I am thinking of reading the notes to David King’s Vienna, 1814. And just the notes. By chance, my eye fell on a long one just now, about the letters of the Empress Marie Louise — how they turned up here and there in Europe after her death — and I couldn’t stop reading it. King’s writing in the notes is somewhat less frothy than his text, which can only be called tarted up. Both notes and text read like an article in Vanity Fair, but the relative sobriety of the notes, which discuss King’s sources, suggests that it’s the reporter’s job that really interests him. His attitude to the Congress of Vienna is more jaded; he writes of it with something of the tabloid muckraker’s disingenously wide-eyed shock. It’s an assignment that he’s got to sell. So we’re treated to an invasive account of Talleyrand’s morning toilette, frequent references to thousands of blazing candles, and the ballerina Emilia Bigottini’s “breathless performances.” There is also a pile-up of infelicities, such as the gratingly repeated “Vienna Congress” (King appears to dislike the word Viennese), the “Russian tsar,” and “quick diligence.”

My complaints are not very heartfelt; of all the historical events that I can think of, the Congress of Vienna is the one most deserving a Vanity Fair-style treatment. Like a grand country house, the Congress had a business side and a pleasure side, and as pleasure sides go, it was the Versailles of glittering turnouts. A tsar, an emperor, the King of Prussia, with all the sisters and their cousins and their aunt living in the same palace — it’s a wonder the Hofburg didn’t levitate. The antics of Talleyrand, the rivalry of the “Russian siren” (Princess Bagration) and the “Cleopatra of Courland” (Wilhelmine de Sagan), two ladies installed on the same floor of a building called the “Palm Palace” — it’s wonderful stuff; wonderful fluff. I’m delighted to learn that Nesselrode pudding, which was still appearing on menus when I was a boy, was concocted in the French plenipotentiary’s kitchens. Not to mention all that waltzing! (It’s a pity that King offers only a translation of the Prince de Ligne’s famous pun, “Le Congrès ne marche pas, il danse,” in English only. Marcher means “to function” as well as “to walk.”) Above all, there is the superb fatuousness of Prince Metternich, torn between saving the world and holding on to Cleopatra’s affections. King is not bad about the business side, but he is careful not to try the reader’s patience with complexities.   

But I’m going straight back to Adam Zamoyski’s more comprehensive Rites of Peace, which I began (re-) reading by mistake, as soon as I’m done with King. Which won’t be long; the pages fly by.

***

On Monday, I opened up the work that I began on Fire Island — I have divulged the name here, but I prefer to call it “my writing project” — for the first time since vacation, and looked over what I’d done. I added more material yesterday. But I haven’t found the tone yet. That’s not terribly important at this stage, I don’t think; at any rate, it’s not as vital as simply getting things down. I looked at the section on “Books” and realized that the second sentence was really the beginning of the section’s ending. So I hit “enter” and wrote something else. I began to see that I don’t understand very well just what it is that books mean to me. There’s a sense in which they’re too intimate to have a meaning. There’s another, though, in which they’re just books. I keep them because I have always kept them, which is a good reason and a bad reason all in one. The good reason is the utility, convenience, and continuity of a library. The bad reason points to the lack of a rigorous criterion for disposing of books. I think that I’m pretty good, now, about not holding onto books that aren’t that great. But I have books that I bought thirty years ago and more, for reasons and in pursuit of interests that are now obscure. But they’ve always been there, on the shelves! How can I dump them now? Well, he said, rolling up his sleeves and opening a shopping bag, watch me.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2012 at 11:13 am.