Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (22 page)

But had the Austrians really been held up outside Paris, as they claimed, or were they deliberately holding back? Emperor Francis surely did not want to take part in officially dethroning his daughter Marie Louise, his son-in-law Napoleon, and his grandson, the king of Rome. As for Metternich’s best ally, Castlereagh, he was not present, either, and he certainly didn’t seem to be in a hurry, hoping perhaps to avoid the unpleasant appearance of imposing a regime change onto France. How long did the tsar have to wait on his Allies? Napoleon was already wavering in his abdication, and this restless man was, as everyone knew, prone to make rash, risky moves. The tsar had made his decision and pressed ahead.

According to the terms of the treaty, known at the time as “the Treaty of Abdication” (history remembers it as the Treaty of Fontainebleau, after Napoleon’s palace, though it was not signed there), Napoleon was to maintain the official title “Emperor and Sovereign of the Island of Elba.” He was granted this authority for the rest of his life, along with an annual pension of 2 million francs a year, to be paid from the French treasury. His wife, Marie Louise, was to be given the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla in northern Italy, and their son, little Napoleon, would be “the Prince of Parma.” Article III of the treaty even incorporated the fiction that the abdication had been Napoleon’s choice. As for Napoleon’s family members, many of whom had lost thrones, they were also to share a yearly stipend of 2.5 million francs. Just as the tsar had promised, he had been generous indeed.

When Metternich and Castlereagh arrived in Paris, in early April, they had been shocked at the terms of this treaty. Castlereagh refused to sign it. Britain would in fact
never
sign this treaty guaranteeing Napoleon’s rights to Elba. Austria was also very disappointed. Confronted with what was essentially the tsar’s fait accompli, Metternich had angrily denounced this agreement as malicious and stupid. Within one year, he predicted, Napoleon would be back, and Europe would have to fight him all over again. His protests were in vain. No one was in a position to oppose the tsar, and so, without any more discussion, Napoleon was going to Elba.

W
HEN
N
APOLEON ARRIVED
in early May 1814, some twelve thousand people lived on the small, sun-drenched island. The capital, Portoferraio, facing out onto a secluded bay on the southern shore, was home to about three thousand islanders. The roads were appalling, often mere goat and mule tracks, and the streets were hardly any better, usually little more than dusty stone steps rising steeply up the cliffside. There was a church, a tavern, and a café called Buono Gusto, serving up the island’s local wine,
alciato.
The capital, at that time, has been summed up as “no more than a small and seedy Mediterranean port.”

From the perspective of a vessel sailing into the island’s chief harbor, Elba seemed all rugged mountains, red-tiled rooftops, and whitewashed walls. Relics of its storied past also stood out, like the old castle, built some twelve hundred feet atop a prominent cliff and attributed by local legend to awesome giants. Many legends, in fact, surrounded the isle. It was said, for instance, that Jason and the Argonauts had docked there in their quest for the Golden Fleece, and even the Trojan prince Aeneas had come on a mission to recruit stalwart Elbans for the Trojan War.

Colorful traditions aside, the small island packed a great deal of history within its eighty-six square miles. Much of it, unfortunately, was bloody and tragic. Elba had fallen prey to a long list of conquerors, including Etruscans, Romans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Lombards. Later in the Middle Ages, the towns of Pisa and Genoa captured the exposed island. Then came the kingdom of Spain, which soon handed the island over to the Florentine dynasty of the Medici, who went on to dominate the island for some two hundred years. Others had ruled there at some point, too, including Germans, Turks, and, most recently, English and French.

Elba was, generally speaking, a very poor island. Its soil was rocky and its seasons extreme. Droughts and torrential, almost tropical, storms ravaged the fields and made famines all too common. Many years, Elba had to import as much as two-thirds of its grain, most of it from nearby Italy. But despite the agricultural challenges and the widespread poverty, the island had some valuable natural resources.

At Rio Marina, on the eastern side of the island, men with pickaxes and shovels gathered the iron ore that gave the island its largest source of revenue, and also lent the name to its capital, Portoferraio, literally the “port of iron.” To the south, there were rich stone quarries, which shipped hard granite and marble to the mainland for use in the construction of buildings, including the cathedral of Pisa. There were also salt marshes, supplying the large warehouse in the Piazza della Granguardia behind the harbor. Oranges, olives, pomegranates, and grapes grew in abundance, and fishing nets yielded rich hauls, too, particularly tunny and anchovy.

For the most part, Elba had quickly accepted its new sovereign—a tribute, in part, to Napoleon’s well-known charisma. He had arrived on the island at a most inauspicious time. After some wild swings of fortune the previous twenty years, ownership had flip-flopped from French to British rule, and then the French gained the upper hand, though the islanders were in revolt, and Elba seemed on the verge of chaos. In fact, guards at the coastal fortifications had fired on the approaching British frigate HMS
Undaunted
as it carried the emperor to his new island.

In all the confusion, however, one thing was certain: The little capital of Elba was unprepared, to say the least, for the strange saga that lay ahead. All the trappings of an imperial court would have to be found or created. As there was no imperial residence, Napoleon was to be housed in a makeshift palace—the unused upper floor of the town hall, which had once been a biscuit warehouse. Chairs, tables, desks, and other furniture were quickly borrowed for the improvised throne room. As for a throne itself, there was none to be found. “What is a throne” anyway, Napoleon had once said; “a bit of wood covered with velvet.” On Elba, this was literally the case: Napoleon’s throne was a borrowed sofa decorated with paper flowers.

W
HILE
N
APOLEON WAS
playing Robinson Crusoe, as Prince de Ligne put it, Vienna was absorbed with its own gossip and speculation. Count Francis Palffy, it was whispered, was having an affair with the celebrated ballerina Bigottini, and now apparently she was pregnant. The count was said to have just offered her a 6,000-franc pension for life. Prince Eugène de Beauharnais was spotted ducking into a jeweler’s shop and splurging on his latest mistress. According to an anonymous police report submitted to Baron Hager in late October, the bill was 32,000 ducats, and the prince paid in part by handing over a cavalry saber given to him by his stepfather, Napoleon.

The biggest source of gossip was still the Russian delegation. While the tsar insisted on making all the main diplomatic decisions himself, many members of his staff found that they had time on their hands, and some were finding their way to Vienna’s red-light districts. One member of the delegation was even said to be in charge of inspecting the brothels and procuring for the tsar himself, though others dismissed this as empty gossip. Alexander, they said, needed no help in this regard.

Many high-ranking Russian military officers were also often spotted at the theater in the Leopoldstadt with well-known courtesans, and sometimes they brought them into their suites at the Hofburg Palace. The nineteen-year-old courtesan Josephine Wolters was making a name for herself, slipping past the guards at the palace almost every night, usually wearing the disguise of a man’s clothes. Despite complaints from other delegations, police agents were not exactly inclined to put a stop to these escapades. The courtesan was also working for the spy chief.

Apparently, according to police reports, the Russians were upset with many things that autumn, and not just the intrigues of Austria. They did not “hide their discontent with England,” particularly with Castlereagh, who was meddling, not mediating, on the question of Poland. They blamed France, too, for stirring up fears among the smaller states and trying to divide the Allies. Some members of the Russian delegation were also unhappy about the growing anti-Russian sentiments expressed around town. Two Viennese wigmakers, for instance, one near St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the other on the Schwertgasse, were indecently and offensively using busts of Tsar Alexander as mannequins to display their latest wigs.

Spies were picking up many other signs of tension as they continued their surveillance, interception of letters, infiltration of embassies, and secret rummaging around offices in search of any papers or any scraps left behind. Two crown princes of rival kingdoms, Bavaria and Württemberg, had almost ended up in a duel. They had been playing a game of “blindman’s buff” at the salon of Princess Thurn und Taxis when one accused the other of cheating. Fortunately, the duel was stopped in time, by an order from the king of Bavaria.

Remarkably little crime had been reported that autumn, considering how many of the world’s richest were in town and that they were not exactly modest about displaying their wealth. Someone had stolen a rare gem from Princess Liechtenstein, and someone else had broken into the Spanish embassy, making off with papers from Labrador’s office, but, on the whole, Vienna had so far experienced little criminal activity.

One event that did briefly capture the attention of the police department was an intrigue by the delegate of the Prince of Walachia in today’s Rumania. The delegate, Prince Bellio, was responsible for forwarding the correspondence between his sovereign and Friedrich von Gentz. But evidently Bellio had been opening the confidential letters, copying their contents, and then resealing them with a counterfeit seal. By the middle of October, Bellio was trying to arrange a meeting with Princess Catherine Bagration to sell or pass on some of his discoveries to the Russian tsar. Before that transpired, however, police raided his rooms on the third floor of a mansion on the bustling Stock-im-Eisen-Platz and seized his papers. The prince was promptly escorted to the border.

Amid all the rumors, gossip, and intrigues being plotted all over town, the most tantalizing scoop during the first month came from a small scrap of paper retrieved from the French embassy by a chambermaid recently placed inside. The note was vague, enigmatic, and of uncertain reliability. It referred to a French consul in Livorno, the Chevalier Mariotti, who was working on a plan to kidnap Napoleon. The motive for this plot was unknown, and it seemed far-fetched, but, just in case, Baron Hager relayed the information immediately to the Austrian emperor.

A
S LEAVES TURNED
crimson and gold, the temperatures dropped and the sky clouded more frequently into a gray dreariness—weather not exactly suited to lifting Metternich’s spirits. He had been desperate to know the duchess’s response to his letter, and on October 23 he received it. She explained that she had in fact wanted to break off her relationship with Prince Alfred von Windischgrätz, but even though she realized he was not good for her, she had cared too much to stop seeing him. Bluntly, she added that she no longer regarded Metternich as a lover: “Beyond the enthusiasm of friendship, all remained calm within me.”

Hearing that assessment had hardly soothed his nerves. Metternich was still overcome and distraught. “You have had the power to kill me,” he wrote back that night. “I told you it would be so.” Metternich once again poured out his heart to the duchess, comparing the agonizing last twenty-four hours to one hundred years:

I am no longer the man I was the day before yesterday…the old friend is dead and you have thrown his ashes to the wind.

His heart had been violently ripped out of him, he alleged. Rumors of the tsar prying in his private affairs also continued to bother him. Could she please let him know what exactly she “had promised the tsar”?

Alexander was certainly attacking Metternich’s credibility, but could he really have put pressure on the duchess to break all contact with him, as gossipers claimed? The tsar had interfered in the private lives of other subjects in his realm in the past, including the time he virtually imposed a marriage on the duchess’s younger sister, Dorothée. Baron Hager’s informers were convinced that the tsar was doing so again, threatening his control over her estates and making it clear that “only a formal break with Metternich will satisfy him.”

Perhaps the tsar had pressured the duchess—he could, of course, have done so with even more powerful leverage than what the spies suggested: her daughter in Russian-controlled Finland. At any rate, whether the rumors were true or not, Metternich believed that the tsar had ruthlessly used the duchess’s daughter as a pawn in diplomacy, and then pressured the duchess to abandon him. “I am no longer astonished at anything, especially when it comes to that man,” Metternich said. This belief would influence how he behaved toward his rival.

By the end of October, the emperor, the tsar, and the king had returned from their trip to Hungary. The three sovereigns had visited the cities on the Danube, the pearl of Buda, and the newer, more commercial Pest, which would later that century merge to form Budapest. They had toured the capital, picked grapes, and visited the tomb of Alexander’s sister, Alexandra, who had married Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary, and died there thirteen years before.