Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (8 page)

D
OROTHÉE WAS A
young lady with striking black hair and flashing dark eyes—they were so dark blue that they seemed black, burning, as one admirer put it, “with an infernal fire which turned night into day.” Her skin was pale, offset by dabs of rouge, and she had a very thin waistline. By the time of the peace congress, Dorothée was painfully unhappy and very much alone.

Some thirteen years younger than her sister Wilhelmine, Dorothée could not have been more different. Wilhelmine, the oldest in the family, was clearly her father’s favorite, adored, indulged, and reared with a stellar education. Dorothée, by contrast, was largely neglected. Her childhood was, in her own words, “sad and miserable.” Whereas Wilhelmine could, as a young girl, recite Virgil in Latin, guests at castle were shocked to see the seven-year-old Dorothée unable to read or recognize the letters of the alphabet.

There is some uncertainty about the identity of her biological father. Dorothée always called Peter, the Duke of Courland, her father, though biographers have long noted that it was very likely an impoverished Polish nobleman and captain of a mercenary regiment, Count Olek Batowski, who had briefly stayed at the family castle. At any rate, Duke Peter was almost seventy years old at the time of her birth, and very sick.

Dorothée had never had the chance to know either man. The Polish nobleman had left the castle soon after her birth, and the Duke of Courland died when she was seven. Her mother, Anna-Dorothea, the Duchess of Courland, was also distant, often busy with her own active social life. Dorothée did not grow up close to her three sisters, either; the nearest one in age was ten years older. Dorothée had very few playmates her own age, and, for the most part, she had been left on her own.

Years later, Dorothée described herself and how she had felt as a child:

Small, skinny, yellow in complexion, always ill from the moment of my birth. My eyes were so dark and huge that they were out of all proportion to the rest of my face and seemed to dwarf the other features…Sad almost to the point of melancholia, I remember perfectly how I longed to die.

It was one of her mother’s lovers, Count Gustav Armfelt, a Swedish guest, who first took an interest in Dorothée’s upbringing. He had decided to teach Dorothée personally, and, much to his surprise, he discovered that she was a very quick learner. In fact, he soon became convinced that Dorothée was an unusually gifted child.

All of a sudden, with his prompting, nothing was too much for the family’s talented youngest daughter. The Duchess of Courland hired two full-time tutors, one of them being Abbé Piattoli, the former secretary to the last king of Poland. He in turn would take her on excursions that suited her newfound interests, such as many trips to the theater, complete with lessons from the queen of the Berlin stage, Madame Unzelmann. For Dorothée’s interest in astronomy, the abbé arranged lessons from the royal astronomer at the Berlin Observatory.

With the help of her encouraging and stimulating teachers, Dorothée was soon showing signs of an exceptionally sharp mind, and the ability to grasp sophisticated subjects quickly. All the while, she was enjoying her new love of reading. She would dash into the family library, scale the ladder to the top, and sit there, under the high ceiling, with a book in her lap.

But by the age of fifteen, Dorothée was under considerable pressure to marry. Despite being promised the freedom to choose a husband herself, she was now being pressured to marry the man of her mother’s choice—or rather Tsar Alexander’s choice, or more exactly, Talleyrand’s choice. Her future had been plotted like an international intrigue.

The French minister had heard of the beautiful heiress Dorothée, and wanted her for his nephew, the twenty-old-year-old Edmond de Talleyrand-Périgord. As Dorothée was a subject of the Russian tsar, Talleyrand had asked Alexander to talk with Dorothée’s mother, and persuade her to arrange this marriage. The tsar, being grateful to Talleyrand for his support against Napoleon, agreed. In October 1808, at a visit to their castle, the tsar made his wishes abundantly clear: “My dear Duchess, I refuse to accept any excuse. I have given my word. I ask for yours.”

When the duchess approached her daughter about Edmond, Dorothée had flatly refused. She preferred to choose her own husband, and that was going to be the Polish patriot Prince Adam Czartoryski, whom she had heard about from her tutor. Sure, he was twenty-three years older, and they had barely exchanged a word, but for a budding romantic like Dorothée, this was irrelevant. She was determined to make the match work, and no one, including the Tsar of All the Russias, was going to stop her.

At this point, when her mother realized the intensity of her conviction, she resorted to an elaborate scheme to trick Dorothée out of her teenage infatuation with an idealized prince of her imagination.

First, her tutor was threatened and forced to declare, falsely, that the Polish prince had just been engaged to another woman. As Dorothée still held out, her mother arranged for Polish friends to arrive at the castle with confirmation of the lie. All Warsaw was talking of the prince’s engagement, they claimed, and in the end, a sad Dorothée agreed to marry this Frenchman she hardly knew.

Edmond was an excellent soldier and cavalry officer who had been decorated several times for his bravery, but he was not a good husband. He was a notorious philanderer, squandering a fortune on his extramarital lovers and his losses at the gaming tables. He racked up considerable debts, too, splurging on his lavish uniforms, adorned with “gold braid, spangles and gems.” Worse still, Edmond could not stimulate Dorothée’s mind, and the married couple had almost nothing to talk about.

“It was impossible to predict his temperament or his thoughts,” Dorothée complained, because “no one has ever relied so heavily…on silence.” Edmond was only home long enough, it seems, for the couple to have three children: Napoleon-Louis, or Louis since the emperor’s downfall; Dorothea-Charlotte-Emily; and the infant Alexander-Edmond. Other than her children, whom she loved dearly, it was a sad and dreary marriage.

Then, that summer of 1814, on the eve of the congress, tragedy struck. Dorothée’s daughter had fallen ill to the measles, a frightening situation in the early nineteenth century. Sadly, after an apparent recovery, the little girl had a sudden setback and died.

Dorothée was devastated, and, unfortunately, had to bear most of her suffering alone. Edmond was still away at war—he had not been home for more than a few months of the girl’s life. The rest of her family was away in Berlin, Courland, or the spas of central Europe. The only person who came to see her was Talleyrand. He found time from his busy schedule at the foreign ministry to console the poor mother in her grief.

Clearly, Dorothée needed a change of environment, and one day that summer, Talleyrand asked if she would like to accompany him to Vienna for the upcoming peace conference. She could be hostess at the embassy.

Dorothée, for her part, accepted the offer. There was nothing left to hold her back in Paris. She would miss her children, of course, but they could stay with her mother. After all, the congress was only supposed to last a few weeks.

So with a new activity to occupy her mind, Dorothée started selecting dresses, gowns, gloves, fans, masks, stockings, jewels, and many different kinds of shoes, all of which were packed into large trunks and then loaded by footmen onto the traveling carriages. On September 16, the preparations were ready. Dorothée and the chief delegate would travel to Vienna together.

Talleyrand had indeed come to admire her abilities. She was beautiful, graceful, charming, and, above all, very intelligent. She had a love of reading, a talent for the art of conversation, and a knack for putting people at ease. Other salon hostesses might be more worldly or sophisticated, but Dorothée, with her youthful and unstudied innocence, would carve out a niche of her own.

Chapter 5

T
HE
B
IG
F
OUR

Pretend to be ignorant of what everyone knows, and to know what others don’t, seem to understand what no-one understands, not to hear what all are hearing, and, in particular, appear able to do the impossible.

—
T
HE
M
ARRIAGE OF
F
IGARO
(1784)
P
IERRE
A
UGUSTIN
C
ARON DE
B
EAUMARCHAIS

W
ith so many royalty, statesmen, and other celebrities making their way to the congress, Vienna’s street performers were busy honing their acts. New marionette shows appeared in puppet theaters around town, and animal shows flourished as well, including one where the entertainer boasted a monkey, an owl, and what he claimed was a shark that he had fished out of the sea at Trieste. A wider selection of exotic animals could be found at the Schönbrunn Palace Zoo, such as rare birds, bears, buffalo, two camels, and a small collection of kangaroos from New Holland, in what is now Australia.

The giant park known as the Prater, the former royal hunting ground north of the city center, was especially lively. There were cafés, restaurants, dance halls, gambling rooms, some buildings shaped exotically as Chinese pavilions, Indian kiosks, Swiss chalets, and “savage huts.” There were good places for fireworks, carriage rides, and pleasant walks. The tall trees of its “magnificent forest” and great lawn, as one visitor, Cadet de Gassicourt, said, “cast shadows that cover the earth with a green carpet that the sun never yellows.”

One entertainer in the park had opened his own “mechanical optical theater” to show scenes of the awful war, including “The Fire of Moscow” and “The Battle of Leipzig,” to name some of his attractions. He also had a new act depicting the Allied march into Paris, complete with “more than one thousand popular moving figures.”

Curious sightseers strolled through the narrow winding streets around St. Stephen’s Cathedral and filled the intimate market squares of the inner city. Even Castlereagh’s wife, Emily, who was used to the delights of London’s West End, was pleased at what she saw.
“Mon Dieu,”
she exclaimed to her husband. “What a fine city! What shops! We almost broke our necks looking.”

All around the town, merchants were looking forward to a golden age of business. Innkeepers, restaurateurs, café owners, and theater managers were just some of the entrepreneurs positioning themselves to house, feed, and entertain Europe’s richest and most powerful figures, many of whom would also bring their own large retinues. Hatmakers, wigmakers, glove makers, tailors, seamstresses, hairdressers, bakers, butchers, florists, and toymakers were likewise hoping for a good season.

Landlords were calculating their likely profits as the congress dignitaries thronged into the city and competed for housing that was scarce in the best of times. Sometimes mansions were leased to the lucky delegations, such as the Spanish, who moved in near the British on the Minoritenplatz. More often, though, the delegates would have to make do with suites, single rooms, or even just attics.

When Prussian ambassador Wilhelm von Humboldt had arrived in August, he complained that already, at this early date, he could not find anything other than a drab “hole in the wall.” Rents had soared. Proprietors of the best real estate near the Hofburg speculated, happily, that if the congress lasted slightly longer than the three to six weeks that most diplomats suspected, then rental intake alone might very well pay for the entire property.

Prices were spiraling higher for many other basic goods. The cost of meat shot up to several times its level just a few months before, and many Viennese blamed the butchers for raising prices arbitrarily. Quality firewood was already hitting 50 gulden a cord, not including additional charges for “cartage, sawing, and splitting.” Candles were likewise on the rise, given the demand to fill all the chandeliers and candelabra for all the balls, banquets, and other late-night activities. Soap went up, too, because, someone joked, “the Congress is going to have a heap of dirty laundry to wash.”

Winegrowers of the fertile valleys surrounding Vienna were bottling their best vintage, and rushing new ones onto the market, too. Bakers, not to be outdone, had created a special Vienna Congress roll, though some critics complained that a powerful pair of glasses was needed to find the slice of meat on the inside.