding, “This may happen to my knights’ hall, also hot-air heated.” Maybe it was diplomatic frustrations that solicited the next tactless remark: “That’s what we get for aping the French!”

M
ETTERNICH HAD CHOSEN
not to attend the Razumovsky ball. He could not bear to participate in an event that was intended to celebrate Russia and its tsar. His relationship with Alexander was as tense as ever.

Happily, Alexander had at least backed down from challenging him to a duel, talked out of it, apparently, by Emperor Francis. The last thing the congress needed, the Austrian emperor had said, was the spectacle of a duel between the Tsar of All the Russias and the foreign minister of His Apostolic Majesty. But the argument that worked most effectively was that a duel would actually hurt Alexander’s honor, as it implied a sense of equality between the combatants. The tsar replied that, in any case, he would have no further dealings with a minister “as untrustworthy as Metternich.”

Having missed the Razumovsky ball, Metternich was pleading with the Duchess of Sagan for a meeting. He was still desperate to hear from her. He needed her company and her insight, especially given the strains he felt around the diplomacy table. “Write me a word,” he said, “I am quite sad, and I certainly need all my strength at this moment!”

In yet another note from the Chancellery, Metternich begged for one last chance to see the duchess before the New Year. It was urgent, he emphasized with the desperation of someone with a superstitious reverence for symbolic dates, but he pleaded in vain. The duchess replied that she was “sick as a dog” and would probably not be well again for a few days.

Interestingly, however, Gentz had stopped by the Palm Palace that night and had a drink with the duchess, as he recorded in his diary. She seemed well enough, surrounded in her drawing room by her sister Dorothée, Count Clam-Martinitz, and many others, including Prince Alfred von Windischgrätz.

It must have been a lonely New Year’s Eve for Prince Metternich. He tried a third time to arrange a meeting, adding that “I do not want the first day of the new year 1815 to pass without seeing you.”

Indeed, before the champagne toasts were clinked that night, a package would arrive for the duchess from a Vienna jeweler’s shop. When the duchess opened the small silk box, she found a handsome gold bracelet, an exquisite piece of craftsmanship, shining with a diamond, a ruby, an emerald, and an amethyst. Each stone symbolically conveyed a message in those romantic times: The diamond and the ruby stood for love and fidelity; the other two were their respective birthstones, amethyst for the duchess and emerald for himself. It had arrived, on Metternich’s instructions, “at the stroke of midnight.”

Metternich had written an accompanying letter, explaining another symbolism in his gift. Each stone had been engraved with the letter
G,
which stood for the words that, as he put it, “I had hoped to say as I fastened it on your wrist this evening:
Gott gebe Gnade, Glück, Gedeihen
” (“May God grant you Grace, Happiness, and Prosperity.”)

What Metternich did that night, after finishing this letter, is not known. The songwriter La Garde-Chambonas claimed to have seen him at Count Zichy’s New Year’s Eve ball, and that is possible, though the young man was notoriously sketchy when it came to connecting people and places with specific dates. It was probably more likely that when the foreign minister laid down his goose pen at eleven o’clock that night, he rang out the end of the year all alone in the Chancellery office.

Chapter 21

R
EQUIEM

I agree with you that Talleyrand cannot be relied upon, and yet I know not on whom His Majesty can better depend.

—C
ASTLEREAGH

A
fter the New Year celebrations, which marked the opening of the Carnival season, Vienna was eagerly anticipating the upcoming social calendar. There was a full schedule of events, including balls, hunts, feasts, plays, concerts, tableaux vivants, and a host of other entertainments to lighten the dark months of winter.

Early morning on New Year’s Day, a cold and tired messenger arrived at Castlereagh’s embassy on the Minoritenplatz. It had been a hard six-day journey through central Europe, the last leg through rain, snow, and ice. The courier was bringing news that Britain’s war with the United States had now ended. On Christmas Eve in Ghent, British and American diplomats had finally agreed on peace.

This was extraordinary news for Castlereagh, who, bogged down with his own negotiations, was thrilled to be released from a difficult war on the other side of the world. Castlereagh sent a messenger over to Metternich and Talleyrand immediately. It was time for a meeting.

“I hastened to offer [Castlereagh] my congratulations,” Talleyrand said on hearing the news of the treaty, and then he added, “I also congratulated myself on the event.” He knew its importance right away.

With this war over, Great Britain no longer had to divide its attention over such a large amount of territory. Frigates, men-of-war, and ships of the line tied up in the New World would now be freed en masse, and, potentially, so would a large war chest of millions of pounds sterling. Should Prussia insist on pressing its demands, Great Britain could now devote the full might of the British war machine to supporting its diplomacy.

When the British foreign minister was congratulated on the peace agreement at a ball that evening at the Hofburg, Castlereagh enigmatically replied, “The golden age begins.” Stories of this response swept through Vienna’s salons and drawing rooms, along with speculation on what exactly the foreign secretary meant. Was he implying that the plenipotentiaries would soon reach agreement and avert war? Or was it, as one member of the English delegation sneered, only a reference to the likelihood of more English gold flowing to allies who promised to do his bidding? Castlereagh’s words suddenly carried more meaning than before.