Although Viennese waltzes had begun to gain popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and many composers had written such pieces, the music Duport played was not the sort of ornament people could treat as background noise.
Everyone held a drink and stood around him. Georgiana had one too, standing with Bonaparte in a corner.
She could feel people appraising her even with the back of her head.
Fine, all that talk of dumping tea and coffee was a joke. After the Seven Years' War ended, Americans simply felt the French no longer posed a threat, so they no longer wished to pay taxes to England.
As she watched Duport play, she imagined Frederick the Great listening to him at the Palace of No Worries and could not help comparing it with what was before her.
The alliance between France and the Ottoman Empire had existed since François I. It had then been called the "Union of the Lily and the Crescent," though other countries preferred to call it the Sacrilegious League. It began when François was defeated and captured at the Battle of Pavia, after which Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire imposed harsh terms.
François agreed, then quickly went back on his word. Relations between the two countries rapidly deteriorated. Charles V loudly demanded a duel with François I, but François refused, and his reputation among the knightly kingdoms was utterly ruined.
France and the Holy Roman Empire reconciled through the Treaty of the Ladies at Cambrai, signed through Margaret of Austria. Soon afterward, François I formed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire.
After the Eastern Roman Empire fell in 1453 and Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, Hungary became the front line against the Ottomans. Once Hungary could no longer hold, Vienna would be besieged. In