MARGINAL - COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
READERS of this page may have observed, and perhaps with irritation, that I am unduly fascinated by the sudden changes which a war of movement brings to accustomed associations and memories. The map of Germany is something much more than a mere cartographical description of a large area in Central Europe ; it is a record of past experience, a book of memoirs, a page of his- tory, a volume of some distant diary. I have spread that map upon an asbestos board discarded from the extreme black-out days and I have affixed it with six neat drawing-pins. From a little saucer I pick out American, Russian, French and British flags, and with a firm penetrating gesture I prick famous place-names until my map bristles with gay pieces of paper like flags at a regatta. Yet always as I insert these pins I am assailed by a sense of strangeness. In goes an American flag, vaunting its stripes and stars, straight into the middle of Baden Baden, and an absurd picture floats across my mind of some simple G.I. unknowingly raising the dust of long- forgotten Archduchesses or of Russian Generals retired with huge fortunes from the Turkish wars. The British flags struggle across the Liineberger Heide, unconscious that once in these lovely wastes the heavy Electors of Hanover would arrange heavy hawking parties with their heavy consorts and mistresses, returning by torchlight to Herrenhausen and heavy bibulous meals. The Russian flags creep on past Semmering, and the mind flashes back to the sight of sala- manders slipping silently among the bilberry bushes in the woods. The French take Stuttgart, and one recalls how, under the trees of the park there Rimbaud had his last quarrel with Verlaine.
* * * *
The other evening, as'I was putting in my pins with accuracy and pleasure, I stuck a pin sharply into Heilbronn in Wurttemberg. I had at first inserted a French flag, but I replaced it later by an American flag, judging that on the whole it was not de Lattre de Tassigny who had seized the little town. But having completed this rectification I paused in perplexity. Heilbronn? Heilbronn?— there was some curious incident connected with the place which escaped my memory. I was aware that it was associated in my mind with some past episode which was at one and the same time amusing, tragic and irritating. How frequently one can recall the tone and colour of the feelings provoked by an event before one remembers the event itself ! As I poised my American pin over Heilbronn. I was perfectly aware of a feeling of anger, amusement and regret ; why should this unusual tangle of associations be pro- duced by Heilbronn? And then I remembered that it was there that Baroness von Kriidener first met the Emperor Alexander I. From that midnight meeting in Wurttemberg came the Holy Alliance, the break-up of the Quadruple Alliance, the dissolution of the Con- cert of Europe and many most unfortunate events. And on recol- lecting these things, and on feeling again my old emotions of rage and hatred against the Baroness, I planted the American flag very firmly in Heilbronn, hoping that by its very firmness it would prevent any such nonsense happening to the world again. For whatever one might feel about Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta or the prospects of San Francisco, nothing like Heilbronn could or would happen now. And in the mood of charity thus begotten I started asking myself whether Baroness von Krudener was really as ghastly, or the Heilbronn meeting really as important, as I used to think.
* * * *
Barbe Julie Wietinghoff was a Latvian girl of extreme egoism and a most unprepossessing appearance. Even her admirers admitted that she had " a large nose and an uncertain complexion," and from the flattering portrait of Angelica Kauffman one derives the im- pression that she had a silly, shambling face. Her selfishness, moreover, must have been early apparent from the fact that she was always late for meals ; it comes as no surprise that a woman as unpunctual as she was should have abandoned her worthy husband except when she wanted him, or have pleaded a delicate constitution when duty rather than pleasure claimed her time. Her first conver- sion took place one afternoon et Riga, when a young man of het acquaintance succumbed to a heart attack after taking off his hat tc her in the street ; that convinced her of the mutability of all human affairs. Her conviction that she was in some special sense marked out for the favour of Providence arose when a sudden bout of measles saved her front an undesired engagement. During her early married life with the estimable, if conventional, Russian diplomatist Baron von Kriidener, she seems to have sought rather to accumulate reasons for repentance than to have exploited her early moods of conversion. As her youth faded she became increasingly austere. and, after a short but horrid phase of being " une femme incomprise,' she devoted her really astounding gift for self-advertisement to the difficult task of rendering herself the literary rival of Madame de Stael. Her novel Valerie did in fact have a certain success, but finding that her literary repute was doomed to be momentary, she decided to devote her talents to the eternal verities. It was thus that she became the Aimee Macpherson of her age. " Everything," she proclaimed, "demands some charlatanism." And it must be agreed that the jumble she thereafter made of pietism, mysticism and histrionics was a shameful jumble.
* * One must admit in favour of the Baroness von Kriidener that her central conviction was sincere. She really did believe that the Russians were the chosen race who, under a divinely designated
Tsar, were destined to regenerate mankind. To her they were " a people dear in the sight of the Almighty . . . a simple people win had not drunk of the cup of iniquity." The Emperor Alexander to her was " the Elect of God." " He walks," she wrote, " in the path of renunciation. The Almighty summoned him ; he was obedient to His call." It is not surprising that the Tsar, when informed of these opinions, should have come to the conclusion that the Baroness must be' a woman of rare insight. And thus when, at midnight on June 4th, 1815, she burst into his sitting-room at the inn at Heilbronn, abjuring him to repent his sins in order to fulfil his destiny, the Emperor Alexander was much impressed. She had arrived at a moment when he was feeling unsuccessful, and therefore attuned to mysticism. Against the advice of his allies he had insisted on sending Napoleon to Elba, and Napoleon, as they had warned him. had escaped ; it was not he who, on that June 4th, 1815, would control the situation, but Wellington and Blucher. It was a humilia- ting thought that the Russian armies and their Emperor would now arrive too late. And, feeling out of it in a distant inn at Heilbronn, it was-comforting to be assured by this haggard but obviously prophetic lady that the destiny of the future lay in his own divinely chosen hands.
* * * * From that interview at Heilbronn was born the Holy Alliance. It was not, as she subsequently allowed it to appear, Baroness von
Kriidener who actually drafted that unhappy document ; she may have invented the title, and she certainly inspired the mood in which the idea was born. For it was she who suggested to the Tsar that in the realms of mysticism he could recover the influence which other and more materially minded people had filched from him at Waterloo. The apotheosis of the Baroness was deferred till September loth, when, on the plains of Vertus and in the presence of the allied Sovereigns and generals, Alexander presented her to his armies as " the Ambassadress of heaven." Clad in blue serge and with a simple straw hat in her hand, she -passed from altar to altar among the assembled troops, making wild gestures of prophecy and virtue. That was her finest hour. It may have been that she overdid her ecstasy ; it may have been that she claimed too readily to have been the authoress of the Holy Alliance ; but from that moment Alexander's friendship cooled. The Baroness was driven thereafter from place to place by the creditors and police of gale and Baden ; and, in the end, she returned to Latvia, living on the memory of that wild night of triumph in the inn at Heilbronn 'El Wurttemberg.
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