Europe had a party during the Congress of Vienna in the last months of 1814. Monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and their wives and mistresses had learnt what Lord Castlereagh called ‘habits of confidential intercourse’ while engaged in defeating Napoleon. Between balls and banquets in the city’s many palaces, they seduced, betrayed and negotiated with each other. Letters copied for the Austrian police tell us who slipped up which staircase, or quarrelled between which polonaises. ‘You, always you, nothing but you,’ wrote Metternich to the Duchess of Sagan, while ‘all Europe’ waited in his antechamber. Their love affair seemed to concern him more than ‘the affairs of the world,’ complained his secretary Friedrich von Gentz.

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