Whenever the carriage stopped, the popular idol harangued the crowd and impressed on them the necessity of respecting persons and property; he entreated of them, as they professed so much love for him, to give him the most striking proof that they could of it, by always doing their duty. Madame de Staël says that her father was fully aware of the fleeting nature of popularity; and, under these circumstances, one wonders that he took the trouble, in such a crisis, to make so many speeches. But it is probable that the intoxication of praise was a little too much for him; and he had at all times the sacerdotal tendency to preach.
At ten leagues from Paris, news was brought to the travellers that De Besenval had been arrested by order of the Commune, and was to be taken to the capital, where he would, said the pessimists, be infallibly torn to pieces by the populace. M. Necker, entreated to intervene, took upon himself to rescind the order of the Commune, and promised to obtain the sanction of the authorities to his act.
On arriving in Paris, consequently, his first care was to proceed, in company with his family, to the Hôtel de Ville. The streets, the roofs, the windows of every house were densely thronged. Cries of “Vive Necker!” rent the air, as the redeemer of the country appeared on a balcony and began his discourse.
He demanded the amnesty of De Besenval and of all those who shared De Besenval’s opinion. This extensive programme committed all those who accepted it to a reactionary policy, since to pardon the people’s enemies unconditionally was to condone, and in a measure to sanction their crimes.
But no such considerations presented themselves at that moment to impair Necker’s triumph. The popular enthusiasm accorded him what he asked; fresh thunders of applause broke forth, and Madame de Staël, overcome with emotion, fainted.
CHAPTER V.
MADAME DE STAËL IS COURAGEOUS FOR HER
FRIENDS.
Necker’s victory over the rage of the populace was a fleeting one. He had, indeed, overstepped the prerogatives of a Minister in asking for the amnesty. Misled by the elation of his gratified vanity and the impulse of his benevolent heart, he, an ardent defender of order, forgot that in placing himself between the Assembly and King on the one hand and the people on the other, he practically recognized the right of a faction to act without the consent of the Government. It was for the latter to reverse the decree of the Commune and not for the electors of Paris.
His dream of smiling peace installed by his hand on the ruins of the Revolution was rudely and rapidly dispelled. Madame de Staël sorrowfully records that on the very evening of that glorious day the amnesty was retracted, and ascribes this result in great part to the influence of Mirabeau. But, in truth, a very little reflection must have sufficed to convince anybody that the utopian demands of Necker were singularly misplaced. The very electors who had acceded to them asserted that all they had ever intended was to shield the arrested royalists from the fury of the populace, but in no sense from the action of justice. The Assembly confirmed this view, and from that moment Necker’s influence was practically gone. It was proved to be a bubble; and his triumph, respectable as were some of the motives which had urged him to invoke it, became ludicrous when contrasted with the stern and tragic realities of the moment. This Madame de Staël did not, could not see. She was fain to console herself with the compassionate reflection that, after all, De Besenval—an old man—was saved.
She narrates with dolorous pride the efforts honestly, courageously, and to a certain degree successfully, made by her father, during fifteen months, to avert the disaster of famine; and innocently appeals to them against the failure as a statesman, to which she resolutely shuts her eyes.
One measure after another opposed by Necker was voted—the confiscation of the property of the clergy, the suppression of titles of nobility, and the emission of assignats. No popularity could have resisted such successive blows; and Necker was popular no longer. Still, Madame de Staël touchingly begs the world, in her writings, not to allow itself to be turned from the paths of virtue by the spectacle of a good man so persecuted by fate. She claims our admiration for a series of quixotic acts, and is perpetually insisting on the amazing magnanimity which would not allow her father to become base because he had ceased to be useful.
Thoroughly discouraged at last (perhaps partly convinced that to preach kindness to savages, and self-abnegation to the vile, was a task to be resumed in better times) Necker tendered his resignation, and had the mortification of seeing it accepted with perfect indifference both by the Assembly and the King.
Before leaving Paris forever, he deposited in the royal treasury two millions of his own property. The exact object of this munificence is not clear; even Madame de Staël failed to explain it on any practical grounds. But she admired it extremely, and so may we.
The journey with the terrified and suffering Madame Necker to Switzerland was a great contrast to the return in the previous year to Paris. Then it had been “roses, roses all the way”; now it was nothing but insults. At Arcis-sur-Aube the carriage was stopped by an infuriated crowd, who accused M. Necker of having betrayed the cause of the people in the interests of the emigrant nobles. The accusation was an absurd one, since he had only endeavored to be superhumanly kind to everybody. He had wished to preserve the people from crimes and starvation, the clergy from ruin, and the emigrant nobles from detection, and this was the result. It was hard, but inevitable, and as there were many worse fates than M. Necker’s in those days one cannot quite free oneself from a feeling of impatience at Madame de Staël’s perpetual lamentations over the inconceivable hardships of her parent’s lot.
We now approach an episode in Madame de Staël’s life which it is necessary to touch on with discretion. This is her connection with the Count Louis de Narbonne. The stories circulated in regard to them are familiar to all readers of Madame d’Arblay’s memoirs. Dr. Burney thought himself in duty bound to warn his little Fanny against her growing adoration for Necker’s great, but, according to him, not blameless daughter, who, during her stay at Mickleham, exerted herself to win the friendship of the author of Cecilia. Fanny, as we know, was at first greatly shocked, and completely incredulous. She described Madame de Staël as loving M. de Narbonne tenderly, but so openly, and in a manner so devoid of coquetry, that friendship between two men, in her opinion, could hardly be differently manifested. But the seed of suspicion once cast in the little prude’s mind, quickly germinated, and led eventually to a total cessation of her acquaintance with the woman whose brilliancy and goodness had so fascinated her. This is not the place in which to discuss Fanny’s conduct; but was the information on which she based it correct? Who shall say? Madame de Staël was extremely imprudent, and she seems to have been dangerously near to loving a number of men.
Miss Berry, in her memoirs, accuses her of a “passion” for Talleyrand, and spoke as though concluding it to be a theme of common gossip. She certainly liked to absorb a great deal of her friends’ affection, and was avowedly displeased when they married. Her sentiments towards Baron de Staël, full of a sweet and fresh cordiality at first, seems rapidly to have changed to aversion. As far as it is possible to judge, she unhesitatingly sacrificed him on all occasions to her filial love or her intellectual aims. When he was in Paris she left him in order to console M. Necker in his mournful retirement at Coppet. When he was at Coppet she remained in Paris, there to form and electrify a constitutional salon. Various anecdotes attest to the scandal uttered about her, and the truth of some of these stories admits of little doubt. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that detraction is ever busiest with the greatest names; that Madame de Staël, always preoccupied with her subject and never with herself, irritated the nerves and stirred the bile of inferior people who were proportionately gratified to hear her attacked; and that she lived in the midst of a society where conjugal fidelity was rare enough to be hardly believed in. Countless passages in her writings prove how exalted was her ideal of family life; and if they also prove her constant, restless yearning after some unattained, unattainable good, there is at least no sign of the satiety of exhausted emotion in them. Let us be content, then, that in many instances a veil should hide from us the deeper recesses of Madame de Staël’s heart. Grant that there were two Germaines—one her father’s daughter, lofty-minded, pure, catching the infection of exalted feelings, and incapable of error; the other her husband’s wife, thrust into the fiery circle of human passion, thence to emerge a little scorched and harmed. The hidden centre of that dual self cannot be revealed to us; but what we do know is sometimes so grand and always so great that we can afford to be indulgent when reduced to conjecture.
In 1791, after having paid a visit of condolence to her father at Coppet, Madame de Staël had returned to Paris, and made her salon the rallying-point for the most distinguished Constitutionels. Conspicuous among these, in principles although not in name, was De Narbonne, described by Madame de Staël herself as “Grand seigneur, homme d’esprit, courtisan et philosophe.” He was a brilliant, an enlightened, a generous and charming man. His sympathies were liberal; it would have been too much to expect from him that they should be subversive. He had been brought up in the enervating atmosphere of the Court, yet had adopted many of the new ideas. After having accomplished the difficult and perilous enterprise of escorting the King’s aunts to Rome, and establishing them under the roof of the Cardinal de Bernis, he returned to Paris and ranged himself on the side of the Constitution. His soldier-soul (he was an extremely gallant officer) would not allow of his going any farther along the facile descent of change. The King’s abortive attempt at escape and subsequent imprisonment in the Tuileries restored to Narbonne all the fervor which his allegiance as a courtier might originally have lacked. But he was a very intelligent man, so much so, that Napoleon himself years later rendered justice to his sagacity. He had serious tastes and a great love of knowledge, and was almost as witty as Talleyrand himself. He was made Minister of War in December, 1791, and the general impression prevailed that Madame de Staël’s influence had contributed to his appointment. He was young and full of hope, and proposed to himself the impossible task of encouraging the action of the Assembly at the same time as he sought to reconstruct the popularity of the King. He also exerted himself to prepare France for resistance to the armies of foreign invaders; visited the frontier; reported the state of things there to the Assembly; provisioned the forts; re-established garrisons, and organized three armies. But what he could not do was to inspire anybody with confidence in himself. “Too black for heaven, too white for hell,” he could neither rise to the sublime ineptitude of deluded royalism nor sink to the brutal logic of facts. Curtly dismissed by the King, at the end of three months, on resigning the portfolio he resumed the sword.
To defend his ungrateful sovereign was his religion, since, in spite of his talents, he did not reach the point of perceiving that there is a moment in the history of every nation when individuals must be sacrificed to principles. Perhaps this preoccupation of minds, naturally enlightened, with merely personal issues is the real key to all that was tragically mysterious in the Revolution. Madame de Staël herself deplored the fate of the King and Queen with precisely the same wealth of compassion that she would have expressed on the occasion of some catastrophe involving hundreds of obscure lives. It seemed as though only such sanguinary monomaniacs as Robespierre or St. Just, only such corrupt and colossal natures as Mirabeau or Danton, could look below the accidental circumstances of an event to its enduring elements. All that was morally and vitally, as distinguished from mentally and potentially, best in France threw itself into passionate defence of persons; while all that was strong, original, consistent, was drawn into the fatal policy of blood.
A few months after Narbonne’s fall, Madame de Staël endeavored to associate him in a plan which her pity had suggested to her for the escape of the Royal Family. She wished to buy a property that was for sale near Dieppe. Thus furnished with a pretext for visiting the coast, she proposed to make three journeys thither. On the first two occasions she was to be accompanied by her eldest son, who was the age of the Dauphin, by a man resembling the King in height and general appearance, and by two women sufficiently like the Queen and Madame Elisabeth. In her third journey she would have left the original party behind and taken with her the whole of the Royal Family. But the King and Queen refused to co-operate in this romantic and courageous plan. Their motives were not unselfish. Louis XVI. objected to Narbonne’s share in the scheme; and Marie Antoinette, who regarded the double representation of the Tiers Etat as the cause of all her woes, detested Necker’s daughter.
When the Tuileries was invaded by the mob, M. Necker, who was already at Coppet, and knew that the Baron de Staël had been recalled to Sweden, wrote urging his daughter to join him. But she was chained to Paris, fascinated by the very scenes that revolted her, and anxious to intervene if only to save. She assisted, with slender sympathy for the revolutionaries, at the celebration of the 14th July in the Champs de Mars, and was wrung with pity for the tear-stained countenance of the Queen, whose magnificent toilet and dignified bearing contrasted with the squalor of her cortège. Madame de Staël’s eyes were fixed with longing compassion on the figure of the King as he ascended the steps of the altar, there to swear for the second time to preserve the Constitution. His powdered head, so lately desecrated by the bonnet rouge, and gold-embroidered coat struck her imagination painfully as the vain symbols of vanished ease and splendor.
Then came the terrible night of the 9th August, during which, from midnight to morning, the tocsins never ceased sounding. “I was at my window with some of my friends” (wrote Madame de Staël), “and every fifteen minutes the volunteer patrol of the Constitutionels brought us news. We were told that the faubourgs were advancing headed by Santerre the brewer and Westermann.… Nobody could foresee what would happen the next day, and nobody expected to survive it.… All at once (at 7 o’clock) came the terrible sound of cannon. In this first combat the Swiss Guards were victors.”
The tidings—partly false, as afterwards proved—were brought her of the massacre of Lally Tollendal, Narbonne, Montmorency, and others of her friends; and at once, regardless of peril, she went out in her carriage to hear if the news were true. After two hours of fruitless efforts to pass, she learnt that all those in whom she was most interested were still alive, but in hiding; and, as soon as the evening came, she sallied forth once more to visit them in the obscure houses where they had taken refuge. Later, she came to have but one thought, which was to save as many as she could of her friends. They were unwilling at first to take shelter in her house as being too conspicuous; but she would listen to no such objections. Two yielded to her persuasions, and one of these was Narbonne. He was shut up with his companion in the safest room, while the intrepid hostess established herself in the front apartments, and there, in great anxiety, awaited a domiciliary visit from the authorities. They were not long in coming and in demanding M. de Narbonne. To permit a search was practically to deliver up the victim. Madame de Staël’s whole mind was consequently bent on averting investigation.
The police agents were exceptionally ignorant, and of this fact she was quick to take advantage. She began by instilling alarm into them as to the violation of rights which they committed in invading the house of an ambassador, and she followed this up by informing them that Sweden, being on the frontier of France, would descend upon that offending land immediately. She next passed to pleasantries, and succeeded so well in cajoling her visitors that they finally allowed themselves to be gracefully bowed out. Four days later a false passport supplied by a friend of Madame de Staël allowed Narbonne to escape to England.
The Swedish ambassadress herself could easily have left France at any moment, but she lingered on from day to day, unwilling to quit the country while so many of her friends were in danger; and she was rewarded at last by the opportunity of interfering to save Jaucourt, who had been conveyed to the Abbaye—now aptly named “the Ante-chamber of Death.” Madame de Staël knew none of the members of the Commune, but, with her unfailing presence of mind, she remembered that one of them, Manuel, the procureur, had some pretensions to be literary. These pretensions being greater than his talent, Madame de Staël rightly concluded that he possessed sufficient vanity to be moved by solicitation. She wrote to ask for an interview, which was accorded her for the next morning at 7 o’clock in the official’s own house.
“The hour was democratic,” she remarks, but she was careful to be punctual. Her eloquence achieved an easy victory over Manuel, who, unlike so many of his colleagues, was no fanatic; and on the 1st of September he made Madame de Staël happy by writing to inform her that, thanks to his good offices, Jaucourt had been set at liberty.
She now, at last, determined to quit France the next day, but not alone. Resolute to the end in risking her life for that of others, she consented to take the Abbé de Montesquion with her in the disguise of a domestic, and convey him safely into Switzerland. A passport obtained for one of her servants was given to one of his, and a place on the high road indicated as a rendezvous where the Abbé was to join her suite.
When the next morning dawned a fresh element of terror had invaded the public mind. The news of the fall of Longwy and Verdun had arrived and Paris was in effervescence. Again in all the sections the tocsin was sounding; and everybody whose own life was his chief preoccupation kept as quiet as possible. But Madame de Staël could not keep quiet—that was impossible for her at all times—and at this moment the image paramount in her mind was that of the poor Abbé waiting anxiously at his rendezvous—perhaps only to be discovered if his generous deliverer delayed.
Turning a deaf ear to all remonstrance, she started in a travelling-carriage drawn by six horses, and accompanied by her servants in gala livery. This was an unfortunate inspiration. Instead of filling the minds of the vulgar with awe, as she had vainly hoped, it aroused their vigilant suspicions. The carriage had hardly passed under the portals of the hotel before it was surrounded by a furious crowd of old women, “risen from hell,” as Madame de Staël energetically expressed it, who shrieked out that she was carrying away the gold of the nation. This intelligent outcry brought a new contingent of exasperated patriots of both sexes, who ordered the fugitive Ambassadress to be conveyed to the Assembly of the Section nearest at hand.
She did not lose her presence of mind, but on descending from the carriage found an opportunity of bidding the Abbé’s servant rejoin his master and tell him of what had happened. This step proved to be a very dangerous one. The President of the Section informed Madame de Staël that she was accused of seeking to take away proscribed royalists, and that he must proceed to a roll-call of her servants. One of them was missing, naturally, having been despatched to save his own master; and the consequence was a peremptory order to Madame de Staël to proceed to the Hôtel de Ville under charge of a gendarme. Such a command was not calculated to inspire her with any sentiment but fear. Several people had already been massacred on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; and although no woman had yet been sacrificed to popular fury, there was no guarantee for such immunity lasting; and, as a point of fact, the Princess de Lamballe fell the very next day.
Madame de Staël’s passage from the Faubourg Saint Germain to the Hôtel de Ville lasted three hours. Her carriage was led at a foot-pace through an immense crowd, which greeted her with reiterated cries of “Death!” It was not herself they detested, she says, but the evidences of her luxury; for the news of the morning had brought more opprobrium than ever on the execrated name of aristocrat. Fortunately, the gendarme who was inside the carriage was touched by his prisoner’s situation and her delicate condition of health, and her prayers, and promised to do what he could to defend her. By degrees her courage rose. She knew that the worse moment must be that in which she would reach the Place de Grève; but by the time she arrived there aversion for the mob had almost overcome in her every feeling but disdain.
She mounted the steps of the Hôtel de Ville between a double row of pikes, and one man made a movement to strike her. Thanks to the prompt interposition of the friendly gendarme, she was able, however, to reach the presence of Robespierre in safety. The room in which she found him was full of an excited crowd of men, women and children, all emulously shrieking, “Vive la Nation!”
The Swedish Ambassadress was just beginning to protest officially against the treatment she had met with, when Manuel arrived on the scene. Never was any apparition more opportune. Greatly astonished to see his late illustrious visitor in such a position, he promptly undertook to answer for her until the Commune had made up its mind what to do with her; and conveying her and her maid to his own house, shut them up in the same cabinet where Madame de Staël had pleaded for Jaucourt.
There they remained for six hours, “dying of hunger, thirst, and fear.” The windows of the room looked out upon the Place de Grève, and consequently offered the spectacle of bands of yelling murderers returning from the prisons “with bare and bleeding arms.”
Madame de Staël’s travelling carriage had remained in the middle of the square. She expected to see it pillaged; but a man in the uniform of the National Guard came to the rescue and passed two hours in successfully defending the luggage.
This individual turned out to be the redoubtable Santerre. He introduced himself later in the day to Madame de Staël, and took credit for his conduct on the ground of the respect with which M. Necker had inspired him when distributing corn to the starving population of Paris.
In the evening Manuel, pallid with horror at the events of that awful day, took Madame de Staël back to her own house, through streets of which the obscurity was only relieved at moments by the lurid glare of torches. He told her that he had procured a new passport for herself and her maid alone; and that she was to be escorted to the frontier by a gendarme.
The next day Tallien arrived, appointed by the Commune to accompany her to the barriers. Several suspected aristocrats were present when he was announced. Most people under such circumstances would have taken care to be found alone; but Madame de Staël remained undaunted to the end. She simply begged Tallien to be discreet, and he fortunately proved so. A few more difficulties had to be encountered before she was fairly in safety; but at last she reached the pure air and peaceful scenes of the Jura.
CHAPTER VI.
MADAME DE STAËL RETIRES TO COPPET.
Madame de Staël arrived at Coppet about the beginning of September, 1792. The life there, after her recent experiences in Paris, so far from seeming to her one of welcome rest, fretted her ardent spirit almost beyond endurance. She longed to be back in France, even under the shadow of the guillotine, anywhere but in front of the lake, with its inexorable beauty and maddening calm.
“The whole of Switzerland inspires me with magnificent horror,” she wrote to her husband, who was still in Sweden. “Sometimes I think that if I were in Paris with a title which they would be forced to respect, I might be of use to a number of individuals, and with that hope I would brave everything. I perceive, with some pain, that the thing which least suits me in the world is this peaceful and rustic life. I have put down my horses for economy’s sake, and because I feel my solitude less when I do not see anybody.”
By “anybody” it is to be presumed that she meant the good Swiss, whose expressions of horror, doubtless as monotonous as reiterated, must have been irritating to one whose single desire night and day, was to cast herself into the arena, there to combat and to save. One outlet she found for her activity in perpetual plans for enabling her friends, and often her enemies, to escape from Paris.
The scheme which she projected was to find some man or woman, as the case might be, who would enter France with Swiss passports, certificates, etc., and after getting these properly visés, would hand them over to the person who was to be saved.
Nothing could be simpler, Madame de Staël averred; and as she provided money, time, thought, energy, and presumably infected her agents with a little of her own enthusiasm, her efforts were often successful. Among those who engaged her attention were Mathieu de Montmorency, François de Jaucourt, the Princess de Poix and Madame de Simiane.
Among the people whom she saved, and whose rescue she records with the most complacency, is that of young Achille du Chayla. He was a nephew of De Jaucourt’s, and was residing at Coppet under a Swedish name—(M. de Staël had lent himself to many friendly devices of that kind). The news came that Du Chayla, when trying to escape across the frontier under cover of a Swiss passport, had been arrested at a frontier town on suspicion of being what he truly was—a refugee Frenchman. Nevertheless, the authorities declared themselves willing to release him if the Lieutenant Baillival of Nyon would attest that he was Swiss. What was to be done? To bring M. Reverdil, the functionary aforesaid, to such a declaration seemed well-nigh hopeless, and Jaucourt was in despair. His nephew, if once his identity were discovered, had no chance of escape from death; for not only was his name on the list of the suspected ones, but his father actually held a command under Condé’s banner. This was one of the opportunities in which Madame de Staël delighted. Her spirits rose at once in the face of such difficulties. Fortunately, M. Reverdil was an old friend of her family; she believed that she would be able to melt him, and she hurried away to try.
The task was more arduous than she had anticipated. M. Reverdil (by her own confession one of the most enlightened of Swiss magistrates) turned out to have a sturdy conscience and an uncomfortable amount of common sense. He represented to his ardent visitor, first, that he would be wrong in uttering a falsehood for any motive; next, that in his official position he might compromise his country by making a false attestation. “If the truth be discovered,” he urged, “we shall no longer have the right of claiming our own compatriots when arrested in France; and thus I should jeopardize the interest of those who are confided to me for the sake of saving a man towards whom I have no duties.” M. Reverdil’s arguments had “a very plausible side,” Madame de Staël allowed thus much herself; but the good man little knew with whom he had to deal if he thought that such cold justice would have the least effect on his petitioner. She swept all paltry considerations as to the remote danger of unknown, unromantic Swiss burghers to the winds. Her object was to bring back to Jaucourt the assurance of his young nephew’s safety; and from this no abstract principles could turn her.
She remained two hours with M. Reverdil, arguing, entreating, imploring. The task she proposed to herself was, in her own words, “to vanquish his conscience by his humanity.” He remained inflexible for a long while, but his visitor reiterating to him, “If you say No, an only son, a man without reproach, will be assassinated within twenty-four hours, and your simple word will have killed him,” he ultimately succumbed. Madame de Staël says it was his emotion that triumphed; it is just possible that it was sheer physical exhaustion. Madame de Staël was at no time a quiet person to deal with; when excited, as in the present instance, she must have been overpowering.
It was shortly after these events that Madame de Staël visited England, and while there went to Mickleham, there to be introduced to, and for a time to captivate, Fanny Burney. Except Talleyrand, she was the most illustrious of the brilliant band of exiles gathered together at Juniper Hall, and familiar to all readers of the memoirs of Madame d’Arblay and the journal of Mrs. Phillips. It is well known how Fanny withdrew from her intimacy with the future author of Corinne on learning the stories which connected the latter’s name with Narbonne. Mrs. Phillips herself was much more indulgent, and Madame de Staël appears to have felt a grateful liking for her; but it is evident that she was deeply hurt at Fanny’s coldness. The approbation of a nature so narrow could hardly have affected her much, one would think, and yet it is plain that she longed for it—she longed indeed, all her life for such things as she possessed not. She could sacrifice her wishes at all times generously and unregretfully, but she never knew how to bear being denied one of them.
In all the glimpses one obtains of Madame de Staël, in different countries and from different people, she never seems quite so womanly, so imperfect and yet so pathetic, as in these journals of Mrs. Phillips. Perhaps the reason of it is that one divines in her at this time a sentiment which, if erring, was simple and true, while many of her later sorrows gained a kind of factitious grandeur from the train of political circumstances attendant on them. Mrs. Phillips was present when Madame de Staël received the letter which summoned her to rejoin her husband at Coppet, and relates the effect produced upon her. She was most frankly inconsolable, spoke again and again of her sorrow at going, and made endless entreaties to Mrs. Phillips to attend to the wants, spirits and affairs of the friends whom she was leaving. She even charged her with a message of forgiveness for the ungrateful Fanny, and fairly sobbed when parting with Mrs. Folk.
Madame de Staël did not leave Coppet again until after the Revolution. Her life seems to have passed with a monotony that the long drama of horror slowly culminating in Paris rendered tragically sombre. She continued her efforts—every day more difficult of accomplishment and sterile of results—to save her friends and foes; and when the Queen was arraigned, she wrote, in a few days, that eloquent and well-known defence of her which called down upon the writer the applause of every generous heart in Europe.
The Neckers during this period seem to have seen very little society. Gibbon was almost their only friend; and in 1794 he went to England, and a few months later died. The next to go was Madame Necker herself. She had long been ill, and her last few months of life were embittered by cruel pain. She had prepared for her end with the minute and morbid care that might have been expected from her. The tomb at Coppet in which she rests, together with her husband and daughter, was built in conformity with her wishes, and in great part under her eyes. She died on 6th May, 1794. M. Necker felt her death acutely, and for months not even his daughter’s sympathy could console him. Madame Necker had one of those self-tormenting natures which poison the existence of others in embittering their own. Too noble to be slighted, and too exacting to be appeased, they work out the doom of unachieved desires; and when they go to be wrapt in eternal mystery, their parting gift to their loved ones is a vague remorse and doubting. Silent themselves when they might have spoken, they leave an unanswered question in the hearts of their survivors. Monsieur Necker, with his exaggerated consciousness, must have asked himself repeatedly if he had cared for his strange and loving wife enough. Madame de Staël mourned her mother sincerely, but it is clear that the keenest edge of her grief came from contemplation of her father’s.
Three months had not elapsed after Madame Necker’s death when the 9th Thermidor dawned, and at its close, all sanguinary as that appalling termination was, France drew one long sigh of inconceivable relief, for Robespierre had fallen. The Directory followed, and Baron de Staël having been re-nominated to his post, his wife lost no time in hurrying back to Paris. There, true to her indefatigable self, she immediately set about obtaining the eradication of her friends’ names from the list of the proscribed émigrés. From this moment her opinions, and with them her character, underwent a certain change. She had been a moderate royalist; she became avowedly a republican. But her republicanism was of a strangely abstract and eclectic sort, and it was dashed with so many personal leanings towards monarchists that it resulted in nothing better than a spirit of intrigue.
She could not understand that the law, whatever it may be, which governs circumstances, makes no account of individuals. She believed that, by causing Mathieu de Montmorency and Talleyrand to be recalled from exile, and inspiring Benjamin Constant with the loftiest ideals, she could obliterate the blood-stained past and reverse the logic of events. When everybody (everybody, that is, whom she cared about) should have been restored to peace, prosperity, and the air of France, she conceived that the study of metaphysical systems and the cultivation of the affections would alone be needed to re-model and perfect humanity.
With this in view she toiled and plotted unceasingly, clasping the hands of regicides like Barras, rubbing skirts with such women as Tallien, and sacrificing her own pet ideal of womanly duty, which consisted, as she repeatedly proclaimed, in loving and being loved, and leaving the jarring strife of politics to men.
Had she remained in France, she must inevitably have been betrayed into greater inconsistencies still. But, fortunately for her fame, her intellect, and her character, the period was approaching in which Bonaparte’s aversion was to condemn her to a decade of illustrious exile.
CHAPTER VII.
THE TRANSFORMED CAPITAL.
In all its varied story, the world probably never offered a stranger spectacle than that presented by Paris when Madame de Staël returned to it in 1795. The mixture of classes was only equalled by the confusion of opinions, and these, in their turn, were proclaimed by the oddest contrasts in costumes. Muscadins in gray coats and green cravats twirled their canes insolently in the faces of wearers of greasy carmagnoles; while the powdered pigtails of reactionaries announced the aristocratic contempt of their wearers for the close-cropped heads of the Jacobins.
To the squalid orgies in the streets, illuminated by stinking oil-lamps, and varied by the rumble of the tumbrils, had succeeded the salons where Josephine Beauharnais displayed her Creole grace, and Notre Dame de Thermidor sought to wield the social sceptre of decapitated princesses. Already royalism had revived, although furtively, and fans on which the name of the coming King could be read but by initiated eyes, were passed from hand to hand in the cafés of “Coblentz.” A strange light-hearted nervous gayety—intoxicating as champagne—had dissipated the lurid gloom of the Terror; the dumbness of horror had given way to a reckless contempt for tyranny. A sordid, demented mania for speculation had invaded all classes, and refined and delicate women trafficked in pounds of sugar or yards of cloth.
An enormous sensation was produced by Ducancel’s Nouveaux Aristides, ou l’Intérieur des Comités Révolutionnaires, a comedy in which its author distilled into every line the hoarded bitterness of his soul against the Jacobins.
Barras flaunted his cynical sensuality and shameless waste in the face of a bankrupt society; and austere revolutionaries, beguiled into the enervating atmosphere of the gilded salons, sold their principles with a stroke of the same pen that restored some illustrious proscribed one to his family. “Every one of us was soliciting the return of some émigré among his friends,” writes Madame de Staël. “I obtained several recalls at this period; and in consequence the deputy Legendre, almost a man of the people, denounced me from the tribune of the Convention. The influence of women and the power of good society seemed very dangerous to those who were excluded, but whose colleagues were invited to be seduced. One saw on decadis, for Sundays existed no longer, all the elements of the old and new régime united, but not reconciled.”
Into this seething world Madame de Staël threw herself with characteristic activity. Legendre’s attack upon her, foiled by Barras, could not deter her from interference. Her mind being fixed upon some ideal Republic, she was anxious to blot out all record of past intolerance. The prospect of restoring an aristocrat to his home, or of shielding him from fresh dangers, invariably proved irresistible to her. Nevertheless she was quick to perceive and to signalize the folly of the reactionaries; and she felt but scant sympathy with the mad attempt at a monarchical restoration known in history as the 13th Vendémiaire. She uttered no word of palliation for the massacres committed by the Royalists in Lyons and Marseilles, and she was more than willing to admit the benefits conferred on France by the first six months of the Government of the Directory.
But she could not be happy at the continued exclusion of the nobles and clericals, and any appeal from one of them touched her with all the force of old association. Talleyrand had not returned from America when her eloquence induced Chénier to address the Convention in favor of his recall. Montesquion next claimed her attention, and in consequence of all this she became an object of suspicion and was accused of exciting revolt. The Government, indeed, thought her so dangerous that, at one moment, when she was at Coppet, they ordered her to be arrested and brought to Paris, there to be imprisoned. Barras, however, defended her, as she relates, “with warmth and generosity,” and, thanks to him, she was enabled to return, a free agent, to France.
Throughout the events preceding the coup d’État of the 18th Fructidor, Madame de Staël was keenly alive to the danger which threatened and eventually overtook her friends among the Moderates. To act, in these circumstances, was with her a second nature. Her relations with Barras had naturally become very friendly; and she used her influence to obtain the nomination of Talleyrand to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “His nomination was the only part that I took in the crisis preceding the 18th Fructidor, and which I hoped by such means to avert,” she wrote. “One was justified in hoping that the intelligence of M. de Talleyrand would bring about a reconciliation between the two parties. Since then I have not had the least share in the different phases of his political career.”
There is a ring of disappointment in these words; but how could Madame de Staël, with her supposed infallible insight, ever have believed in such a nature?
“It is necessary to serve someone,” was the answer of a noble when reproached for accepting the office of chamberlain to one of Napoleon’s sisters. Madame de Staël records the reply with scorn; but she should, one thinks, have recognized the fibre of just such a man in the Bishop of Autun. The proscription extending on all sides after the 18th Fructidor, Madame de Staël’s intervention became unceasing. She learnt the danger incurred by Dupont de Nemours, according to her “the most chivalrous champion of liberty” France possessed, and straightway she betook herself to Chénier, who, two years previously, had made the speech to which Talleyrand owed his recall. Her eloquence soon fired the nervous, violent-natured, but imaginative author, and, hurrying to the tribune, he succeeded in saving Dupont de Nemours, by representing him as a man of eighty, whereas he was barely sixty. This device displeased the very person in whose favor it was adopted; but Madame de Staël saved her friends in spite of themselves.
So much energy could not be displayed with impunity, and the Committee of Public Safety caused a hint to be conveyed to the Baron de Staël, which induced his wife to retire for a short time to the country. According to Thibaudeau, indeed, the hint was in the first instance a distinct order to quit France, and M. de Staël cut a somewhat sorry figure when appearing before the Committee to protest against it. In spite of his “embarrassed air” and “want of dignity,” he managed to convey to his hearers that to expel the wife of an ambassador would be a violation of rights; and after some discussion the decree was withdrawn. Nevertheless, probably yielding to the prudent representations of her husband, Madame de Staël did retire for a while, and took refuge with a friend. We may suppose that she felt greatly aggrieved and ill-used, and yet it cannot be denied that her qualities—rare and noble though they might be—were not of a nature to recommend her to a Revolutionary Government. One can even affirm that they were not of a sort to recommend her to any Government. Her talents, her wealth and her position gave her immense social power. When she used this, as she repeatedly did, to inspire officials with disobedience to orders, and to save the lives of reactionary prisoners at the risk of ruining radical functionaries, it is not to be wondered at if the selfish majority regarded her interference as exceedingly pernicious.
It may even be questioned whether her influence at this time was intrinsically valuable. Her state of excited feeling kept her floating between sympathy with principles and sympathy with individuals. The result was an eclecticism of feeling, which reflected itself in the composition of her salon. Had she been able to declare herself frankly either Monarchical or Republican she might have left some lasting impress on the destinies of her land. As it was, she was kept in a condition of restless activity which, while sterile of intellectual results, brought her into disrepute as a conspirator.
The time was now rapidly approaching when Bonaparte was to cross her path, and, as she chose to conceive it, to spoil her existence. The instrument of destiny in this instance was Benjamin Constant. Immediately after the fall of Robespierre he arrived—a young old man, world-weary, full of unsteady force, and warmed by an inner flame of passion that sometimes smouldered but never died down.
A Bernese noble, he had been reared in aristocratic prejudices, but his life was early embittered by domestic circumstances and the political conditions of his country. After being educated at Oxford, Edinburgh, and in Germany, he was forced by his father to accept the post of Chamberlain at the Court of Brunswick. Ariel in the cloven pine was not more heart-sick, with the difference that Constant’s “delicate” spirit was dashed by a vein of mephistophelian mockery. Some malignant fairy seemed to have linked to his flashing and unerring insight a disposition the most cynical of which man ever carried the burden through sixty-three years of life. Being utterly unwarped by illusion, he could place himself on the side of opposition with telling effect, for he could neither deceive himself nor be deceived by others; and if not rigidly conscientious, he was inexorably logical.
At war with the authorities of his native land, too familiarized with order to be further charmed by it, and tired of the solemn absurdities of Court functions, he turned his thoughts towards revolutionary Paris as being, perhaps, the one city in the world which could still afford him a fresh sensation. Moreover, every element of originality and audacity in his brilliant mind was attracted by the amazing spectacle then presented by the Convention. A government which, deprived of organized armies, money, or traditions, confronted with a European coalition, and weighted with the responsibility of crime, had conquered its enemies in the field, and made its will respected from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, was exactly of a kind to fascinate a born combatant like Constant. He arrived, eager to be initiated into that strange world; longing to find himself in the salons of Madame Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais and Madame de Staël.
Hitherto his Egeria had been Madame de Charrière, a charming middle-aged monitress, Dutch by birth, but French by right of intellect and choice of language. Her delicate penetration and subtle sympathy with minor moods had doubtless for years responded precisely to his ideal; for if she might not excite neither could she bore him; and she must have understood his fastidious notions even before he could express them. She was, in fact, perfection, as long as he was still too young to mind feeling old; but there necessarily came a moment when that unconscious comedy was played out. The fitful energy of his nature had gradually vanquished his early lassitude, and he needed to renew his utterances at the founts of some Sybilline inspiration.
Madame de Staël appears simply to have overwhelmed him; and the effect which he produced on her was not less startling. Her salon was the rallying-ground of contradictory individualities. She believed in those days that she could reconcile Irreconcilables, and she welcomed Conventionnels like Chénier and Roederer, stranded “survivals” of a vanished epoch like Suard, Morellet and Laharpe; and aristocrats, some of them altogether soured and worn out, like Castellane, Choiseul and Narbonne. Into this political menagerie Constant fell like a spirit from another world. Applauding the Revolution, yet having played no part in it, he was its virgin knight. There was something strange and attractive also in his appearance; a certain awkwardness in figure and gesture joined to a handsome, clever, young face and long, fair hair. Just at that moment (1795) the predominant tendency in Madame de Staël’s salon was hostile to the Government. She professed herself already to be converted to Republicanism, and probably was so in theory, but she had not yet overcome her aversion to the real revolutionaries. Either directly through her influence or with her tacit consent, Constant was induced to publish three letters protesting against the admission of two thirds of the old Convention into the new body of Representatives. The success which followed was prodigious. All the women of the Royalist party flattered and caressed him, and all the journalists extolled him to the skies. Constant, however, was not the man to bear that kind of petting long, he required excitement with some keener edge to it, and was, moreover, too logical, too naturally enlightened and liberal to endorse reactionary platitudes. He hastened to disavow the letters, and although he did not find it easy to disabuse the public mind of its first impression, he was careful not to deepen this by any further mistakes. During the following four years his intimacy with Madame de Staël flourished and grew apace. They acted and reacted upon one another by the law of their opposing natures. His ardor was as uncertain as hers was steady; but whenever he caught fresh fire, it came from her. On the other hand, the tormenting kind of cruelty which belonged to his cynical caprice seems to have cast a spell over Madame de Staël’s own warm and frank simplicity which she found it difficult to break.
To Constant, at this time, belongs the merit of having appreciated her thoroughly and defended her warmly—if not invariably, at any rate in his truer moments. On his very first meeting with her, which was in Switzerland, she enthralled him instantaneously; perhaps all the more so that, like most people, he had been prejudiced against her by hearsay. He wrote to Madame de Charrière, who seems to have felt and expressed some bitterness regarding his new acquaintance, that she should get rid of the idea that Madame de Staël was nothing more than a “talking machine.”
He praised her lively interest in everyone who suffered, and her courage in scheming for the escape of her friends and enemies. He admitted that she might be active partly because she could not help it; but silenced further carping by the remark that her activity was well employed. In about a month more his admiration had risen to enthusiasm, and he could hardly find words in which to praise the brilliancy and accuracy of mind, the exquisite goodness, the generosity and social politeness, the simplicity and charm of his latest friend. He declared that she knew just as well how to listen as to talk (a point on which many both before and after Madame de Charrière differed from him), and that she enjoyed the talents of other people quite as much as her own. This was perfectly true. No woman ever breathed who was less envious than Madame de Staël; but, on the other hand, what woman’s intellect was ever so unapproachable? At the time, however, of her first acquaintance with Constant, her literary reputation was still to make, and it is not to be wondered at, consequently, if Madame de Charrière felt more inclined to question than agree when informed that this restless female politician was a being of so superior a sort that her like could not be met with once in a century.
About 1796 Madame de Staël took a new departure. Perhaps thanks to Constant’s enlightened views, perhaps thanks merely to her own common sense, she felt the full futility of reactionary effort, and ranged herself frankly on the side of the Directory. The royalist Club de Clichy was by this time an accomplished fact; and to neutralize its mischievous influence the Cercle Constitutionnel had been formed at the Hôtel de Salm. For some time Madame de Staël was the soul of these meetings, and Constant was their orator. Finally, when a fresh division in the Convention declared itself, and a large number of deputies deserted the Directory, Madame de Staël and Constant exerted themselves to prove that such dissensions could profit only the two extremes of Royalists or Terrorists, but never the Moderates. Naturally, the latter were deaf (when have Moderates eyes to see or ears to hear in moments of vital significance?), and Madame de Staël’s worst previsions were justified by the events of the 18th Fructidor. The establishment, two years later, of the Consulate, while filling Madame de Staël’s noble soul with dismay, offered Constant the opportunity assigned to him by his talents. He entered then upon the course of opposition from which he did not again deviate until sixteen years later, when he yielded either to Napoleon’s personal charm, the fascination of his deeds, and the hope of his repentance, or to the profound disgust of a world-worn man with the imbecility of the Restoration.
This is how Constant, in 1800, described the state of the public mind in France:—
“The predominating idea was: Liberty has done us harm, and we wish for it no longer; and those who modestly pointed out to these candidates for slavery that the evils of the Revolution came precisely from the fact that the Revolution had suspended liberty, were hounded through the salons under the names of Jacobins and Anarchists. A nation which begged for slavery from a military chieftain of thirty, who had covered himself with glory, might count upon its wishes being gratified; and they were.”
These few lines are a good example of Constant’s incisive intellect and biting style. Another man with such gifts would have retired disgusted from all opposition; but Constant loved fighting for its own sake. Perhaps he loved the combat better than the cause; but that is one of the secrets which it is given to no one to fathom. Whatever the central motive, the final fact of his complex and interesting nature, he proved himself the ideal leader of a forlorn hope.
By the contemporaries of Constant and Madame de Staël the connection between these two brilliant minds was, as might be expected, variously judged. Later critics have asserted that he was completely under her influence, but it is more likely that his native cynicism and spurious passion alternately irritated and dominated her. She may have inspired, but she could not mould, a nature so original and perverse.
Chênedollé said of Madame de Staël about this time that she had more intelligence than she could manage, and in this there was probably some truth. She had hardly begun to write as yet, having published (besides some pamphlets) only the Letters on Rousseau, and her work on the Passions. Her turbulence of ideas, scarcely then reduced to any system, must necessarily have been crystallized at moments by contact with a more definite mind.
CHAPTER VIII.
MADAME DE STAËL MEETS NAPOLEON.
The hostility between Madame de Staël and Napoleon was inevitable, since not a single point of sympathy existed between them. Her moral superiority, unselfishness, romantic ardor and sincerity, were precisely the qualities for which he would feel contempt, as being incompatible with the singleness of individual purpose, serene indifference to suffering, and calm acceptance of means which are necessary to material success. Madame de Staël was intimately convinced that not only honesty, but every other virtue constituted the best policy. Napoleon treated all such amiable theories as mere sentimentalism. If occasionally sensual from love of excitement, he was essentially passionless, and looked upon women as toys, not as sentient beings. He hated them to have ideas of their own; he liked them to be elegant, graceful and pretty. He was brought into contact with Madame de Staël—a woman overflowing with passion, energy and intellect, large of person, loud of voice, careless in attire. She had generally found her eloquence invincible, and he meant nothing to be invincible but his system. She had every reason to believe in her talent, and proclaimed that belief somewhat obstreperously; while he was disgusted at not being able to differ from her, and at finding that there was still one light which could shine unquenched beside his star. He usually succeeded in repressing people so entirely as to leave alive in them no possibility of protest; but she was, by her nature, irrepressible. It is true that she records having felt suffocated in his presence, but such a feeling could not have endured in her long. A very little familiarity would have transformed it into impatient rebellion. For Napoleon society, with a few exceptions, was composed of dummies, some of them a little more tangible and resisting than others, consequently more difficult to thrust out of the way. The individual had no intrinsic value for him, but was simply a factor in the sum of success. Madame de Staël admired everybody who was clever, loved everybody who was good, pitied everybody who was sorrowful. She detested oppression, and fought against it and conquered, if not materially, at least morally, although sometimes she hardly foresaw when engaging in it how much the fight would cost her. In the beginning of her acquaintance with him Madame de Staël evidently entertained an admiration for Napoleon greater than that which she eventually cared to avow. Bourrienne goes so far as to assert that she was in love with him, and that she wrote him perfervid letters, which he disdainfully threw into the fire. It is not necessary to accept the whole of this story. Bourrienne as a returned émigré can have felt but a meagre sympathy for Madame de Staël, and he probably yielded to the temptation of making his account of her as piquant as possible. But as she never did anything by halves, and always wrote with the most unconventional ardor, it is certain that her first sentiments towards the conqueror of Italy were expressed in a form to weary rather than gratify him. She presumably praised him for views which he did not hold, and for a disinterestedness that he was far from feeling. He must have understood that to an intellect such as hers, the first shock of disappointment would bring enlightenment, and then his schemes would be penetrated before they were ripe for execution. Add to all these elements of antipathy the fact that every intelligent man in Paris would find his way to Madame de Staël’s salon, with the further fact that she herself was not to be silenced, and it becomes easy to understand how Bonaparte could condescend from his greatness to hate her.
His aversion, owing to his Italian blood, had a strain of Pulcinello-like malignity, and every fresh outbreak of clamor from his victim only roused him to strike harder. That he should exile her in the first instance was not only comprehensible but justifiable. He had undertaken a gigantic task, that of accomplishing by the single force of his own will, and in the brief space of his own life-time, what, in the natural course of events, would have required the slow action of generations. That is, he sought to weld into his own system the mobile, alert, and impressionable mind of France.
To crush a thing so impalpable, to extinguish a thing so fiery, was an impossible undertaking, and to anybody but Napoleon it must have seemed so. He, at least, so far understood its magnitude as to appreciate the full danger of even a momentary reaction. And what, in that sombre but electric atmosphere, charged with suppressed fire, was so likely to provoke a reaction as the influence of Madame de Staël—a woman of amazing talent, of high position and great wealth; notoriously disinterested, and, although ever true to her principles, yet strongly swayed by personal influences.
Moreover, she represented the Opposition. Let anybody consider what public opinion is, even in well-ordered England, how it reverses in a moment the best laid plans of Ministers, and it becomes easy to understand how in revolutionary France, a new thought emanating from Madame de Staël’s salon could prove gravely dangerous to Napoleon. In exiling her he only treated her as she had been treated already. If he found her in France on coming to power, it was because she had been reconciled to the Directory; but there never was the least chance of her becoming reconciled to him.
There are several very womanly touches in Madame de Staël’s own account of her relations with Napoleon. Here is one of them, relating apparently to a time when the aversion between the First Consul and his illustrious foe had become an accomplished but not an acknowledged fact. Madame de Staël was invited to General Berthier’s one evening when it was known that Napoleon would be present.
“As I knew,” she says, “that he spoke very ill of me, it struck me that he would address me with some of the rude things which he often liked to say to women, even to those who flattered him; and I wrote down on chance, before going to the party, the different stinging and spirited replies which I could make to his speeches. I did not wish to be taken by surprise if he insulted me, for that would have been a greater want of character even than of wit; and as nobody could be sure of remaining at ease with such a man, I had prepared myself beforehand to defy him. Fortunately, it was unnecessary; he only put the most insignificant question in the world to me, for … he never attacks except where he feels himself to be the stronger.”
The whole of this passage is enchantingly simple-minded. One may be allowed to think, in spite of Madame de Staël’s assertion to the contrary, that she was really disappointed at not being able to make some of her defiant retorts to the conqueror; but it was child-like of her to have arranged them in advance!
Napoleon was preparing to invade Switzerland. Madame de Staël flattered herself for a moment that she might deter him from the project, and sought an interview with him for that purpose. The tête-à-tête lasted an hour, and Napoleon listened with the utmost patience, but he did not give himself any trouble to discuss Madame de Staël’s arguments, and quickly diverted the conversation to his own love of solitude, country life and fine arts—three things for which, by the way, his visitor cared almost as little as himself. She came away convinced that the eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes combined would not move him, but captivated, she admits, by the charm of his manner; in other words, by the false bonhomie which he possessed the art of introducing into his Italian garrulity. While Madame de Staël pleaded and Bonaparte chattered they were both learning to understand one another, but it is most probable that the first to be enlightened was the man.
Switzerland being threatened with an invasion, Madame de Staël left Paris in 1798 to join her father at Coppet; for he was still on the list of émigrés, and therefore came under a law which forbade him on pain of death to remain on any soil occupied by French troops. His daughter, always as much alarmed by remote danger as courageous when in imminent peril, trembled for his safety, and supplicated him to leave, but in vain. He probably supposed that her fears were groundless; and so they turned out to be.
When Madame de Staël was returning to France, Necker, anxious to have his name erased from the list of the proscribed, drew up a memorial to that effect, which was presented by his daughter to the Government. His request having been unanimously granted, his next step was to endeavor to recover the two millions which he had quixotically left in the public treasury when quitting France on the outbreak of the Revolution. The Government recognized the debt, and offered to pay it out of the confiscated church lands. But to this M. Necker would not consent. He no longer disapproved of the sale of ecclesiastical property, but he did not wish to throw doubt on his perfect impartiality by confounding his interests with his opinions.
About this time Madame de Staël’s separation from her husband took place. Her ostensible object was to ensure the safety of her children’s fortune, which was jeopardized by Baron de Staël’s extravagance. Any other reason which may have existed is not of great importance, inasmuch as the Baron, always a shadowy personage, had finally been quite eclipsed by his brilliant wife. He was said to be indifferent to her, but he seems to have been always fairly amiable and very obedient. As it will not be necessary to speak of him again, it may be mentioned here that he died in 1802, and that his last moments were soothed by the ministrations of his wife, who, hearing that he was ill, travelled from Switzerland to France to attend on him, and tried to bring him back with her to Coppet; but he expired on the road at a place called Poligny.
Madame de Staël happened to be returning from Coppet to Paris on the 18th Brumaire, when she learnt that her carriage had passed that of her former ally Barras, who was returning to his estate at Grosbois accompanied by gendarmes. The name of “Bonaparte” was on everybody’s lips—the first time, as she remarks, that such a thing had happened since the Revolution. The state of things which she found on entering the capital was of a kind to excite her imagination. Five weeks of intrigue had ripened Napoleon’s opportunity, and the 19th Brumaire dawned on a France exhausted and enslaved.
From that moment Madame de Staël’s rôle was marked out for her irrevocably as one of perpetual opposition. At no time inclined to silence, she was, we may be sure, both loud and intrepid in her denunciation of the new tyranny. At first Napoleon appeared disposed to win her over. Joseph Bonaparte, who was her friend and frequented her salon, came to her once with something that sounded like a message. Napoleon had asked why Madame de Staël would not give in her adhesion to his Government. Did she want the two millions to be paid to her father, or residence in Paris accorded him? There should be no difficulty about either. She had only to say what it was she wanted. Madame de Staël’s answer is celebrated: “The question is not what I want, but what I think.”
Some protests against the growing despotism proceeded from the Tribunat, and notably from Constant. It is superfluous to say that Madame de Staël applauded these with fervor. It is well known how, the evening previous to a celebrated speech which he was about to make, Constant consulted her on the subject. She encouraged him warmly, although already perceiving that the path which she had elected to tread would, in all likelihood, lead to exile. The salon was full of her friends at the time, but Constant warned her that, if he spoke the next day, everybody would desert her. “You must obey your conscience,” she replied; but adds that, had she known what she would have to suffer from that day, and throughout the next ten years, her answer might have been different. But here we think that Madame de Staël’s literary instinct carried her away. She was very sincere, but very imaginative, and, when writing for the public, it must often have been difficult for her to distinguish between what she felt before and after the fact. Considering what her disposition was, and the opportunities for eloquence afforded both to herself and Constant by an attitude of hostility to Napoleon, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that she enjoyed her opposition with one-half of her nature, if she regretted its results with the other.
For some weeks after Constant’s speech Madame de Staël’s salon, usually so animated, was silent and deserted. Joseph Bonaparte was forbidden by his brother to attend it; but most people needed no prohibition, they absented themselves of their own accord under various pretexts. Fouché, the Minister of Police, called on her, and insinuated that a brief retirement into the country would be advisable, as giving the storm time to blow over. She took the hint, and retired for a short time to St. Ouen. On her return to Paris she avers that she did not find Napoleon’s wrath at all appeased. Apparently she expected it to die a spontaneous death, for she did not adopt the only means by which she could have pacified him, but continued to applaud, if not instigate, an active hostility to his measures. It would have been grand and magnanimous of Napoleon to have despised the enmity of a woman, but he was neither grand nor magnanimous. Moreover, the last thing which Madame de Staël probably desired was to be despised. Nobody can deny her the meed of admiration which she deserved for her love of liberty, and the indomitable spirit with which, when in exile, she refused to conciliate her oppressor by one word of praise. But, inasmuch as she knew with whom she had to deal, and what would be the consequence of her actions, one must admit that the amount of pity which she claimed for herself, and has generally received, is excessive. She was in direct contradiction to her own theories of a woman’s true duty, when interfering in politics; and in being treated by Napoleon as a man might have been, she paid the penalty of the splendid intellect which emancipated her from the habits and the views, if not from the weaknesses, of her sex. She was neither helpless nor harmless, since she could stir up enemies to the tyrant by her eloquence, and revenge herself, when punished, by the power of her pen. She was exiled not because she was a woman and defenceless, but because she was a genius and formidable. She deliberately engaged in a contest of which the object was to prove who was the stronger—herself or Napoleon.
She came out of it scarred, but dauntless. What right had she to complain because the weapons that wounded her were keen?
Besides, paltry as Napoleon showed himself in many respects, he was a phenomenon of so exceptional a nature that to judge him by ordinary standards was absurd. It was the weakness of France which made his opportunity; and if the epoch had not been abnormal, he never could have dominated it. The people whom he governed had two courses open to them: to submit or to protest. The first brought profit, the second glory; and the glory which is purchased by no sacrifice is unworthy of the name.
In 1801 Madame de Staël published her work on Literature, in which, as she says, there was not a word concerning Napoleon, although “the most liberal sentiments were expressed in it with force.” The book produced an immense sensation; and Parisian society, in its admiration for the writer, forgot the First Consul’s displeasure, and again crowded round her. She admits that the winter of 1801 was a pleasant one. Napoleon, passing through Switzerland the previous summer, had seen and spoken with M. Necker. It is characteristic of both interlocutors that the ex-statesman was far more impressed with the warrior than the latter with him. Necker divined in the young hero a strength of will to which his own hesitating nature was a stranger; while Napoleon, on his side, penetrating but prejudiced, contemptuously described the once august financier in two words, “A banker and an Idealist.” With his usual cynicism, he attributed Necker’s visit to the desire of employment; whereas Madame de Staël affirmed that her father’s chief object was to plead her cause. In this he was so far successful that residence in France was for some time at least assured to her. “It was,” she writes, “the last time that my father’s protecting hand was extended over my life.” For the moment, either this beneficent influence, or, as is more likely, a passing fit of good humor on the part of Napoleon, enabled her to enjoy existence. Fouché consented to recall several émigrés for whom she interceded, and even Joseph Bonaparte once again treated her with cordiality, and entertained her for a little time at his estate at Morfontaine.