Benckendorff and Mlle George
Metternich and Benckendorff, who played leading roles on the European scene, first met under very different circumstances; P.S. Squire describes how they were both attached to a charming French actress.
We did not think in Paris in the year Six, when you were already a very powerful personage and I was trying to imitate you in the pursuit of pleasure, that I should be in your debt for the establishment of my daughter...’1 Thus wrote Count Benckendorff from St. Petersburg to Prince Metternich in Vienna in November 18392 on receiving the latter’s consent to the engagement of his second daughter, Annette, to a junior Austrian diplomat, Count Rudolf Apponyi.
And, indeed, in the momentous opening years of the First Empire, Metternich and Benckendorff could scarcely have foreseen that their widely differing careers and characters were destined some thirty years later to bring them once again into close and repeated contact.
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