The tsar was in Warsaw for the opening of the Polish Sejm. Ironically, given the anti-constitutional mania of the day, he was now presented by Novosiltsev with the final text of the constitution for Russia which he had asked him and Viazemsky to draw up two years before. He looked at it, put it aside, and never mentioned it again. Nobody beyond the tsar, Novosiltsev, Viazemsky and Novosiltsev’s secretary was to know of the existence of the document for many decades.
In his opening address to the Sejm, Alexander had said that while a vigorous loyal opposition inspired by the desire to serve the public good was praiseworthy (which annoyed Metternich, who complained that it was an invitation for all the malcontents of Europe to start voicing their grievances), he warned that ‘the spirit of evil is once more trying to extend its harmful empire; it is already hovering over Europe’. His worst fears were confirmed when the deputies rejected a number of measures put forward by the ministry and demonstrated an unwelcome spirit of independence. Grand Duke Constantine, commander-in-chief of the Polish army, was convinced that there were ‘missionaries’ being sent out from Paris to spread revolution, and warned his brother that trouble was brewing in Poland. It was in Warsaw that Alexander received news of a military conspiracy in Paris, which seemed to confirm his worst fears.1
While the French director general of police, Claude Mounier, was developing his concept of a comité directeur, a real conspiracy was afoot which, characteristically, entirely escaped the police’s attention. Mounier had been given warning of it, but having recently received so many reports of impending plots from his various agents, he ignored it. The conspiracy centred on the Bazar Français, a shopping mall in the rue Cadet run mainly by former Napoleonic officers, whose comrades would frequently congregate there. Gradually a plot to overthrow the Bourbons in favour of Napoleon’s son germinated. A former captain, Léon Nantil, and Colonel Charles Fabvier made contact with men of the various units stationed in Paris, but most of the senior officers they approached were either non-committal or sceptical, and some would only support the replacement of the Bourbons with either the duc d’Orléans or a republic. The plotters also made contact with soldiers in two regiments of infantry and one of cavalry, stationed at Cambrai, which they hoped would march on Douai, engage the support of three more regiments stationed there, then move on Valenciennes, raise the troops there, and reach the Belgian frontier, on the other side of which some 4,000 émigrés would supposedly have gathered. The combined force, which should by then have numbered at least 12,000, was to advance through all the garrison towns of the departments of the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais and the Somme on its way to Paris. A mutiny by troops in Paris was to provide a distraction.2
The coup was to have taken place on 10 August, but was put back by nine days. During that time several soldiers defected, and Marshal Marmont, commanding the troops in Paris, acted swiftly. Thirty-six officers and NCOs were arrested, and a further fifty-three questioned. This failed to produce any firm evidence on the alleged conspiracy. The police files reveal pathetic attempts to construct some by piecing together unconnected snippets of information. The fact that a sergeant major of the 1st Legion of the Seine Inférieure had deserted on 19 June, taking with him ‘a sabre and a pair of braces’, is deemed noteworthy.3
The court which judged the conspirators acted as though it had no wish to get to the bottom of the affair, and there is some evidence that highly placed persons might have been aware of the conspiracy, if not actually involved. Some of the conspirators on trial also appear to have been agents provocateurs. Three men were sentenced to death, and a handful received prison sentences. The atmosphere in the courtroom was relaxed, not to say light-hearted. Having interrogated all the officers of one regiment and received the same alibi, that they had been visiting their mistresses, the chief investigator, General Rapp, could not help complimenting the regiment on its ‘galanterie’.4
It was also in Warsaw that Alexander heard alarming news from Portugal. On 24 August a military insurrection had broken out in the city of Porto, and rapidly spread across the country. A bloodless affair, aimed principally against the British presence and at bringing the royal family back from Brazil, where they had taken refuge from Napoleon, it was controlled by liberal constitutionalists, and threatened nobody. But the fact that it had originated with the army classed it with those that had taken place in Spain and Naples.
News from Spain was not encouraging either. The moderates who had originally been in a majority in the Cortes were losing ground. The hostility of every other European government denied them credibility and encouraged extremists. In August Riego had appeared in Madrid, fêted by crowds, and demanded to be nominated dictator. Although he failed to get his way, he raised the temperature with his populist antics.
Alexander could not but be shaken by such news. His aide-de-camp Arsenii Andreevich Zakrevsky wrote to General Vassilchikov in St Petersburg urging him to keep a close watch on all ‘hotheads’, but common sense no less than his liberal instincts inclined the tsar to consider a new approach. In a long letter to Francis, he suggested that if they had agreed to negotiate with the Spanish revolutionaries, and thereby encouraged the moderates, there might never have been a revolution in Naples. ‘Perhaps the only way of paralysing this terrible enemy is to take away from it the power it uses to stir the masses,’ he mused. ‘By anticipating the desires or the needs of the people, and by offering them in advance a part of that liberty which they seek to seize with violence.’ He was beginning to think that the best way of resolving the crisis in Naples was to involve Louis XVIII, as head of the house of Bourbon and a constitutional monarch, and to replace the unacceptable 1812 constitution with one modelled on the French Charte.5
Metternich was horrified, and thought he could smell the influence of Alexander’s adjunct minister for foreign affairs, Count Ioannis Capodistrias. Capodistrias was a Corfiote nobleman who had entered the service of Russia when the Ionian islands had been overrun by the French in 1807. He was on Alexander’s staff from 1813 to 1815, when he was made secretary of state, and played a significant part in the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna. Gentz summed him up as ‘a man of honour, of the utmost integrity, a true friend of all that is fine and good in human nature, a noble and disinterested soul, a lofty spirit – but, unfortunately, occasionally of poor judgement’. By that, he meant that he had liberal instincts and did not always agree with him and Metternich.6
Metternich was convinced that Capodistrias was Alexander’s evil genius, and he had been trying to undermine his influence ever since the Congress of Vienna. He had Capodistrias tailed, and collected every shred of evidence that might suggest he was in league with subversive elements. He regularly intercepted Capodistrias’s letters in the hope of discovering something that might link him to them, and was delighted when he found some correspondence with the apocryphal Duke of Brindisi. He promptly informed Alexander that his minister was in league with Italian revolutionaries. The Austrian chancellor’s continuous insinuations were so obviously venomous that Capodistrias’s colleague Nesselrode actually refused to show Alexander some of the information passed to him by Metternich. Metternich urged Dorothea Lieven to use her influence to have Capodistrias removed from office. (When a delighted Decazes, whose police regularly intercepted Metternich’s most private correspondence, showed Capodistrias some of the letters in question while he was passing through Paris in 1819, the latter was so shocked he assumed it was a French forgery designed to make mischief between Russia and Austria.)7
Capodistrias shared his master’s conflicting sympathies, being himself dedicated to Russia’s state interests and at the same time sympathising with liberals and nationalists who were in conflict with them, and tried to help him square the circle between his liberal instincts and his fear of revolution. He also shared some of Alexander’s spiritual and religious enthusiasms. He was a very personable young man, and it was not difficult for him to encourage or restrain, occasionally to influence; but it is doubtful that he could have manipulated anyone as unstable yet as headstrong as Alexander.
By the end of the summer of 1820, Alexander had drifted back to a more reactionary position. According to Capodistrias, the events of the past few months ‘inclined the Emperor to see and to suspect in everything the action of a certain directing committee, which supposedly exerted its influence from Paris over the whole of Europe, with the aim of overthrowing established governments in order to introduce in their stead the methods and despotism of revolution’. He had become convinced that Paris was the ‘active and permanent source’ of the revolution, and claimed to have in his possession ‘evidence whose authenticity it would be difficult to call into question’, as he wrote to Richelieu from Warsaw on 3 September. The ‘evidence’, which he did not actually produce and which has so far eluded the searches of historians, ‘proved’ that ‘the clubs of Paris’ had been behind the Spanish revolt and ‘the clubs of Madrid’ behind that in Naples. This may have been the same ‘evidence’ which the British ambassador in St Petersburg, Sir Charles Bagot, was shown by his Portuguese colleague, from which it was clear that ‘the object of [the secret societies in Spain] is to establish republics in every country in Europe; and that, for this end, they have agents in every quarter, but that the principal central societies are established at Paris, Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, in Prussia, and in Poland’, as he reported to Castlereagh on 16 September.8
‘Men formed in the school of populist despotism during the French Revolution and perfected in the art of upheaval by the despotism of Buonaparte are working with a deadly perseverance to repossess the power which was taken from them by the re-establishment of order in Europe,’ Alexander asserted. ‘The pernicious influence of these enemies of society has penetrated everywhere, and everywhere it is propagating with a fatal intensity.’ Lebzeltern, whom Metternich had sent to Warsaw to meet the tsar, reported back that Alexander was ranting about English Radicals, Irish ribbon-men, Neapolitan Carbonari, Spanish rebels, and seeing subversion everywhere, even in Russia, all of it orchestrated from Paris. The by now familiar imagery of corrosion and gangrene was being enriched in the letters of the day with a more geographical lexicon of ‘deluge’, ‘torrents’, ‘cascades’, ‘tidal waves’, ‘earthquakes’, ‘volcanoes’ and ‘eruptions’.9
The otherwise welcome conversion of Alexander to the ranks of the defenders of the status quo nevertheless posed problems for his allies. Metternich wanted to convene a congress of foreign ministers in Vienna which would sanction Austrian military action against the Neapolitan revolutionary government. He also hoped to persuade the other powers to set up a joint police ‘information centre’ on the model of the Mainz commission, a pan-European counter-revolutionary agency with extensive powers directed by envoys of each of the powers to act without referring back to their courts. But Alexander insisted on a congress of monarchs, one that would commit all the members of the Alliance, including France, to a joint strategy of uncompromising opposition to not only revolutionary upheaval but even constitutional change anywhere in Europe.
France, which did not wish to see Austria given a free hand in Italy, proposed making an offer to mediate. But it needed Britain’s support for this initiative, and, keen as he was on resolving European problems through high-level meetings, Castlereagh had indicated that Britain would not be taking part in a congress that looked as though it would turn into a counter-revolutionary alliance. Liverpool’s cabinet was in an uncomfortable position. The king’s divorce proceedings had brought the monarchy into disrepute, and there was an ugly mood in the country. ‘I cannot describe to you how grievously I suffer and have suffered, on account of the dangerous and deplorable situation in which our country, the king’s government, and indeed all of us, have been so long placed,’ Sidmouth wrote to a friend in September 1820 as the queen’s trial was about to start, ‘a situation out of which, I profess, I see no satisfactory, indeed no safe, deliverance.’ The last thing the government could afford was to embark on a line of foreign policy that would cast it in the same image as the absolutist monarchies bent on repressing popular constitutionalist movements. As Castlereagh pointed out to Britain’s ambassador in Vienna, Lord Charles Stewart, a British government could not make pledges which it might not be able to redeem, as it would always have to seek the approval of Parliament for any action. Britain could therefore not take part in the forthcoming congress.10
Pasquier and Richelieu were disappointed by his stance; they, and others, felt that Britain’s failure to support vigorous action over Naples would give revolutionaries all over Europe the impression that it was on their side. Metternich and Alexander were desperate to have Britain’s support, or at least participation, and they tried hard to persuade the British cabinet to change its stance. In London, Lieven, and particularly his countess, lobbied assiduously to persuade all and sundry that Britain should take part, arguing that by taking a strong line on Naples and Spain the government would teach the Radicals at home a lesson.11
At Alexander’s insistence, the congress was held not in Vienna, whose social whirl he feared might be a distraction, but in the small town of Troppau (Opava) in what was then Austrian Silesia, situated conveniently close to the borders of Prussia and the Russian kingdom of Poland. It convened on 20 October. The only monarchs present were Alexander and Francis, as Frederick William of Prussia had delegated his son the crown prince. They were accompanied by their respective plenipotentiaries, Capodistrias, Metternich and Hardenberg. The Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Golovkin, and the Prussian foreign minister Bernstorff were also present. The conference was to be presided over by Metternich, with Gentz acting as secretary. Britain was only present in the person of Lord Charles Stewart, in the capacity of an observer. France had taken a similar line, ordering its ambassadors at St Petersburg and Vienna, La Ferronnays and the marquis de Caraman, to attend in the same capacity. The Alliance had divided, with the two constitutional powers standing aside while the three absolutist monarchies clubbed together.12
‘The little town of Troppau has an extraordinary number of beautiful and comfortable houses, so the members of the congress are comfortably accommodated,’ Metternich wrote to his family on arrival. The 7,000 inhabitants had cleaned up the streets, painted their houses, and erected a triumphal arch and other decorations to welcome their august visitors. Their enthusiasm is not surprising, considering that some four hundred people descended on the town, and 1,200 more would join them for shorter periods, quite a fillip for the local economy. But incessant rain soon turned the streets into a sea of mud. The town council laid down planks to create walkways, but these posed problems of protocol as ministers, ambassadors, generals, dukes, princes and counts came face to face going in different directions and had to assess each other’s credentials, political, diplomatic, military, aristocratic or otherwise, before one stepped aside into the mud to let the other pass.13
The morning after his arrival in Troppau, Alexander had a three-hour conference with Metternich. ‘He greeted me like an old companion-in-arms,’ Metternich noted with satisfaction. He was delighted with what he heard, and felt that Alexander had come to see reason. Metternich spent the following morning in conference with Capodistrias, who, to his surprise, was thoroughly ‘reasonable’. He could not believe the change that had come over them. ‘All this is too wonderful, and if I did not pinch myself, I would think I was dreaming.’14
Alexander collared Stewart in a last attempt to involve Britain, explaining to the sceptical ambassador that there was a vast conspiracy operating from Paris, in which Sir Robert Wilson was a prime mover. They should all unite to combat the ‘fatal spirit’ and ‘settle upon some principle of common action and conduct with regard to it, so that military revolution and the machinations of occult sects and incendiaries should be arrested and paralysed’. This was precisely what Castlereagh and his cabinet opposed.15
At the opening session, on 23 October, Metternich set out his agenda. He wanted the powers to declare that there existed an illicit state of revolution in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies which they condemned, that they would never recognise any government brought into being by it, and that it was their duty to ‘liberate’ the king, which would entail military intervention to suppress the revolution. Bernstorff lent Prussia’s support, but a few days later the Russian position was defined in a memorandum composed by Capodistrias. While not ruling out military intervention if it proved necessary, it suggested that this should be followed by a joint allied reconstruction of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies in a form acceptable to its people. The memorandum also proposed that the allied powers accept a doctrine of intervention against any state which changed its constitution in a manner which might pose a threat to others, or even present a bad example. Metternich was not pleased. ‘The clouds here begin to lower, and the placid aspect of the first week has given way to dark and thoughtful countenances,’ Stewart reported to Castlereagh on 3 November. The mood would only grow more sombre.16
On 9 November Alexander received news from St Petersburg that the Semeonovsky Guards regiment had mutinied. The Semeonovsky was Alexander’s favourite. He had served in it himself, and had been its honorary colonel when still a grand duke. Most of his aides-de-camp were drawn from its ranks. It had fought with distinction throughout the war with Napoleon and had returned to Russia covered in glory. But it had also developed some of the dash and swagger of a victorious fighting unit, which displeased Alexander’s brother Grand Duke Nicholas, who had appointed a new commander, Colonel Schwarz, to smarten it up.
On 16 October, Schwarz had ordered the flogging of some soldiers decorated with the St George Cross, the highest Russian military decoration, whose bearers were traditionally exempt from this humiliating punishment. The unit to which they belonged registered a complaint, which the outraged Schwarz treated as mutiny. He had the men locked up in the Peter and Paul fortress, whereupon the remainder of the regiment came out in sympathy. Since Schwarz had made himself scarce, they broke the windows of his quarters and took their complaint to the corps commander, General Vassilchikov. He ordered them to go and join their comrades in gaol, which they meekly did. Vassilchikov and the governor of St Petersburg, General Mikhail Andreevich Miloradovich, both wrote to Alexander, assuring him that everything was under control, that the episode was of little consequence, that it had been caused only by Schwarz’s lack of judgement.17
Alexander would not accept this. He viewed the episode not just as mutiny, but as yet another piece of evidence confirming the existence of a devilishly efficient grand conspiracy. It was, as he put it in a letter to Princess Sophie Meshcherskaia, a manifestation of ‘the empire of evil which is rapidly gaining ground through all the occult means used by the Satanic spirit which directs it’. There was no arguing with him. ‘Nobody on earth can persuade me that these events were the work of the soldiers or that it was merely the consequence, as they say, of the cruel treatment meted out to them by Colonel Schwarz,’ he wrote to General Arakcheev. ‘I am convinced that other motives are hidden here … I blame it on the secret societies.’ As he told his youngest brother, the Grand Duke Michael, he had not the slightest doubt ‘that a foreign influence had been exerted on the regiment’. He had the Spanish ambassador in St Petersburg put under strict surveillance and followed everywhere (the police duly noted his frequent and regular visits to the best whores in town). Alexander would later tell Wellington that ‘the late Spanish minister in Russia laid out large sums of money to corrupt my officers and troops’. Grand Duke Nicholas was also convinced that the Spanish ambassador in St Petersburg had had a hand in the mutiny.18
Extrapolating from the available evidence and anticipating the motives of the ‘satanic spirit’, Alexander leapt to the conclusion that the mutiny had been ordered from Paris with the aim of forcing him to return to St Petersburg, which would have crippled the Troppau congress and thereby saved the revolutionaries in Naples. On 22 November he wrote to Vassilchikov that he would not return before he had finished the business in hand, ‘Because all these radicals and Carbonari scattered all over Europe want to force me to leave the unfinished work; we have more than one document in hand to prove this; they are furious seeing the work we are occupied with here.’19
‘We are on a crater, there is no doubt of it and I do not exaggerate anything, nothing short of the presence of the Emperor can save us,’ a frantic Countess Nesselrode wrote to her husband from St Petersburg on 24 November, adding that the whole of St Petersburg society was terrified, and feared that the garrison might revolt in the absence of the emperor, who should look to his own country rather than sitting around at Troppau. ‘Do not think I am exaggerating,’ she went on; ‘if I were to relate to you everything that is being said, of the spirit that reigns in this army, you would shudder.’20
That such a degree of paranoia should have taken hold in some quarters is astonishing, given that Vassilchikov and Miloradovich were so relaxed. The French chargé in St Petersburg, the comte de Gabriac, devoted two lengthy reports to the events, and dismissed them as being of no consequence. He pointed out that keeping large numbers of troops with nothing to do, albeit relentlessly exercised with punishing parades, which entailed severe penalties over footling derelictions, was a recipe for discontent, and blamed ‘that fatal military mania which consumes the whole imperial family’. He was adamant that no societies, Masonic or otherwise, were involved. The young officers were obsessed with supposedly liberal principles, but in his view they had no idea what these really meant, and treated their soldiers and servants like dirt while talking high-minded nonsense about liberty and equality. Metternich’s envoy in St Petersburg concurred, and assured him that the mutiny ‘has nothing of the character of the military revolts of our day’, adding that the officers were incompetent as well as cruel.21
Metternich did not see the mutiny as posing any threat to the rest of Europe, and welcomed the fact that it would make Alexander easier to deal with and less likely to insist on sending Russian troops anywhere. Underneath all the volcanic talk of revolutionary upheaval threatening the fabric of Christian society lurked straightforward realpolitik, and Austrian interests of state could not countenance a Russian presence in Italy any more than they could a French.22
But Alexander was not so easily deflected from his purpose. On 6 November, Capodistrias once again put forward a proposal to solve the Neapolitan problem peacefully, through the granting of a Charte along the lines of that of France. He argued that this would steal some of the fire of the revolutionaries around Europe. He was backed up by Nesselrode, who also suggested involving France. ‘It was after all France that gave birth to the calamities which have desolated Europe over the past twenty-five years, and it may be from France that even now secrets and instructions which are orchestrating the victory of crime are coming,’ he wrote on 9 November; ‘it therefore behoves France to take first place in a system which such disasters call for when they threaten to once more smother the civilised world in blood and mourning’.23
Castlereagh was also being unhelpful, arguing that no association of states should arrogate the right to decide the internal affairs of others, and that ‘no man can see without a certain feeling of fear the lot of every nation submitted to the decisions and to the will of such a tribunal’. He pointed out that the revolutions that had taken place in Spain and Naples did not threaten anyone, but that if they were to be attacked by the Alliance, they would become defensive, belligerent and possibly as aggressive and victorious as the French Revolution.24
Those in power in Naples were open to every reasonable proposal, as A’Court explained. ‘The moderate constitutionalists (amongst whom we may class all the nobility, the superior officers of the army and most of those who compose the present administrations) are cast down and alarmed in the same proportion [as the radicals were encouraged], for their hopes rest upon the arrival of some firm and energetick declaration on the part of the greater powers, dictating those conditions which may, at the same time, offer a sufficient guarantee to Europe, and secure this country the enjoyment of a constitution in which property may be admitted as the basis of representation, and the Royal Prerogative be allowed that just latitude which is denied to it by the Constitution of the Cortes,’ he reported from Naples. ‘I have every reason to believe that the nation, generally speaking, is prepared for and would agree to accept conditions of this nature, if proposed by the united voice of the Congress.’25
Metternich was not going to be put off his determined course by the arguments of Castlereagh or anyone else. He had already made his own plans for the reconstruction of Ferdinand’s kingdom following its occupation by Austrian troops. In the first place, there would be severe reprisals against all those involved in the revolution (in stark contrast to the revolutionaries’ scrupulously lenient treatment of the tyrants they had toppled). The government, administration, army and police would be reorganised along lines set out in a long document which took as its point of departure that, due to ‘the hot temper of the people and the vivacity of their hatreds’, representative institutions were not suitable for Italians.26
All Metternich needed in order to proceed was the sanction of Russia and Prussia, which was not difficult to obtain. ‘The Emperor of Russia is now convinced of the dangerous influence of the political or mystical secret societies,’ Metternich wrote to Consalvi. ‘His fiery imagination helps him overstep the limits imposed by strict reasoning. In consequence, he ascribes to them not only all that they are responsible for but also much that they are not.’ The Prussian crown prince was also easily swayed.
On 19 November Metternich published a preliminary protocol signed by the plenipotentiaries of Russia, Prussia and Austria. It began by justifying their concern on the grounds that an allied court had been attacked, that all countries of Europe were threatened by ‘the contagion of crime’, and that they wished to ‘ensure the happy and peaceful development of civilisation, the reign of justice and the law under the auspices of Christian morality’. The protocol stipulated that the three allies would not recognise any political changes achieved by illegal means, and would strive to bring things back to normal first by ‘amicable approaches’ and, if that failed, by ‘coercive force’. They were determined to ‘give back their liberty to the king and the nation’ of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies with the support of an Austrian army of occupation. While it was only signed by the representatives of the three courts, it implied that Britain and France had approved it.27
Stewart and Caraman were incensed at not having been informed, and protested vigorously against the implication that their governments were parties to the document. Castlereagh was so angry that he insisted it be withdrawn, which it was. Metternich nevertheless pursued his course. He wrote to Ferdinand, inviting him to meet the three monarchs and their ministers in order to discuss the future of his kingdom, and to appeal to them for assistance.
Still looking for a peaceful solution, Alexander suggested they ask the pope to act as mediator with the government in Naples. Metternich went along with the tsar’s proposal, and sent Lebzeltern off to Rome bearing letters from himself to Consalvi and from Francis to the pope. Instead of asking the pope to mediate, Lebzeltern was to negotiate the passage of Austrian troops through his dominions and persuade him to join in the crusade against the ‘sacrilegious’ Neapolitan regime. Neither Consalvi nor the pope wanted to get involved, fearing it might expose them to attack from Naples, with which the Papal States shared a long frontier.28
While they awaited Ferdinand’s answer to their invitation, Metternich and Gentz took up the idea put forward by Alexander at Aix and got down to work on the formulation of a universal principle of intervention, to be embodied by an Act of Guarantee. The idea was to insure all existing governments with a guarantee of military assistance. Any change in any state – even if introduced by its ruler – which might, if only by example, incite the peoples of other states to subversion would trigger automatic military intervention by the Alliance. Although these principles were never translated into a formal Act, they reveal the width and depth of the gap that had opened between the three courts and the British cabinet. Metternich would have liked to have had the support of Castlereagh, but when it came to what he saw as Austrian reasons of state, he was prepared to forge ahead on his own.
It was nevertheless essential for the sake of appearances before the outside world to keep up the pretence that the Alliance was still intact. Gentz affected to blame the apparent discordance on what he described as the less than constructive part being played by the British observer. ‘A year ago, Lord Stewart married one of the richest heiresses of the Three Kingdoms,’ Gentz commented on 31 December 1820. ‘This woman, whom he loves to distraction, has so far enslaved him that he hardly dares come to Troppau. Receiving every day more imperious summonses to return to Vienna, he has never stayed at Troppau for more than five or six days, and for the greater part of the month of December he has been absent.’ Stewart had concluded that there was little point in his hanging around, since, as he put it to Castlereagh, ‘policy here was framing more upon alarm of future visionary evils, aided by the spectre of Buonaparte raised into reality by a breath’; and anyway, conditions in Troppau were hardly enticing.29
The mud precluded going for walks or riding, it grew extremely cold with the onset of winter, and there were no distractions. ‘We are all bored to death,’ wrote Alexander’s aide-de-camp Prince Volkonsky. Most of the important figures would gather in the evenings at Metternich’s lodgings. ‘It is the most agreeable moment of the day, particularly when he leads the conversation himself,’ La Ferronnays wrote to his wife on 20 December. ‘He really does have all the wit he is credited with, he speaks well, tells a story beautifully and knows how to add interest to details which might seem the least likely to have any.’30
The less exalted did what they could for entertainment. One of the Russians in Alexander’s suite held a ball, decorating his quarters with silver paper and making lemonade for the ladies out of some crystalline concoction he obtained from a local chemist. They danced until two in the morning and, according to another of Alexander’s aides-de-camp, ‘the ball was extremely merry, but towards the end, there was an awful smell of sweat, because the local ladies are not very clean and apparently wash very little’.31
Having issued their invitation to Ferdinand, all the monarchs and their ministers could do was wait. Metternich complained that his chargé d’affaires in Naples and the envoys of the other courts could supply them with no information as to whether Ferdinand would come or not. ‘Without a little Jew who is there because he is everywhere, we would know absolutely nothing,’ he wrote to his family on 23 December. ‘From the little that we can learn from this Jew, we assume the king will come.’ He had suggested that they all adjourn to the greater comforts of Vienna, but Alexander would not hear of it, as it would involve him in the court and social life of the capital. He spent his free time with his sister Maria and his younger brother Nicholas. ‘I am living in complete isolation,’ he wrote to Aleksandr Galitzine in December. ‘My sister is my only distraction at mealtimes or when we have an opportunity to go out and take the air together.’ Christmas was therefore spent in Troppau, without much in the way of celebration. Metternich did receive one present, in the shape of the news that Ferdinand had accepted their invitation.32
In the end, the Emperor Francis could stand it no longer and left for Vienna, precipitating a general move there. The congress was adjourned, to reconvene in January at Laibach (Ljubljana), which was closer to Italy and, it was hoped, a little warmer. Everyone was relieved to leave Troppau except for Alexander, whose forebodings about Vienna proved prophetic when he had a coach accident as he was driving into the city which nearly proved fatal.33