Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

When on the 15th of April, 1814, Murat received the news of the capitulation of Paris and the abdication of the Emperor, he paled as he read the despatch and betrayed great agitation and nervousness, and for several days afterwards he was gloomy and unapproachable.

He repaired quietly to Bologna, and, while Italy went mad and raved in its madness, while the Milanese murdered Prina and Eugène Beauharnais took refuge with the King of Bavaria, he returned to Naples, where he was received like a conqueror and was compelled to bow his appreciation and render his thanks for a display, not one word or one smile of which, as he well knew, was genuine. The people expected very naturally that a new order of things would bring them a new government, and Murat’s own suspicions were confirmed when the treaty of peace was signed at Paris and the Congress of Vienna was summoned without any mention of him at all. Legitimacy was now the rage, and Joachim, though without an invitation, despatched the Duke di Campochiaro and Prince de Cariati as his representatives to Vienna. That done, he turned to his kingdom and, taking time by the forelock, he summoned the most able men of the country to him and set them to work upon the land, the finances, and the army, only warning them not to follow too hard after the latest fashion or to “run backwards blindfold.”

At the same time, on his own account, he lightened the heaviest of the taxes, brought in measures for the encouragement of trade with England, and permitted the free export of grain. Then he decreed that the offices of State were to be given only to Neapolitans, and that foreigners holding them who refused to be naturalised must resign, after which he sat down to wait upon events.

By these measures he contrived to win over a large part of the people, and, by degrees, the old Murat began to emerge from his hiding-place in the personality of the new. His Council had agreed with him in almost every question of importance, and the counsels which he received, while suggesting a constitution, were really sincere in their hopes for the maintenance of his dynasty. His army, which he had had time to put into shape again, was with him; the newspapers were obsequious in their praises of his virtues; and all the corporate bodies in the State announced their readiness to pledge their lives and property in his support.

The Congress of Vienna began to pay some attention to these signs of popular approval and it was noised abroad that the Emperor of Russia had let fall the remark that “it was impossible to restore the ‘Butcher King’ now that the interests of the people had to be considered.” Then Caroline of Austria, Ferdinand’s wife, died suddenly, and so little was her decease lamented that Francis forbade the Court to go into mourning for her.

It may well be imagined that Joachim began to feel safe on his throne, and the fact that, by an agreement concluded at Charmont some little time before the fall of Napoleon, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England had confirmed the principles of the alliance between Austria and Murat, helped him to hope that, after all and in spite of everything, he might be allowed to remain. He had not reckoned, though, with Talleyrand, whose desire it was, just then, to show himself as a reformed character who was ready to do anything to prove his detestation of the fiend whom he had been serving and of all the fiend’s family, which of course included Joachim.

Talleyrand had besides a private grudge against Joachim, for the latter had openly mistrusted him for years, and Napoleon’s parting remarks on the subject of his late Minister for Foreign Affairs must still have been tingling in that gentleman’s ears when he set out for Vienna.

“I should have hung him long ago,” said the Emperor. “I always knew that he would be the first to betray me when the occasion offered itself!”

Talleyrand, who had arrived at the Congress as an apologist both for France and himself, a man with no claims to consideration from anybody, outside the pale of Christian intercourse as an excommunicate bishop and an unfrocked priest, a creature at the sight of whom Francis and his Catholic princes must have shuddered; without a friend—or a case—bankrupt of power and credit, contrived by the sheer force of his own genius to dominate the whole Congress after the first half-dozen sittings.

He set Austria and Russia by the ears, and heated up the quarrel until there was every prospect of war; lined up their adherents and pushed them into the conflict, and manœuvred so marvellously that, in a very short while, France and her friendship were the objects of the diplomacy of both contending parties. Metternich, Nesselrode, Hardenberg, Castlereagh, Stewart, and Stackelberg were little more than children in his hands. His confrères—Noailles, Dupin, and Dalberg—had no voice in the questions that arose. Talleyrand was the Congress, and when he began to use his power to pay off some of his grudges and enmities, it was on Murat that his hand first fell. More Legitimist than the Legitimists, he set out to earn the million francs promised him by Ferdinand for the throne of Naples.