$6 Nineteenth Century Peace Congresses
clever, and gouty king a true representative of kingly hero-
ism. The age of Napoleon seemed a time full of sound and
fury. Men remembered how in the spring of 1813 the peas-
ants of two provinces of Russia had gathered up the bodies
of more than ninety thousand men which had been lying all
winter unburied in the snow. The past alone had healing
for the wounds of the present.
The idea of legitimacy, of which Talleyrand was the
author, and which he used so cleverly for his own purposes,
was readily accepted by Metternich as the exact statement
of his own most profound convictions. To Talleyrand it
was a weapon which might well serve his ends and then be
modified and even discarded without a tear. But to Metter-
nich it was an abiding principle of action from which he
never consciously swerved and which he believed in just as
truly when, many years later, it drove him in flight from
Vienna, as he did when it was first declared as the funda-
mental policy of the Congress of Vienna. “I do not know
how to compromise,” he wrote in 1848 to Nicholas of
Russia, and his whole career was a commentary on this
statement. If loyalty and sincerity are the supreme ethical
qualities, then Metternich was a virtuous man. In a spirit
of perfect consistency he later framed the doctrine of inter-
vention which sent an Austrian army to restore Ferdinand
of Naples to his absolute authority, and a French army
across the Pyrenees into Spain to put down revolution there.
This same idea of legitimacy also made Metternich unwill-
ing to have anything to do with the rising rebellion in Greece
which was to begin the dismemberment of the Turkish em-
pire and to introduce the so-called Eastern Question into the
deliberations of Europe.
But this principle as it was first explained by Talleyrand
to Alexander in Paris was not necessarily the wholly