Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna by David King Read Free Book Online

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