My own academic specialty was limited to Vienna between 1765–1790, under the reign of Emperor Joseph II, but that’s a deeply depressing historical arc for any modern historian to watch, as the “Enlightened Emperor” was persuaded by Pergen into authorizing all the (non-magical) actions described in this book, including nighttime raids on “radical” printers, the smashing of their printing presses, burning of their shops, arrests, beatings, and disappearances. Emperor Leopold, Joseph’s brother, immediately dismissed Pergen and abolished the secret police after Joseph’s death, but when Leopold’s son Francis took the reins only a year later, Pergen came into full power … and a city where politics had been freely debated in the famous coffee houses for years became a place where people were terrified to express any political opinions for fear of being reported to the secret police by their many informants.
Francis’s paranoia, his general personality, and his relationships with his uncle Joseph and with Pergen are all described as accurately as possible in this book … with the obvious proviso that in real life, of course (I assume!), no alchemy was involved, and Baron von Hager was the true leader of the secret police by the time of the Congress of Vienna, rather than merely serving as Pergen’s proxy. As well as monitoring all the prominent visitors to the Congress, Von Hager’s informants scoured the visitors’ fireplaces and rubbish, searching for any incriminating information, and the secret police delivered daily reports to the emperor, exactly as described in this book.
Caroline, Michael, and Peter are all fictional characters, but Michael’s former mentor, Count Cagliostro, was very real, and all the various cons mentioned in Michael’s backstory were based on actual cons that were successfully performed by various charming and persuasive con-men across Europe in the late eighteenth century. I created the principality of Kernova in the long tradition of imaginary Eastern European kingdoms that hearkens back toThe Prisoner of Zenda, but all of the other political maneuvering described in this book really did happen at the Congress of Vienna, including the Polish Question and Talleyrand’s brilliant and successful disruption of the Great Powers’ original plans to leave France out of any decision-making. (In real life, of course, he used different methods of persuasion than those described in the climax of this book.)
The Prince de Ligne was a real and fascinating person, as was Princess Bagration, and as were all the other royals and political figures described in this book except for Marie Rothmere and her husband. The Comte de La Garde-Chambonas was also real, and he wrote an entertaining and opinionated memoir of the Congress (translated into English as Anecdotal Recollections of the Congress of Vienna)that I found incredibly useful in my research. You can buy the book in paper, or you can find it digitized online in various historical archives, along with many other memoirs and letters written by visitors from across the Continent, all competing to give their own spin on Vienna and the famous Congress.
If you’d like to read more, and you want a vivid and colorful introduction to the Congress, its various personalities, and its political wrangling, Harold Nicolson’s The Congress of Vienna is a fabulously fun place to start. And finally, if you’d like to find out more about the Prince de Ligne, there’s a wonderful biography of him that I’d strongly recommend: Prince of Europe: The Life of Charles-Joseph de Ligne, by Philip Mansel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you so much to everyone who critiqued all or part of Congress of Secrets for me: Patrick Samphire, Justina Robson, Lisa Mantchev, David Burgis, Sarah Prineas, Jenn Reese, and Leah Cutter. I really appreciate your help!
Thank you so much to Patrick Samphire and Ben Burgis for reading first-draft chapters as I wrote them and cheering me along. Thank you to Justina Robson for saying at a crucial moment: Send it! And thank you to David Burgis for sharing my obsession with Habsburg history and trading wonderful research books with me over the years.
I owe an enormous thank-you to my parents, Richard and Kathy Burgis, for making it possible to edit this book at the same time as moving house. I genuinely could not have done it without you! And thank you so much to my husband, Patrick Samphire, for taking time in the middle of that house move to read and critique this book yet again. I appreciated it so much.
Thank you so much to my wonderful editor, Rene Sears, for believing in this book, and for helping me to make it stronger. Thank you to Lisa Michalski, my fabulous publicist at Pyr, and to Nicole Sommer-Lecht, who has created such beautiful covers for my books. Thank you to Sheila Stewart for the careful copyediting that’s saved me from my own mistakes so many times, and a huge thank you to my agent, Molly Ker Hawn, for representing this book so beautifully. I can’t imagine any better partner in publishing! I definitely owe you lots of chocolate.
Chocolate is also owed, along with profuse thanks, to Carly Silver, research goddess, who answered my last-minute cry for help on a particular historical detail and came up with the right answer within minutes. My book and I both thank you!
This is going back quite a way, but still, it really does have to be said: I am so grateful to the Fulbright Commission for sending me to spend a year at the University of Vienna, where I fell even more in (complicated) love with the city, after spending a six-month exchange program there two years earlier; and to my late grandfather, Emil Bauman, who encouraged me to go to Vienna in the first place, and who passed on his own Austro-Croatian father’s deep love of the city. That particular branch of my family may have had to flee Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century, but the emotional connection has held strong across the generations.
And, of course, I am deeply grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council here in the UK for supporting me in a two-week research trip back to Vienna, years later. I was meant, at the time, to be researching a doctoral thesis on Viennese opera and politics, and I promise that I really did do that research, in lovely long hours spent every day in the National Music Library, with the smell of lilacs floating in through the open windows … but in my off-hours, I wandered the streets of Vienna’s first district and planned out the staging of this book with deep pleasure. Thank you so much for giving me that opportunity!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Patrick Samphire
Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and was a Fulbright scholar in Vienna, Austria, where she studied music history, attended the opera as often as possible, and ate far too much apple strudel. After spending three years as a doctoral student studying the opera and politics of eighteenth-century Vienna and Eszterháza, she moved into the more practical side of opera studies by going to work for an opera company in the north of England. Nowadays, she lives in a small town in Wales, surrounded by castles and coffee shops, with her husband, fellow writer Patrick Samphire, and their two sons. She is also the author of Masks and Shadows, as well as the Kat, Incorrigible trilogy and over thirty short stories in various magazines and anthologies. You can find out more at her website: www.stephanieburgis.com.
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