one of those citations had already done duty two days previously at the Prince de Hardenberg’s. When we went into the drawing-room, a good many distinguished personages were already there. In fact, to see this forgathering of the majority of the members of the Corps Diplomatique grouping themselves around M. de Talleyrand, the supposition would have been pardonable that his residence was the _locale_ of the Congress. Mme. la Comtesse de Périgord received her relative’s guests with a charming grace. Her brilliant and playful intellect tempered from time to time the gravity of the political matter gliding into the conversation. There was, however, this difference: under M. de Talleyrand’s roof the discussion was ever serious, and never deviated from its aim; while in the other drawing-rooms of Vienna, politics were treated as an accessory, and in an airy fashion, during the rare intervals not devoted to pleasure. On the evening in question, Saxony was once more the subject of the conversation. Louis XVIII. had declared himself strongly opposed to the maintenance of Frederick-Augustus on its throne. He wished that prince to be punished with the loss of his kingdom for his faithful support of Napoleon. The utmost Louis would concede was the restricted sovereignty of Frederick-Augustus over some small patch of territory on the left bank of the Rhine. The execution of that plan would have involved the incorporation of the whole of the Saxon States with Prussia. The latter Power claimed them energetically as a compensation guaranteed to it by the Treaty of Kalisch. Alexander, who at that time was nursing the idea of a kingdom of Poland comprising the Polish provinces that had formerly lapsed to Prussia, had pronounced in favour of that incorporation. Austria, however, looked askance at this scheme of aggrandisement, while the minor German princes were positively afraid of such a spoliation, which seemed to them the precursor of their destruction. M. de Talleyrand, on the other hand, sided with Saxony, sustaining its rights on every possible opportunity with as much dignity as healthy logic.