endured at the hands of the Imperial
officials. He argued that the French people had been given no choice in
the matter. Napoleon had forced them to act at his bidding. But Napoleon
was gone and Louis XVIII was on the throne. "Give him a chance,"
Talleyrand pleaded. And the Allies, glad to see a legitimate king
upon the throne of a revolutionary country, obligingly yielded and the
Bourbons were given their chance, of which they made such use that they
were driven out after fifteen years.

The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metternich, the Austrian
prime minister, the leader of the foreign policy of the house of
Habsburg. Wenzel Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg, was exactly
what the name suggests. He was a Grand Seigneur, a very handsome
gentleman with very fine manners, immensely rich, and very able, but the
product of a society which lived a thousand miles away from the sweating
multitudes who worked and slaved in the cities and on the farms. As a
young man, Metternich had been studying at the University of Strassburg
when the French Revolution broke out. Strassburg, the city which gave
birth to the Marseillaise, had been a centre of Jacobin activities.
Metternich remembered that his pleasant social life had been sadly
interrupted, that a lot of incompetent citizens had suddenly been called
forth to perform tasks for which they were not fit, that the mob had
celebrated the dawn of the new liberty by the murder of perfectly
innocent persons. He had failed to see the honest enthusiasm of the
masses, the ray of hope in the eyes of women and children who carried
bread and water to the ragged troops of the Convention, marching through
the city on their way to the front and a glorious death for the French
Fatherland.

The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with disgust. It was
uncivilised. If there were any fighting to be done it must be done by
dashing young men in lovely uniforms, charging across the green
fields on well-groomed horses. But to turn an entire country into an
evil-smelling armed camp where tramps were overnight promoted to be
generals, that was both wicked and senseless. "See what came of all your
fine ideas," he would say to the French diplomats whom he met at a quiet
little dinner given by one of the innumerable Austrian grand-dukes. "You
wanted liberty, equality and fraternity and you got Napoleon. How much
better it would have been if you had been contented with the existing
o