CHAPTER XIII

The Fire at the Razumowski Palace--The Prince’s Great Wealth --The Vicissitudes of Court Favour in Russia--Prince Koslowski--A Reminiscence of the Duc d’Orléans--A Remark of Talleyrand--Fête at the Comtesse Zichy’s--Emperor Alexander and his Ardent Wishes for Peace--New Year’s Day, 1815-- Grand Ball and Rout--Sir Sidney Smith’s Dinner-Party at the Augarten--His Chequered Life, his Missions and his Projects at the Congress--The King of Bavaria without Money-- Departure and Anger of the King of Würtemberg--The Queen of Westphalia--The Announcement of a Sleighing-Party--A Ball at Lord Castlereagh’s.

It seemed as if every species of amusement had been exhausted for the gratification of the illustrious gathering at Vienna. Balls, hunts, banquets, _carrousels_ were only a few of the forms pleasure had adopted in its pursuit. The new year was drawing near, and in order to inaugurate it under similar auspices of gaiety and happy freedom from care, the Austrian Court had announced sixteen grand fêtes or new assemblies for the forthcoming month of January. Suddenly, on a moonless night, the palace of Prince Razumowski caught fire, and in consequence of a rather stiff breeze the mischief spread rapidly, and in a short time looked like Vesuvius in full blast. The excitement spread in due proportion, and everybody wished to catch a glimpse of the spectacle, worthy of the brush of a great artist. In a short time the roads leading to the structure were simply black with people.

At daybreak I also repaired to the spot. The Emperor of Austria had gone thither at the first news of the disaster. Several battalions of infantry, animated by his presence, preserved order, and did all they could to check the progress of the flames, without much apparent success. From amidst the snow-covered roofs arose dense clouds of smoke, which in turns hid and lighted up the burning building itself. Every now and again an explosion more violent than the rest literally caused burning beams to drop from on high. A shower of smaller flames threatened the various parts of the pile with total destruction. The yawning walls suddenly disclosed vast rooms, superb galleries crammed with precious furniture and art-treasures, which almost immediately became a prey to the fast-advancing monster. The pictures and the statues were flung headlong into the gardens and into the courts. If they escaped destruction by fire, they were shattered to pieces on the flagstones or saturated with the jets of water and the molten snow, which had converted the ground into a kind of quagmire. One magnificent gallery, decorated with a number of statues by Canova, could not be saved. Its floor had given way; and at that moment a feeling of profound consternation seemed to have taken possession of the enormous crowd. It was not surprising, for the Razumowski Palace constituted one of the sights of Vienna. It had taken twenty years to build it. Several times since the opening of the Congress, Emperor Alexander had borrowed it of his ambassador. It was in these vast apartments that he had given some of the fêtes rivalling in pomp and splendour those of the Austrian Court; it was at the Razumowski Palace that he had gathered around a table of seven hundred covers all the political celebrities of Europe; it was at the Razumowski Palace that, but three weeks previously, he had so fitly celebrated the birthday of his sister, the Grand-Duchess of Oldenburg. Such, in short, were the splendour and charm of this magnificent palace that Empress Elizabeth had, it was said, seriously thought of renting it during the spring as her private residence.

For many, many years Razumowski had made a point of embellishing the place with every art-treasure that wealth could buy. The rooms themselves were decorated with as much taste as sumptuousness. Side by side with galleries containing masterpieces of pictorial and statuary art, there was a library, perhaps matchless anywhere, inasmuch as the rarest manuscripts and books were collected there. In short, the building was a unique specimen of Asiatic magnificence, carefully toned down by European taste.

In the costly ornamentation of that palace, Razumowski had spent a considerable part of his fortune: it was even said that his fortune had been impaired by it. That wealth, which was enormous, came to him from his father, Cyril Razumowski, the field-marshal, and the brother of that famous Alexis who was the favourite and subsequently the husband of Empress Elizabeth, who secretly married him at Perowo, near Moscow. The vagaries of luck, which has played so important a part in the history of Russia, were for Cyril what they were for the brother of Catherine I. When the erewhile chorister-lad of the imperial chapel, Alexis Razumowski, had sprouted into the lover and minister of Empress Elizabeth, it all at once recurred to him that he had a brother. Alexis decided upon having him sent for, in order to give him a share of some of the good things that had come to himself. The brother herded flocks somewhere in Little Russia, and had no presentiment of the marvellous destiny in store for him. On the contrary, he was inclined to look upon the imperial emissaries who had come in search of him as so many recruiting-sergeants bent on converting him into a soldier. In his opinion, the wallet in which he carried his bread while tending his flock was a thousand times preferable to the grenadier’s knapsack; hence, at the approach of the men in quest of him, he escaped, and hid himself in the woods. As a matter of course, they were on his track in a few days, and after a most obstinate resistance, he was bound and laden with fetters, and in that condition he made his first appearance at the Imperial Palace, whence he issued very soon, laden with wealth and favours, a field-marshal, and invested with the restored commandership of the Cossacks, a rank abolished by Peter the Great in consequence of the Mazeppa conspiracy. In addition to the most extensive powers, the latter office conferred upon him the right of levying tithes upon all the revenues of the provinces of his government; and this naturally became the source of one of the most enormous fortunes of Europe.

Exceedingly tactful and devoid of prejudice, Cyril Razumowski succeeded in maintaining himself in his great position during the reign of Catherine II., to whose elevation he was supposed to have contributed in no mean degree. The pomp and splendour with which he surrounded himself, as well as his personal kindness of heart, seemed to have rendered him fully worthy of such unprecedented favours. Many traits are recorded of him proving his generosity as well as his nobleness of character. He had a steward, who for many years had managed his affairs, and who had acquired great influence over him. A poor gentleman of Little Russia, a neighbour of the marshal, was at loggerheads with the business man about some land, which, though of little or no importance to the wealthy Court dignitary, practically constituted the whole of the other’s patrimony. The steward insisted upon the surrender of the property. The gentleman was thoroughly aware of Razumowski’s inherent sense of right and justice, and, instead of trusting his all to the chances of a lawsuit--always uncertain in Russia, and notably where one’s opponent happens to be very powerful--he made up his mind to go and find the marshal at St. Petersburg, and to plead his cause with him. The steward, having got wind of the affair, is beforehand, and on his arrival in the capital stigmatises the claim of the gentleman as an utterly unfounded pretension, and extracts from his master a promise to yield neither to solicitations nor prayers, but to remain firm. A short time afterwards the poor gentleman arrives upon the scene and explains his case, and succeeds in convincing the marshal so completely of the justice of his claim as thoroughly to move him. The picture of the other’s total ruin is by no means to his taste; the promise to his steward is forgotten, and without saying a syllable he leaves the room for a small one adjoining it, and there in a few lines he draws up a document granting the contested land to his adversary. At the sight of the paper, the latter drops on his knees, where the steward, entering at the same moment by another door, finds him. ‘You see,’ said Razumowski smiling, ‘where I have brought him to.’ The scene is worthy to figure by the side of that of Sully and Henri IV. at Fontainebleau, when the king said to his friend the minister, ‘Rise, Rosny, these people might imagine that I was granting you a pardon for something.’

André Razumowski, his son, who had only received his princely title some short time before from Alexander as a reward for important services, had inherited several of those qualities which seem such dignified accompaniments to great wealth. He also had a remarkable and enlightened taste for art. The genuine type of the grand seigneur, he was at the same time wholly familiar with the less redundant graces of diplomatic courtesy. Most expensive in his taste and grandiose in his projects, he noticed one day that he might shorten the distance separating him from the Prater, and had a bridge thrown over an arm of the Danube. As the ambassador to the Austrian Court, he was on the most confidential footing with Prince de Metternich, the presiding spirit; and more than once, Razumowski, by his cleverness, had dissipated the clouds gathering over the discussions of the Congress.

The fire had meanwhile been got under, but that part of the palace looking out upon the gardens was irrevocably gone. Among the crowd of lookers-on, I noticed the Prince Koslowski. After the death of the Prince de Ligne, an instinctive feeling of friendship, and perhaps sympathy also, seemed to draw me nearer to that other friend. If, in the case of the old marshal, I had admired the treasures of experience and reason and that subtle and delicate appreciation of society, in the case of the Russian prince I found a loftiness of views, an entire independence of judgment and expression about men and political events, too rare, perhaps, among diplomatists. His sprightly conversation bound many people to him, while at the same time his frankness commanded affection.

‘This,’ he said, when I got up to him, ‘is a chapter to add to the vicissitudes of courtly favour and disgrace in Russia. Razumowski may consider himself fortunate to be quits at the cost of a palace half burnt down. He also has known the ups and downs of favour and disgrace; he also has known the sweets of power and the bitterness of exile. The history of my country could indeed be made into a most philosophical novel; it would, above all, provide a series of excellent moral lectures on the danger of vainglory and the frequency of revolutions. The last century has offered any number of examples. There is Menschikoff, a pastry cook’s lad, who becomes a prince and a general, and is suddenly exiled, dying a couple of years after, without individually recovering his position. Biren, a servant, is raised to sovereign rank, and is practically master of the empire for nine years, until the day that Münnich, his rival, claps the fetters on him in the presence of his own guards, petrified with fear. Biren, however, regains favour, while Münnich himself expiates his sudden rise with twenty years’ banishment to Siberia. Surgeon Lestocq, after having overthrown the Regent Anne, practically puts the crown on Elizabeth’s head, and remains one of her principal advisers during her reign. He is, nevertheless, flung into prison, then set free, and finally almost entirely forgotten. The Princesse Daschkoff, the supposed soul of the plot that dragged Peter III. from his throne to place his wife there, is soon misjudged by her whose plans she imprudently boasted to have inspired, and to whose grandeur she professed to have contributed. Finally, the plotters who took Paul I.‘s life and crown are treated with the utmost harshness by him who owes his present power to them.

‘Well,’ he went on, after we had left the scene of the fire, ‘the elevations are often as strange in their causes as the catastrophes are terrible in their effects. Judge for yourself. In consequence of my relationship to Prince Kourakine, I began my career in the secretarial department of the great chancellor Romanzoff. One day the latter was dictating an important despatch to me. I do not know how I managed it, but in my hurry, instead of emptying the pounce over the document, I emptied the inkstand over the beautiful white kerseymeres of the chief. That inkpot, so indiscriminately emptied, decided my fate. Romanzoff, as you may imagine, did not care to keep near him a secretary with such a distinct tendency to spoil his clothes, so he gave him a position as a state-councillor, where there was a good deal to control, but little to write. But for this trifling circumstance, I’d probably be vegetating now among the subalterns.’

Few men combined like the Prince Koslowski the liking for work, and the intelligent appreciation of it, joined to a remarkable and fiery eloquence. His learning was very varied and extensive, his memory most admirable. History had no secrets for him; he had mastered all the diplomatic transactions which for many centuries had regulated the fate of Europe. His manner of judging men was that of a philosophic statesman. All the political questions so often twisted out of their natural shape by private interest he regarded in the light of a friend of humanity. A staunch partisan of all progress, he was fond of telling how he, like another illustrious personage already mentioned, had received equally deserved chastisement at the hands of an Austrian postillion. While travelling, when very young, on the frontiers of Prussia, he had struck the driver, whose horses did not keep pace with the traveller’s impatience. The driver vigorously applied his whip to the back of the ’prentice diplomatist. ‘Well, it was that Austrian who gave me my first lesson in liberalism,’ said the prince, laughing, a decade later.

Koslowski quickly climbed the first rungs of the diplomatic ladder. Minister-plenipotentiary to the King of Sardinia, he had the good fortune to save the lives of several shipwrecked Frenchmen who had been made prisoners. Napoleon immediately sent the Legion of Honour to the representative of a sovereign with whom at that very moment he happened to be at war. The reward redounded as much to the honour of the Russian ambassador as to that of the French Emperor. It was at Cagliari, about the same period, that the Prince Koslowski became acquainted with the Duc d’Orléans, afterwards the King of the French. A similar love of knowledge, a similar desire for fathoming most things, drew these two together. Both had spent their earlier years in serious and assiduous studies. The chequered and adventurous life of the French prince had strengthened the studies with the experience derived from misfortune. These two took long walks by the sea-shore, and passed in review the gigantic events of which practically they were the eye-witnesses. Sometimes they read Shakespeare, whose language and whose beauties were equally familiar to them; and those readings were rarely interrupted except by the cries of admiration of the Russian diplomatist or the subtle and learned comments of the French exile.

Very often during the Congress I heard Koslowski refer to the particulars of that familiar intercourse, of which, despite the difference in their years--for that difference consisted of a decade--he cherished a lively recollection. ‘The learning of the Duc d’Orléans surprises and confounds me; on no matter what subject, whether it be a scientific, an historical, or a politico-economical one, he not only holds his own with me, but beats me. What, however, I admire most in him is his courage in misfortune, and his profound knowledge of men. He sees them as they are; nevertheless, he judges them without the slightest bitterness. Proscribed from his country, he constantly has his eyes turned towards it, and has steadfastly refused to join those who would reconquer it by force of arms. The saying: “They have learnt nothing; they have forgotten nothing,” does not apply to him. Both as a man and as a prince, he belongs to his time.’

The Comtesse Zichy gave a grand ball, which was to be honoured by the presence of the sovereigns. The sole topic of conversation in the capital was the fire of the previous night, which had robbed the city of one of its handsomest ornaments. The damage, estimated at several millions, was absolutely irreparable from the point of view of art. But oblivion came quickly in those days, and by evening the excitement had largely subsided, and the courtiers’ greatest interest seemed to be the study of the sovereigns’ faces, inasmuch as the rumour ran that the most important questions had been settled, that the sweetest accord reigned between those rulers of the world, and that the opening of the new year would be signalised by the proclamation of some great decisions and the declaration of a general peace.

Among the crowd of notabilities grouped around the celebrities, such as M. de Metternich and the Field-Marshal Prince de Schwartzenberg, was the young Prince C---- de F----, the son of a king, the brother of a king to-be, yet who, nevertheless, was as simple and unaffected as he was handsome and clever. A circumstance most trifling in appearance had made him for the last few days the subject of all comments and the object of all observation. In the shape of a floral decoration, he wore simply a daisy in his buttonhole and nothing else. Of course, renewed each day, the modest village flower was a proof of careful search at a season when the snow-covered fields had none to offer to the rustic swain. No doubt some tender recollection, some thought proceeding direct from the heart, was hidden under this humble emblem. It was one of the many love-stories enacted while the Congress was supposed to be unravelling the tangled skein of Europe’s diplomacy. The air of Vienna seemed positively teeming with them, and their secrets were not difficult to read. The latest was no exception to the others. It was soon known that the modest flower of the field reminded the young prince of a cherished name, that of the Comtesse de ----. One day these two we