Political Passion

THE PRIVATE LETTERS OF BKINCESS LIEVEN -- Edited by Peter Quennell -- Dutton ($3.75).

To their contemporaries, the surprising thing about the marriage of Prince and Princess Lieven was that it lasted for almost 40 years. Russian Ambassador to England after the Napoleonic wars, Lieven was an upright, punctilious, short-sighted wittol whose portrait makes him look like an aristocratic Andy Gump. Dorothea, his wife, was "the most feared, most flattered, worst hated female politician of her day." Because Dorothea was known to be the mistress of Metternich, and because she was on very intimate terms with the Duke of Wellington, George IV, Tsar Alexander, Lord Castlereagh, many others, cynics assumed that her marriage was one of expediency. But when her private letters were released by her family last year, it was learned that even her husband loved her. "He appears to have suffered deeply," says Peter Quennell, "both from his wife's indifference ... and from the extravagance with which she dispensed sums of money he had often been at some pains to scrape together."

Last week Dorothea was belatedly punished for her sins when 376 pages of her private letters to Metternich were published for the edification of the general public that she despised. She wrote him almost every day for eight years, giving information about English and Russian politics, scandals and her own repeated triumphs, and acting in general as Metternich's spy. She was so powerful that it was said Austria had two ambassadors in London, the official one and Dorothea. Dorothea and Metternich so wangled state affairs that they were able to meet on three occasions, but when Metternich remarried in 1827 their relationship ("already injured by differences of opinion on Near Eastern politics") was broken off.

Dorothea's life was a matter of going to dull parties, visiting the King at Brighton, picking up scraps of gossip, nattering the King's fat mistress, patching up quarrels between, Austrian supporters, suffering boredom, nervousness, tantrums and fears of revolution, then making fun of everybody and everything to Metternich. Because she did so with a mixture of malice, snobbishness, impatience, heartlessness and occasional humdrum housewifely humor, her private letters make a lively book, packed with characterizations that, a novelist could envy. Thus she describes the conversation of her diplomatic rival, the clumsy, ill-favored wife of the Austrian Ambassador: "Do you know the kind of woman who always wants to be the centre of social interest? She is afraid of mice, she loves cats, she tumbles down, she burns herself, she upsets her tea on her dress--all this happened in her house the other day. . . . Still, these are graceful blunders. The most serious seems to me to be--talking sentiment. I find it much more natural for her to fall down on a perfectly smooth carpet." Witty as Dorothea was, by the time they have finished her private letters most readers will be able to understand why, after eight years of them, Metternich suddenly threw her over and married a young girl not half so aristocratic nor half so harsh.

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