PARIS, August, 1805.
MY LORD:--According to a general belief in our diplomatic circles, it was
the Austrian Ambassador in France, Count von Cobenzl, who principally
influenced the determination of Francis II. to assume the hereditary
title of Emperor of Austria, and to acknowledge Napoleon Emperor of the
French.
Johann Philipp, Count von Cobenzl, enjoys, not only in his own country,
but through all Europe, a great reputation as a statesman, and has for a
number of years been employed by his Court in the most intricate and
delicate political transactions. In 1790 he was sent to Brabant to treat
with the Belgian insurgents; but the States of Brabant refusing to
receive him, he retired to Luxembourg, where he published a proclamation,
in which Leopold II. revoked all those edicts of his predecessor, Joseph
II., which had been the principal cause of the troubles; and
reestablished everything upon the same footing as during the reign of
Maria Theresa. In 1791 he was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St.
Petersburg, where his conduct obtained the approbation of his own Prince
and of the Empress of Russia.
In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety nominated the intriguer, De
Semonville, Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte. His mission was to excite
the Turks against Austria and Russia, and it became of great consequence
to the two Imperial Courts to seize this incendiary of regicides. He was
therefore stopped, on the 25th of July, in the village of Novate, near
the lake of Chiavenne. A rumour was very prevalent at this time that
some papers were found in De Semonville’s portfolio implicating Count von
Cobenzl as a correspondent with the revolutionary French generals. The
continued confidence of his Sovereign contradicts, however, this
inculpation, which seems to have been merely the invention of rivalry or
jealousy.
In October, 1795, Count von Cobenzl signed, in the name of the Emperor, a
treaty with England and Russia; and in 1797 he was one of the Imperial
plenipotentiaries sent to Udine to negotiate with Bonaparte, with whom,
on the 17th of October, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. In the
same capacity he went afterwards to Rastadt, and when this congress broke
up, he returned again as an Ambassador to St. Petersburg.
After the Peace of Lunwille, when it required to have a man of experience
and talents to oppose to our so deeply able Minister, Talleyrand, the
Cabinet of Vienna removed him from Russia to France, where, with all
other representatives of Princes, he has experienced more of the frowns
and rebukes, than of the dignity and good grace, of our present
Sovereign.
Count von Cobenzl’s foible is said to be a passion for women; and it is
reported that our worthy Minister, Talleyrand, has been kind enough to
assist him frequently in his amours. Some adventures of this sort, which
occurred at Rastadt, afforded much amusement at the Count’s expense.
Talleyrand, from envy, no doubt, does not allow him the same political
merit as his other political contemporaries, having frequently repeated
that “the official dinners of Count von Cobenzl were greatly preferable
to his official notes.”
So well pleased was Bonaparte with this Ambassador when at
Aix-la-Chapelle last year, that, as a singular favour, he permitted him,
with the Marquis de Gallo (the Neapolitan Minister and another
plenipotentiary at Udine), to visit the camps of his army of England on
the coast. It is true that this condescension was, perhaps, as much a
boast, or a threat, as a compliment.
The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge
of Bonaparte’s for your mandate of blockade. Rumour states that this
measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of
your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our
Napoleon. For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination,
Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any
objections or representations. “But what absurdities do I not sign!”
exclaimed the pliant Minister.
Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor. Charlemagne
had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
before,--an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but
to gratify his impertinent vanity. Every spot where Charlemagne had
walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with
great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign
representatives, and by his side his wife. To a peasant who presented
him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave
nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small
crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he
bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand
louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter,
but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the
manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National Institute
for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by Charlemagne, who many
believed was not able to write; and a German Baron, Krigge, was
registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor
to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of
sixty years’ standing. But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt
about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe! A German professor,
Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise,
addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his
intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne
were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of
this century, the diploma written in the last; the crucifix manufactured
within fifty, and the ring, perhaps, within ten years. The night after
Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a police commissary, accompanied by
four gendarmes, entered the professor’s bedroom, forced him to dress, and
ushered him into a covered cart, which carried him under escort to the
left bank of the Rhine; where he was left with orders, under pain of
death, never more to enter the territory of the French Empire. This
expeditious and summary justice silenced all other connoisseurs and
antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such
numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that
we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by
the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in
monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne
at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish
professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of
Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand livres--L 500. This
ballad may, perhaps, be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or Lyceum
Charlemagne.