What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I dined at Metternich’s table on the day mentioned above as well as on sundry other occasions; on some of which I was fortunate enough to make one of the little circle enjoying his conversation. Of course the dinner parties at the prince’s house were affairs of much magnificence and splendour. But I had, on more than one occasion, the higher privilege of dining with him en famille.

On both and all occasions, whether it was a grand banquet of thirty persons or more, or a quite unceremonious dinner en famille, the prince’s practice was the same, and was peculiar.

He did not in any wise partake of the spread before him. He had always dined previously at one o’clock. But he had a loaf of brown bread and a plate of butter put before him; and, while his guests were dining, he occupied himself with spreading and cutting a succession of daintily thin slices of bread and butter for his own repast.

Victor Emmanuel used similarly to dine in the middle of the day, and at his state banquets used to take no more active part than was involved in honouring them with his presence. But Metternich, I think, would not have said what my friend G. P. Marsh, the United States minister, once told me Victor Emmanuel said to him on one occasion. Mr. Marsh, as dean of the diplomatic body (it was before any of the great powers sent ambassadors to the court of the Quirinal), was seated next to his majesty at table. Innumerable dishes were being carried round in long succession, when the king, turning to his neighbour with a groan, said, “Will this never come to an end?” I have no doubt Marsh cordially echoed his majesty’s sentiments on the subject.

The words of men who have occupied positions in any degree similar to that of Prince Metternich are apt to be picked up, remembered, and recorded, when in truth the only value of the utterances in question is to show that such men do occasionally think and speak like other mortals! And my notebooks are not without similar evidences of gobemoucherie on my own part. But there is one subject on which I have heard Metternich speak words which really are worth recording. That subject was the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte.

Of course on such a topic the Austrian statesman might have said much that he was not at liberty to say; and there was also much that he might have said which could not have found place in one halfhour’s conversation. The particular point upon which I heard him speak was the celebrated interview, at which the emperor lost his temper because he could not induce Austria to declare war.

Metternich described the way in which the emperor, with the manners of the guard-room rather than those of the council-chamber, suddenly and violently tossed his cocked hat into the corner of the room, “evidently expecting that I should pick it up and present it to him,” said the old statesman; “but I judged it better to ignore the action and the intention altogether, and his majesty after a minute or two rose and picked it up himself.”

He went on to express his conviction that all this display of passion on the emperor’s part was altogether affected, fictitious, and calculated; and said that similar manifestations of intemperate violence were by no means infrequently used by the emperor with a view to produce calculated effects, and were often more or less successful.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the most cynical observer could have detected the slightest shade of bitterness in the words or the manner of Prince Metternich. On that field of battle at all events the honours did not fall to the share of Napoleon. And his aged adversary spoke of the encounter with the amused pleasantry and easy smile of a veteran who recounts passages at arms in which his part has been that best worth telling.

But with a graver manner he went on to say, that the most unpleasant part of the circumstance connected with dealing with Napoleon arose from the fact that he was not a gentleman in any sense of the word, or anything like one. Of course the prince, with his unblemished sixteen quarterings, was not talking of anything connected with Napoleon’s birth. And I doubt whether he may have been aware that Napoleon Buonaparte was technically gentle by virtue of his descent from an ancient Tuscan territorial noble race. Metternich, in expressing the opinion quoted, was not thinking of anything of the kind. He was speaking of the moral nature of the man. In these days, after all that has since that time been published on the subject, the expression of Metternich seems almost like the enunciation of an accepted and recognised truism. Nevertheless, even now the judgment on such a point, of one who had enjoyed (no, certainly not enjoyed, but we will say undergone) so much personal intercourse with the great conqueror, is worth recording.