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Blücher, baulked of his wish to shoot Bonaparte, was with difficulty dissuaded by the protests of Wellington and Louis XVIII. from blowing up the Pont de Jéna at Paris; and the fierce veteran voiced the general opinion of Germans, including Metternich, that France must be partitioned, or at least give back Alsace and Lorraine to the Fatherland.
A few minutes afterward the slender form, and the handsome, florid, and smiling face of Count Clement de Metternich appeared on the threshold of the imperial cabinet. The emperor quickly met the Austrian minister, but, as if restraining himself, he stood in the middle of the room.
"However," says Metternich, "I have often thought that Napoleon, by talking in this way, merely sought to study the opinion of others, or to confuse it, and the direct advance which he made to Louis XVIII., in 1804 seemed to confirm this suspicion. Speaking to me one day of this advance he said, 'Monsieur's reply was grand; it was full of fine traditions.
In collaboration with Prince de Metternich, then Austrian ambassador at the court of the Tuileries, and an amateur musician of no mean order, he had written the libretto of a ballet called "Le Roi d'Yvetot."
He enjoyed greatly the repose of his own library, an apartment eighteen feet high, and containing fifteen thousand volumes. The only unamiable thing about Metternich was his fear of being bored. He maintained that it was impossible to find over six interesting men in any company whatever. With people whom he trusted he was unusually frank and free-spoken.
Here was I, a stranger in a foreign land, about to sacrifice my life on the shrine of a wild boar! Count Metternich, behind the next tree, fired and killed the brute, so I was none the worse save for a good fright.
Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Alexander: "My respected Brother, I consent to restore the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg" and there would have been no war.
One of the ladies most intimate with the empress was the wife of Prince Richard Metternich, the Austrian ambassador. This lady seems to have had personal and political ends in view, and to have succeeded in inducing the empress to adopt and further them.
The morning before my departure I waited on Lord Aberdeen, requesting a passport to England; he referred me to Prince Metternich. I reached his hotel, and had to wade through a host of long-whiskered, long-piped gentlemen, who were smoking with all their might and main, and spitting in all directions.
Metternich heard people wondering in Vienna whether a new French dynasty was really to be established for the peace and welfare of France, or whether the alliance was intended to throw the strength of a hitherto implacable and courageous foe into another Napoleonic combination for the conquest of Europe and the world. The solution of this enigma has never been found.
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