Word: metternich
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...England after the Napoleonic wars, Lieven was an upright, punctilious, short-sighted wittol whose portrait makes him look like an aristocratic Andy Gump. Dorothea, his wife, was "the most feared, most flattered, worst hated female politician of her day." Because Dorothea was known to be the mistress of Metternich, and because she was on very intimate terms with the Duke of Wellington, George IV, Tsar Alexander, Lord Castlereagh, many others, cynics assumed that her marriage was one of expediency. But when her private letters were released by her family last year, it was learned that even her husband loved...
Last week Dorothea was belatedly punished for her sins when 376 pages of her private letters to Metternich were published for the edification of the general public that she despised. She wrote him almost every day for eight years, giving information about English and Russian politics, scandals and her own repeated triumphs, and acting in general as Metternich's spy. She was so powerful that it was said Austria had two ambassadors in London, the official one and Dorothea. Dorothea and Metternich so wangled state affairs that they were able to meet on three occasions, but when Metternich remarried...
...life was a matter of going to dull parties, visiting the King at Brighton, picking up scraps of gossip, nattering the King's fat mistress, patching up quarrels between, Austrian supporters, suffering boredom, nervousness, tantrums and fears of revolution, then making fun of everybody and everything to Metternich. Because she did so with a mixture of malice, snobbishness, impatience, heartlessness and occasional humdrum housewifely humor, her private letters make a lively book, packed with characterizations that, a novelist could envy. Thus she describes the conversation of her diplomatic rival, the clumsy, ill-favored wife of the Austrian Ambassador...
...Mexico City, just after the signing of the treaty of peace had given California to the U. S., came news of a great gold strike there. In Paris the last of the Bourbons signed his abdication, and the gale of revolution that swept Europe ended the age of Metternich. The first carload of grain came by rail into Chicago...
...great treaty that came out of the Congress, and that fixed the boundaries of Europe along lines that Metternich had envisioned, was "the vastest political document ever drawn up," consisting of 121 articles. Twenty-six secretaries working all day turned out one copy. Yet when the ceremony of signing began another cautious Englishman suddenly got cold feet, insisted on reading the whole treaty, read until midnight, then signed it and "one epoch was closed, another opened...