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Marie was soon joined in Vienna by the potentates and grifters of Europe as her father Emperor Franz and Chancellor Metternich presided over a congress to reorganize the continent. ‘When I arrived yesterday,’ wrote Metternich, ‘I found all Europe in my antechamber.’ The congress was the world’s biggest junket, a diplomatic summit, an interminable ball, a social carousel, a feast of gourmandism, a VD-infested super-brothel, attended by Alexander, Wellington, Talleyrand and hundreds of diplomats, spies, bankers, mountebanks and panders, as well as thousands of prostitutes and 18,000 members of the public, with a soundtrack by Beethoven: his ‘Wellington’s Victory’ was its anthem. It opened with a ball at the Hofburg for 10,000 guests.^*

Yet there were a hints of a new age. One of the favourite salons, attended by Metternich, Wellington and Talleyrand, was held by a sophisticated banker’s wife, Fanny von Arnstein, who was Jewish – a first for a salonnière. Metternich created one of the first secret-police bureaucracies to watch the players: these were soon essential tools of statehood. Baron Franz von Hager’s Oberste Polizei und Zensur Hofstelle employed an army of spies from princesses to the Grabennymphen, prostitutes of the streets: daily rapporte were presented to kaiser and chancellor. Metternich’s other indispensable aide was his publicist, Friedrich von Gentz. ‘The greatest evil is the press,’ Metternich told Gentz. But mass politics was on the threshold of the palace.

The exhausted grandees restored what they regarded as balance: the Habsburgs headed a German Confederation and secured northern Italy; the Romanovs were restored in Poland, the Bourbons in France; and outside Europe, Britain kept Cape Colony, and slave trading was abolished in the northern hemisphere.^* Just after the treaty was finally signed, the magnates received astonishing news.

In February 1815 Napoleon, infuriated by the failure to pay his pension and the diverting of Marie, escaped from Elba, rallied his veterans, who flocked to his banner unmoved by the fat, arrogant Louis XVIII, and retook Paris. He was at once declared ‘a disturber of the world’. He advanced into Belgium to knock out the Anglo-Prussians before the Austro-Russians arrived. He started well. ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God,’ said Wellington, leaving Vienna to take command. On 18 June, at Waterloo, Napoleon, now forty-five, pot-bellied, dog-tired and haemorrhoidally aggravated,^* failed to master the battle and lost 25,000 men – more than at any other battle except Borodino.^* ‘A damned close-run thing,’ said Wellington.

Nathan Rothschild heard of Waterloo before Lord Liverpool, benefiting from his own intelligence network, but contrary to the myth that the Rothschilds made a fortune with the information, the quick victory wrongfooted him, exposing his holdings, just as the closing of the great French war ended his subsidy-delivery business. ‘I feel my spirits very low,’ Nathan told this brother Carl two weeks later. Their brother Salomon raised funds for Kaiser Franz and lent cash to Metternich (codenamed Uncle). Metternich was the first statesman to dine regularly with Jews chez Rothschild. In 1816, Emperor Franz elevated the brothers to the nobility, awarding the title baron, though he joked pointedly that they were ‘richer than I am’. Carl in Naples was advising the ex-empress Marie Louise; Amschel in Frankfurt covered Prussia; Nathan, ascetic and intense, directed the family from London.

The pleasures of family were their real treasure. ‘After dinner, I usually have nothing to do,’ Nathan wrote to Saloman in Vienna. ‘I don’t read books, I don’t play cards … My only pleasure is my business and in this way I read Amschel’s, Salomon’s, James’s and Carl’s letters.’ In 1806, Nathan had married a Dutch merchant’s daughter, Hannah Barent Cohen,^* with whom he had seven children and who described him as her ‘best friend’. Her sister Judith married an Italian immigrant, Moses Montefiore, a Sephardi banker, who lived next to Nathan and above the bullion business in St Swithin’s Lane in the City of London. They shared family and business, and increasingly collaborated in campaigns for Jewish rights and liberal reforms.

Nathan was expert at making bets on the future. ‘Mr Rothschild has been a very useful friend,’ said Liverpool, who was capable enough to remain prime minister for over fourteen years.^* The wars cost Britain much in blood and treasure, but ultimately they slowed the European economy – over three million died – but quickened the British. The war was the engine that drove British growth. And the Rothschilds provided the fuel: capital.