Mme. la Comtesse de Périgord received her relative’s guests with a charming grace. Her brilliant and playful intellect tempered from time to time the gravity of the political matter gliding into the conversation. There was, however, this difference: under M. de Talleyrand’s roof the discussion was ever serious, and never deviated from its aim; while in the other drawing-rooms of Vienna, politics were treated as an accessory, and in an airy fashion, during the rare intervals not devoted to pleasure.
On the evening in question, Saxony was once more the subject of the conversation. Louis XVIII. had declared himself strongly opposed to the maintenance of Frederick-Augustus on its throne. He wished that prince to be punished with the loss of his kingdom for his faithful support of Napoleon. The utmost Louis would concede was the restricted sovereignty of Frederick-Augustus over some small patch of territory on the left bank of the Rhine. The execution of that plan would have involved the incorporation of the whole of the Saxon States with Prussia. The latter Power claimed them energetically as a compensation guaranteed to it by the Treaty of Kalisch. Alexander, who at that time was nursing the idea of a kingdom of Poland comprising the Polish provinces that had formerly lapsed to Prussia, had pronounced in favour of that incorporation. Austria, however, looked askance at this scheme of aggrandisement, while the minor German princes were positively afraid of such a spoliation, which seemed to them the precursor of their destruction. M. de Talleyrand, on the other hand, sided with Saxony, sustaining its rights on every possible opportunity with as much dignity as healthy logic.
There was a very lively discussion between Lord Castlereagh[39] and the French envoys. England at that time, though having no direct interest in the question, seemed inclined to favour Prussia’s pretensions. A few months later, there was a reversal of her policy. But however interesting King Frederick-Augustus’s cause might be to me personally, it seemed to me that the atmosphere in which I had hitherto lived at Vienna excluded all political affairs, and I had drawn aside with the Duc de Richelieu. He gave me some particulars of the brilliant military career of his nephew, the Comte de Rochechouart, with whom I had spent so many happy moments at Odessa;[40] and then talked to me about the handsome Mme. Davidoff,[41] and of her famous friend Mme. la Comtesse Potocka. Surrounded by all that was most brilliant and accomplished in European civilisation, our thoughts yet went back to the deserts of the Yeddisen, and when we returned to the group of diplomatists, the prince had vanquished the grand sophist, and equity had scored a triumph over arbitrariness.
Although M. de Talleyrand was both in bearing and in temperament naturally cold and indifferent, his great reputation and his uncontested merit caused him to be assiduously courted. That apparent coldness, in fact, still further enhanced the special marks of his interest or of his affection. The words falling from his lips, a benevolent smile, a sign of approval—in short, everything emanating from him was calculated to fascinate. His was the flexible intellect which without effort and without pedantry can, on notable occasions, show itself the master of the situation, and which, in more familiar intercourse, knows how to lend itself with inimitable grace to the lightest banter. Full justice has never been done to his goodness of heart. He repaid hatred and slander by clever sallies; he never emphasised or paraded the services he rendered; and in general his kind actions were performed with such simplicity as to make him easily lose the recollection of them.[42]
At that period I often tried to establish a parallel between the two men who, even in that gathering of so many illustrious people, powerfully attracted and captivated everybody’s attention, namely, the Prince de Ligne and M. de Talleyrand. Both, having lived in contact with the celebrities of the eighteenth century, seemed to have been bequeathed to the new generation as models and ornaments; both were representatives, though in different styles, of that witty society—the one of its lighter and more sparkling phase, the other of its easy, graceful, and noble phase; both had the secret of pleasing by the charm of intellect: the first was more brilliant, the second more profound. M. de Talleyrand seemed born, as it were, to captivate his fellow-men by the strength of an ever-direct and luminous reason; the Prince de Ligne fascinated and dazzled them by the sparkle of an inexhaustible imagination: the latter bringing to bear upon the different branches of literature the subtlety, sparkle, and gracefulness of the habitué of Courts; the former dominating over the most important concerns with the easy calm of a grand seigneur and the imperturbable moderation of a superior intellect; the one and the other lavishly scattering around them clever sentences, happy sallies, original and piquant traits, graver and more individual in the case of the statesman, more spontaneous and brilliant in the case of the soldier:—both, in fine, animated with the sympathetic benevolence which is the appanage of the well-born man, and which was more contained with the first and more expansive with the second. ‘Happy ought the man to be who finds himself placed near the Prince de Ligne in the morning, and in the evening near M. de Talleyrand,’ I said to myself. ‘If the one be apt to enlighten his mind by the lessons of a long experience and a succession of true pictures, the other may purify his taste by the never-failing tact, the judicious observation which takes in everything, and the magic charm of a conversation which has the faculty of subjugating listeners even where it fails in convincing them.’
The reception on the evening in question did not last as long as usual, Mme. de Périgord, like the majority of us, being due at the Burg, to attend a monster concert. Nothing, it was said, could convey a better idea of the marvellous results of the practice of music in Vienna. We left the prince engaged in his game of whist, in which he indulged every night with a particular fondness and with superior skill, and made our way to the Imperial Palace.
In one of the vastest halls, that of the States, there were a hundred pianos on which professors and amateurs performed a concert. Salieri, the composer of the Danaïdes, was the conductor of that gigantic orchestra. To tell the truth, however, save for the general scene, which in all these fêtes was always dazzling, that matchless charivari, in spite of the superior talent of the maestro directing it, was more like a huge display of strength and skill than a concert of good taste. This new surprise was, nevertheless, such as might have been expected from a committee appointed by the Court. To justify the confidence placed in it, it had ransacked its imagination for something unforeseen and unprecedented, something altogether out of the ordinary. It had succeeded to perfection.