Byron accuses Louis XVIII, who was not present at the Congress, of being a gourmand and a hedonist,
“A mild Epicurean, form’d at best
To be a kind host and as good a guest.”
The same idea is conveyed in Moore’s description of that king as,
“Sighing out a faint adieu
To truffles, salmis, toasted cheese.”
Especially painful to Byron was the report that Marie Louise (1791–1849), Napoleon’s widow, who had been secretly married to her chamberlain, Adam de Neipperg, had attended the Congress, and had become reconciled to her first husband’s captors. One section of the satire paints a picture of her leaning on the arm of the Duke of Wellington, “yet red from Waterloo,” before her husband’s ashes have had time to chill.
The most bitter, and, at the same time, the most just satire in the poem is directed at the English landed gentry:
“The last to bid the cry of warfare cease,
The first to make a malady of peace.”