At this period, the Austrian armies had marched into Italy against Murat and the Neapolitans, and General Bianchi had obtained the most brilliant victories over the wavering and ill-organised troops of Joachim. Metternich caused all the fortresses of the kingdom of Naples and the Roman States to be garrisoned by Austrian troops; for he had decided, in concert with the French legation, upon the re-establishment of the House of Bourbon at Naples as completing the scheme of the government of Europe.
While Fouché was negotiating with Metternich a plan for substituting the regency under Maria Louisa to the empire, organised as it had been during the hundred days, French agents were contriving means of carrying off the child who had been saluted in his cradle with the title of King of Rome. A great deal of mystification went on in all this; there was even one of these gentlemen, otherwise, too, a man in good society, who received a large sum of money, but who had in reality no other object than that of joining M. de Talleyrand at Vienna. Napoleon had promised that his wife and son would be present at the Champ de Mai, but Metternich's police baffled the intentions of the French agents, and, with the politeness which characterises all his actions, the minister conducted the daughter of the emperor and the Duke de Reichstadt to the palace of Schönbrunn, under an escort of the most trustworthy servants of the house of Austria. It was one of the most delicate circumstances that occurred during the life of Metternich, a man, too, always remarkable for his attention to propriety; for Maria Louisa did not at that time feel the cold indifference for Napoleon which she afterwards exhibited, and she was a party to the project formed for carrying her off, by some attendants who had remained with her, but who now all received an order to quit Schönbrunn.
The Austrian armies proceeded from Italy across the Alps, and took a part in the melancholy invasion of the south of France; they afterwards occupied Provence and Languedoc as far as Auvergne, their head-quarters being at Lyons and Dijon. On the dissolution of the Congress of Vienna, after the second fall of Napoleon, Metternich repaired to Paris, to be present at the conferences which were to precede the treaty of November 1815. Prussia and England had been victorious at Waterloo, and their interest had proportionally increased. In the negotiations of Paris, the two cabinets of Berlin and Vienna acted in concert to represent the interests of Germany, which were very hostile to the French nation. The German population had been greatly irritated during the gigantic efforts that Europe had made against Napoleon; the secondary princes on the banks of the Rhine demanded Alsace and a portion of Lorraine, marked upon a map drawn in 1815 (which now lies before me), under the name of Germania, as the representation of Germany. There was a terrible reaction in that country against France, one of those refluxes of the people and the national feeling by which various periods of our history have been distinguished.