THE CONGRESS DANCES

by Susan Mary Alsop ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 27, 1984

Few historic occasions lend themselves more naturally to petticoat history than the 1815 Congress of Vienna, where Tsar Alexander I, Austria's Metternich, Britain's Castlereagh, and France's Talleyrand assembled to reconstruct Europe after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. And where, notoriously, three international beauties--Dorothea de Talleyrand-Perigord, her sister Wilhelmina Sagan, and Catherine Bragation--played prominent roles. Alsop (Lady Sackville, Yankees at the Court) sets the scene over-elaborately but animatedly: the life, character, domestic and diplomatic intrigues of all concerned; the victors' gala entrance into Paris; the truculent, anticlimactic return of Louis XVIII; Alexander's unfortunate visit to England. She is perfectly clear about what was involved--""the complex problem of establishing what Castlereagh called 'a real and permanent balance of power'""--and, in the course of the Congress, she shows how conflicts of interest (between Castlereagh's desire to strenghten the center against east and west and Talleyrand's fear of a strong Prussia, between Metternich and the tsar on Poland) threatened a new war. But her real subject is ""the bizarre interplay between the serious and the frivolous"": Metternich's consuming passion for fickle Wilhelmina Sagan (who contemptuously let Alexander call at M.'s accustomed hour), Alexander's premiere liaison with Catherine Bragation (who occupied half the same house, whose daughter was Metternich's child), Talleyrand's troubling new infatuation with Catherine, his niece-by-marriage and youngest daughter of his longtime mistress, the Duchess of Courland. (On the Courlands generally, this is far superior to Roslaynd C. Pflaum's By Influence and Desire, p. 349.) If this weren't more than enough, Alsop not only recaps events through Napoleon's return from Elba and the aftermath of those Hundred Days, she tells what-happened-after to the three ladies--down to the culinary and literary particulars (Careme's ""salade Bragation"" and ""sauce Bragation,"" Balzac's ""La belle Foedora, la femme de monde"") of Princess Bragation's flamboyant Paris heyday. The last scene is her pitiful final meeting--through his granddaughter's eyes--with Metternich. Head-spinning entertainment for readers of (tasteful) costume fiction.

Pub Date: June 27, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION