Madame de Staël

A variety of circumstances arose to put an end to this state of things and to revive Napoleon’s dislike to Madame de Staël. Her father published his work, Dernières Vues de Politique et de Finance, with the avowed intention of protesting against Napoleon’s growing tyranny. His daughter had encouraged him in this feeling, herself unable, as she declares, to silence this “Song of the Swan.” Then Bernadotte had inaugurated a certain sullen opposition to the First Consul, and Madame de Staël immediately became his friend. Finally, her salon was more crowded than ever, and by great personages, such as the Prince of Orange and other embryo potentates, besides foreigners of celebrity in letters and science.

Napoleon detested salons. It was his conviction that a woman who disposed of social influence might do anything in France, inasmuch as he held that the best brains in the country were female. Madame de Staël, moreover, possessed the art of keeping herself well before the public. Even now she had just published Delphine, and all the papers were full of it. To please Napoleon, they condemned it as immoral—a strange criticism in that age, and an excellent advertisement in any.

Napoleon, on Madame de Staël’s again visiting Switzerland, hinted to Lebrun that she would do well not to return to Paris. His obsequious colleague hastened to intimate this by letter; and although the communication was not official, the First Consul’s lightest intimations by this time carried so much weight that Madame de Staël was compelled to obey. She did so very reluctantly; and perhaps if her father’s prudence had not been greater than her own, her longing to be back in the capital would have overpowered every other consideration. As it was, she made the best that she could of a year’s uninterrupted sojourn at Coppet. The Tribunat meanwhile had shown itself again rebellious. Bonaparte, irritated, declared that he would shake twelve or fifteen of its members “from his clothes like vermin,” and Constant had no choice but to rejoin his friend in Switzerland.

CHAPTER IX.
NEW FACES AT COPPET.

Some remarkable people had already begun to cluster round the Châtelaine of Coppet. De Gérando, Sismondi, Camille Jordan, Madame de Krüdener, Madame Récamier—all are interesting names. Camille Jordan, who was introduced by De Gérando, appears to have been taken up at once with characteristic ardor by Madame de Staël. His Vrai Sens du Vôte National sur le Consulat à Vie, published in 1802, was just the kind of trumpet-call to which she always responded. Straightway her letters to him became frequent, and full of the excessive fervor and flattery which distinguished all her protestations of affection. Oddly enough, Madame de Krüdener, not yet a priestess, but a most decided coquette, appears to have exercised a rather perturbing influence upon these new relations. Madame de Staël writes that she would have liked to send Jordan a ring containing a lock of her hair, and formerly the property of her husband, but she is restrained by the recollection of Madame de Krüdener’s fair tresses, for which, as she learns, Camille entertains a lively admiration. Another letter contains an invitation to him to join her and one or two other friends in a journey to Italy, coupled with a playful hint that in such scenes he might find her society more agreeable than the lovely blonde’s. Camille not responding in the way desired, Madame de Staël betrays some wounded feeling. She had thought that when once she had admired Jordan’s writings so much, everything must be in harmony between them. She had been mistaken. She would take refuge in silence. Nevertheless she is not silent; and Madame de Krüdener’s name reappears. Madame de Staël is willing to admit that she is a remarkable person, but objects that she is always talking of persons who have killed themselves for love of her. Then Jordan is summoned to say if it be true that he is in love, not with Madame, but with Mademoiselle de Krüdener? She has nothing but a Greuze-like face to recommend her, and if she has enthralled him then why has he not fallen a victim to every young girl of fifteen? Nevertheless, if he really be in love, and will confess it, Madame de Staël will set herself to study Mademoiselle de Krüdener better, with a view to loving her herself if she prove indeed worthy of Jordan’s affection.

In reading all this, one is forced to the conclusion that a more emotional woman than Madame de Staël never trod the earth. Every human creature, perhaps, has one unsolved, it may be insoluble, riddle in his life—one mystery of feeling which nobody fathoms. More especially is this true of women who live so much in sentiment; and supremely true of a woman like Madame de Staël. That ineffable something in her which nobody seems to have guessed while she was living, of which Byron felt the presence in her without divining the cause, was the passionate and unappeasable desire to be loved. All men who had dealings with her appear to have misunderstood her in so far that they believed her to be more dominated by her head than her heart—instead of understanding that, in her, head and heart were the systole and diastole of a temperament surprisingly forcible but not essentially strong. Or, if they did learn to comprehend her better at last, it was when she was no longer young, and feeling of a certain sort had become, alas! ridiculous. As long as she was entitled to feel and to suffer they made almost a reproach to her of the intellectual superiority which they could not deny, and cast her back upon her own thoughts for happiness.

Madame de Krüdener, on one occasion, arrived at the complacent conclusion that Madame de Staël was jealous of her. Not jealous of her beauty and golden locks, which was conceivable, and might have been true, but jealous of her literary fame! Corinne jealous of Valerie! It is true that Corinne had not yet seen the light, while Valerie had not only appeared, but had met with great success. So great an authority as St. Beuve pronounces Madame de Krüdener’s novel to be a thing of joy, a work to be read thrice, “in youth, in middle life, and in old age.” But it is possible to have many intellectual qualities, and yet remain at such an immeasurable distance beneath Madame de Staël that nothing but vanity could scale the height.

Moreover, Madame de Krüdener’s meaner self had not been a stranger to the immediate and surprising triumph of her work. She was always intriguing, and intrigued to some purpose when her novel was on the eve of publication. She ran about to all the fournisseurs in Paris, asking them for bows à la Valerie, caps and gowns à la Valerie.

They heard the name for the first time, but naturally proceeded to call a variety of articles by an appellation presumably so fashionable, and the success of the novel was assured. Madame de Krüdener, promptly and conveniently oblivious of the sources of this sudden triumph, allowed herself to become somewhat intoxicated by it, and wrote to a friend that the “dear woman” (meaning Madame de Staël) was jealous of her. The person at whom this accusation was levelled probably never heard of it. She certainly would never have divined it; and, the little difficulty about Jordan once overcome, she appears to have found Madame de Krüdener’s society more than tolerable. Indeed they ended by becoming affectionate friends; but that was after the authoress of Valerie had undergone the mystic change which transformed her from a flirt into a priestess.

She had always been immensely admired, and had not preserved a spotless reputation. But she had one of those emotional natures in which a restless vanity, love of novelty, a morbid sensibility and an excess of imagination, combine to produce religious fervors.

Standing at a window in Riga one day, she saw an old admirer drop dead at the very moment that he was lifting his hat to salute her. This event made on her one of those terrifying and ineffaceable impressions which in regenerate circles is known as “a call.” She plunged into mysticism; became the exponent of a new dogma, and finally claimed for herself the gift of prophecy. People were, of course, not wanting to declare that her predictions had in several instances been verified; and, her personal fascination remaining always great, she now acquired an enormous influence. Her extreme self-abnegation and boundless charities increased her reputation for sanctity, and she even succeeded in bringing down on herself a satisfactory amount of persecution. In Paris superstition was, as always, rife. The days were not yet so remote when Philip Egalité had gone to question the devil in the quarries of Montrouge; and men were barely more than middle-aged who in their first youth had looked on the brazen brow of Cagliostro, and felt their blood agreeably frozen by the Comte de St. Germain’s casual mention of personal experiences three hundred years old. But little more than thirty years previous to Madame de Krüdener’s “revival” Mesmer had seen numbers of the fairest and many not of the stupidest heads in Paris gathered round his famous baquet. A little later the illuminati had been credited unveraciously and to their scant honor, with a share in the sanguinary priesthood of Robespierre, and finally Mademoiselle Lenormand had shuffled the cards of prophecy at the instance of Napoleon himself. Into this strange world, so exhausted and cynical, yet excited, impulsive, and thirsting for novel emotions, the Northern Sybil, with her strange, pale face and shining eyes, came like a wandering star.

But all this was subsequent to our first meeting with her at Coppet, when she was still fairly young and singularly pretty, and the gold in her tresses owed as yet no fancied splendor to the aureole of inspiration.

Madame Récamier, the charming Juliette, was a far more normal, but a not less attractive person. Châteaubriand’s memoirs have made her famous, but he was among the latest of her many swains. Her path through life was strewn with conquests, and she had offers of marriage by the score. They continued up to the age of fifty-one, when the author of Réné laid a heart which was hardly worthy of her at her feet.

Three generations of Montmorencys adored her; a German prince of royal blood urged her to divorce her husband in order to marry him; and Lucian Bonaparte was among the most ardent of her slaves. Ampère the younger, at twenty, fell in love with her, she being then forty-three; and Châteaubriand addressed her as “très belle et très charmante” when she was seventy and blind. The little Savoyards turned round in the streets to look at her, and when they did so no longer she knew that her marvellous beauty was on the wane. But the fascination of her grace, her goodness, her unfailing tact and delicate intelligence survived her loveliness; and the men who knew her still worshipped her for years after fresher charms had attracted the eyes of the multitude. She was not a politician, but her friendship with Madame de Staël gave her decided opinions, and she incurred the anger of Napoleon by declining to be Dame du Palais to one of his sisters. It was said, however, that what specially raised his ire was that a throng which on one occasion had been assembled to do homage to him, so far forgot his presence, when Madame Récamier appeared, as to have eyes only for her.

Finally Constant, the inexplicable, unhappy, brilliant Constant, sought the peace which he had never found in anyone in a tardy passion for her. He sought in vain, for she treated him as she treated all men, with a kind and gracious indifference which her unique fascination robbed of all its sting. She influenced his political conduct—not altogether for good, as it turned out in 1814, when Napoleon returned from Elba. Vague hints at a rivalry before this date between her and Madame de Staël are to be found in some of the correspondence of the time, but they are contradicted by the tone of Madame de Staël’s letters to her belle Juliette, and by Madame Récamier’s own rare discretion.

Moreover, although Constant first saw Madame Récamier at Coppet in 1806, and confided to her those grievances of his against Madame de Staël, which just then were rising to exasperation point, it was only in 1813, when she called upon him to defend the interests of Murat at the Congress of Vienna, that he fell in love with her. The correspondence which ensued between them does more honor to her than to him. Leaving aside the questionable nature of his passion, he allowed himself to speak of Madame de Staël with a fractious mistrust which, even if transitory, could have come from nobody with a more deplorable grace. The basis of the sentiment appears to have been jealousy of Madame de Staël’s influence over her devoted friend. Such a jealousy was as futile as paltry; for it would have needed a more witching tongue even than Constant’s to have shaken the loyalty of the loving Juliette. To gratify a request of hers he wrote some fragments of memoirs and sketched a portrait of Madame de Staël which, besides much praise, contains some furtive sarcasm at her inexpugnable belief in herself—that large quality, too grand to be called conceit, which, according to Constant, amounted to a cultus and inspired a “religious respect.”

It is interesting to record that the first time Châteaubriand ever saw Madame Récamier was at Madame de Staël’s. He had gone to thank the latter for having occupied herself about his recall to France. He found her at her toilette, talking eagerly, and twirling in her fingers, as usual, a little green twig. Madame Récamier suddenly entered, dressed in white. From that moment Châteaubriand was so absorbed in her that he had no longer any attention to bestow on her eloquent friend. This was in 1800. He did not see her again for twelve years. Benjamin Constant, in the “portrait” already mentioned, has left an account of Madame Récamier and Madame de Staël, which gives a very good idea of both of them, and is specially interesting as coming from such a source. He relates that, at the first interview between them, Madame Récamier felt very shy. He says:—

Madame de Staël scattered golden rain of the frankest and sincerest praise over Madame Récamier every time that she addressed her. “You are exquisite,” “you are beautiful,” “you reign as a queen over sentiment,” are among the sentences that stud every other line of her letters. Another of her female friends was she whom she named the “sweet Annette de Gérando,” the wife of the author of The Signs and Art of Thinking in their Mutual Relations, the Origin of Human Intelligence, the Comparative History of Philosophic Systems, etc. He was a philanthropist as well as a philosopher, and Madame de Staël in later years once made rather a bitter allusion to this fact. As time went on, and Napoleon’s star blazed brighter, De Gérando was unable to resist the general infection of idolatry; moreover, he had accepted a post under the new Government, and the withering blight of officialism fell to a certain extent on his spirit. “There is too much philanthropy in his friendship,” wrote Madame de Staël to Jordan. “One is afraid of being treated by him like a pauper.”

But in the summer of 1801 all this was still in the future, and harmony and wit reigned at Coppet. Sismondi about this time appears on the scene; discreet, observant, serene, reasonable, he conceived for Madame de Staël a friendship which remained moderate in expression and sincere in feeling to the last. He was not as much dazzled by her as many, and saw her failings clearly. Occasionally she even wounded his quiet self-love, and once or twice, when very restless and excited, she offended him. But he was invariably drawn back to her by the spell of her goodness. He appears as a rock of strength amid all the sparkling, moving, changing tide of ideas and feelings that rippled, dashed, recoiled, and returned unceasingly in every hour of the sojourn at Coppet. His steady sense and calm judgment bring out into sharper contrast the unrest of Constant; the flashing splendor of Madame de Staël; the dreamy refinement of Mathieu de Montmorency; the fantastic charm of Madame de Krüdener, and the unfailing grace of the lovely “Juliette.”

Bonstetten was yet another visitor at the château. He was called the Swiss Voltaire, was eternally young, and even grew younger and more plastic in mind as the unnoticed years crept over him. He had seen Madame Necker in Paris when she was still unmarried, and reappeared in her daughter’s home at Coppet as gay, as smiling, as vivacious and witty as he had shown himself in the long-vanished salon of Madame de Vermenoux. He laid himself at Madame de Staël’s feet at once, was received by her with her usual gracious warmth, and profited by her keen but generous criticism of his works. Everybody began by gently laughing at Bonstetten’s incurable youthfulness, and ended by adoring him for it. He wanted steadiness of intellectual purpose—a “belfry,” as St. Beuve expresses it; in other words, some central fact of mind round which all his ideas could rally—but he had plenty of insight, and, amid the universal eulogium of Madame de Staël’s powers, seems to have been the first to point out a defect in her which Schiller commented on later. For when writing of her to Frederica Brun, he says: “Her goodness is extreme, and nobody has more intellect; but that which is best in you, in her does not exist. She lacks feeling for art, and sees no beauty except in eloquence and intelligence. She has more practical wisdom than anybody, but uses it more for her friends than herself.”

Frederica Brun herself came to Geneva about this time, and has left enthusiastic descriptions of Madame de Staël, of Necker, Madame Necker de Saussure and Madame Rilliet-Hüber. She also bore testimony to Madame de Staël’s devotion to her children. Her eldest son, Auguste, and her only daughter, Albertine, were destined all her life to solace her by their love for much that she suffered. She directed the education of both her boys, but occupied herself especially with that of the girl. She was accused by some of her friends, even by Sismondi, of not caring very much for her children; but no word of theirs ever betrayed any sense of such a deficiency in her. On the contrary, both Auguste and Albertine always spoke and wrote of her with the utmost enthusiasm.

After spending two summers and one winter uninterruptedly at Coppet, during which period she wrote and published Delphine, the desire to return to France grew into an overpowering force. Napoleon had now been declared Consul for life, and was preparing to invade England. She hoped, she said, that amid such multifarious occupations he would not have leisure to conceive any objection against her establishing herself within a few miles of Paris, near enough, in fact, to enjoy the society of such friends as would not be too much in awe of the potentate to pay her occasional visits. She further deluded herself with the notion that Napoleon would shrink from the odium of exiling a woman so well known as herself. Such a hope shows how simple Madame de Staël could still be at times. Napoleon was no longer in a position in which blame for mere details of conduct could touch him, and his career from this moment was to be one long outrage on public opinion.

Madame de Staël established herself in a country house about ten miles from Paris. Then there happened a circumstance which she had not foreseen. In the eighteen months of her sojourn at Coppet, the society which she knew formerly had grown baser. A whole race of parasites had arisen, whose real or fancied interest it was to obtain the favor of Napoleon by denouncing the people whom he detested. A woman, whose name is suppressed, lost no time in informing Napoleon that the road leading to Madame de Staël’s dwelling was crowded with her visitors. Immediately one of her friends warned her that a gendarme would probably be sent to her without loss of time. She instantly became a prey to anxiety, an excessive anxiety it is certain, for she was excessive in most things.

She wrote to De Gérando to plead her cause with Talleyrand; she solicited the good offices of Lucian and Joseph Bonaparte; and finally she wrote a passionate but dignified letter to Napoleon himself. Then she waited, in the midst of strangers, and consuming herself with a fiery impatience that made every hour of fresh suspense a torture. She spent the nights sitting up with her maid, listening for the tramp of the horse which was to bring the gendarme and his message. But the gendarme did not arrive; and, worn out with her terrors, Madame de Staël bethought herself of her “beautiful Juliette.” That loving and devoted person assured her of a kind welcome at St. Brice, a place about two leagues from Paris. Thither Madame de Staël went, and finding there a varied and agreeable society, was for the time being cured of her fears. Hearing nothing more about her exile, she persuaded herself that Napoleon had changed his mind, and she returned with some friends to her own lodgings at Maffliers. It is probable enough that some officious courtier again drew her enemy’s attention to her; or perhaps Madame de Staël’s own letter, in which she spoke of her children’s education and her father’s advanced age, and betrayed in every line her haunting fear of exile, enlightened Napoleon as to the tenderest spot in which to wound her. Disliking her as he did, and irritated by the mere thought of her as he seems to have been, it would have been highly characteristic of his southern malice to be decided in his course by the very prayers that should have deterred him.

However that may be, she was sitting at table with her friends one late September afternoon when she perceived a rider, dressed in grey, pull up at her gate and ring the bell. This prosaic-looking individual was the messenger of destiny. She felt it at once, although he did not wear the dreaded uniform. He was the bearer of a letter signed by Napoleon, and ordering her to depart within twenty-four hours for any place not nearer than forty leagues to Paris.

Needless to say, Madame de Staël did not submit without protest, and represented so energetically to the gendarme that a woman and three children could not be hurried off with no more preparation than a recruit’s, as to induce him to allow her three days at Paris in which to get ready.

On their way they stopped for a few moments at Madame Récamier’s, and there found General Junot, who, like everybody else, was one of Juliette’s admirers. Perhaps to please the latter, he promised to intercede with the despot for her illustrious friend; and he was, as it appears, so far successful that Napoleon accorded permission for Madame de Staël to reside at Dijon. As soon as Madame Récamier received this news she communicated it in a letter to the care of Camille Jordan. But Madame de Staël never received it, having been driven, as she says, by daily admonitions from her gendarme—but as Madame Récamier appeared to think, by her own impatient agitation—away from Paris to Morfontaine. This was the home of Joseph Bonaparte. Probably pitying her state of excitement and misery, he invited her thither to spend a few days. He was just then animated, as far as he dared be, by a spirit of opposition to his mighty brother; and perhaps—who knows?—was kind to Madame de Staël as much for that reason as for any other. In any case, nobody in those days appears to have been profoundly in earnest except Madame de Staël herself. She could not recover either patience or peace. She was wretched at Morfontaine in spite of the kindness of her host and hostess, because surrounded with officers of the Government who had accepted the servitude against which she rebelled. She knew that her father would receive her, but the thought of taking refuge at Coppet again was distasteful to her.

She had but just left that place, and to return thither was to resume habits of which she had tired, and to acknowledge herself beaten. Probably she longed for a change; and probably enough, also, she was in that morbid condition of mind in which to do the simplest and most obvious thing is to rob grief of all its luxury. Finally, she decided to crave permission through Joseph to betake herself to Germany, with the distinct assurance that the French Minister there would consider her a foreigner and leave her in peace. Joseph hastened to St. Cloud for the purpose, and Madame de Staël retired to an inn within two leagues of Paris, there to await his reply.

At the end of one day, receiving no answer, and fearing (but why?) to attract attention to herself by remaining any longer in one inn, she sought the shelter of another; and is extremely—one cannot really help thinking needlessly—eloquent in describing her anguish during these self-imposed peregrinations. At last Joseph’s letter came. He not only forwarded her the permission to go to Berlin, but added several valuable letters of introduction, and took leave of her in the kindest terms.

Accompanied by her children and Benjamin Constant, she started, hating the postillions for their boasted speed, and feeling that every step taken by the horses was a fresh link in the ever-lengthening and indestructible chain of which one end was Paris and the other her heart.

What Constant’s feelings were she does not say, and speaks of his accompanying her as a spontaneous act of friendship. But he had been exiled as well as herself; and although his desire to go to Germany had partly determined hers, and neither wished to separate from the other, there are indications that Constant quitted France as reluctantly as his companion.

Their relations were already varied by alternate periods of shine and storm; and although her influence over him was still immense, it had begun, as was inevitable with such a man, to fret him. And probably some doubts that were not political, and some sufferings that had their root in another cause than exile, played their part in the extreme agitation of Madame de Staël’s mind at this period.

CHAPTER X.
MADAME DE STAËL VISITS GERMANY.

At Metz Madame de Staël was received in triumph. The Prefect of the Moselle entertained her, parties were given in her honor, and all the literary big-wigs of the place hastened to do her homage. She there, for the first time, came into personal contact with Charles de Villers, with whom she had previously corresponded on the subject of Kant. Of course she was charmed with him, her first impulse invariably being to find every clever or distinguished person delightful. Her friendship with him resembled all her friendships. She began by expecting to have inspired as much enthusiasm as she felt, possibly a little more, seeing that she was a woman, and such a woman, and exiled to boot. Villers, a cross-grained kind of Teuton, had no idea of allowing his theories, which were extremely sturdy on all subjects, to be spirited away by any of Madame de Staël’s conversational conjuring tricks. They discussed philosophy, and he railed sourly at French taste; and, perhaps by way of proving his final emancipation from all such fetters, he had obtained the companionship of a certain Madame de Rodde, whom Madame de Staël described, with some asperity, as a “fat German.”

But she separated from the philosopher still quite charmed with his appreciation of the good and true, and not in the least repulsed by his ways. On the contrary, she wrote to him shortly afterwards, reproaching him passionately with his silence. One can imagine how absurd such exactions must have seemed to the good Villers, with his head full of Kant and Madame de Rodde to attend to his comforts; but the truth was that Madame de Staël’s mood just then caused her to make herself needlessly miserable about everything. To Mathieu de Montmorency she wrote that she was filled with terror, and fancied that death must shortly overtake her father, children, friends, everybody dear to her.

She seemed to forget entirely that it was her own choice which had taken her to Germany; Napoleon had banished her merely from Paris; and there was nothing to prevent her returning to Coppet to soothe the last years and enjoy the conversation of her venerated father. But this did not suit her; she required a wider intellectual horizon and more varied society.

For many reasons, some of them dependent on the political bias of monarchical writers, it has been the fashion to proclaim Madame de Staël’s opposition to Napoleon as inspired by pure hatred of despotism. To us this does not seem quite a correct version. If it were, Madame de Staël would have been a totally different person; colder, less impulsively benevolent, less thoroughly womanly. All through her life her conduct was determined by her feeling towards individuals. While professing republicanism she counted, as we have seen, hosts of reactionary friends; the claims to consideration of noble names and social distinctions weighed powerfully with her; and all her love of liberty could not save her from being torn by sympathy for every Royalist head that fell during the Revolution. Such a catholicity of feeling constitutes a charming woman, but not a great politician; and Madame de Staël’s liberal instincts and penetrating insight only lent force to her hatred of Napoleon, they did not originate it. There was a natural antagonism between their natures—circumstances increased this, and obstinacy on both sides confirmed it—and Madame de Staël made the most of a persecution which, while condemning her to inaction, added enormously to her fame.

That Napoleon in his most transcendent moments was great simply by stupendous intellect and amazing will; that in his baser moments he was inconceivably callous, cynical, arrogant and mean, perhaps few persons in these days will be found to deny. But it is overstating the case to assert, as has been done, that he persecuted Madame de Staël from unmitigated envy of her superiority. Much as he resented intellectual power in a woman, it is nevertheless most likely that what really inspired his action against Madame de Staël was her turbulent disposition and the restless mind which made her the centre of Parisian opposition. As to this opposition itself, without any wish to detract from its sublimity, it may fairly be asked whether—at the time Constant began his denunciations, and Madame de Staël encouraged them—it was altogether well-timed. To declaim against Napoleon’s growing despotism was perhaps irresistible to independent spirits; but such declamation necessarily remained sterile of results in the state in which France then was. What would these orators have substituted for the strong will of a Dictator? The greed for place of a Talleyrand? The mystic fervor of a Montmorency? The dissolute ambition of a Barras? Between the sanguinary excesses of the Terreur Rouge, the lust for revenge of the Terreur Blanche, the incorrigible short-sightedness and criminal frivolity of the “Coblentz” faction, the diseased logic of the Jacobins, and the frightful collapse of intelligence, morality, decency, and humanity that extended from end to end of France, it is difficult to understand what ruler could have governed it for other ends than personal ones. Napoleon sprang armed from the ruin of France, as a kind of fatal embodiment of all the evil under which she groaned and all the crime that stained her. And yet who shall say that his career of conquest, desolating as it was, could have been spared from European history? It enters as a factor into almost all that this closing century has brought us—the unity of Italy, the power of Germany, France’s own awakening to the limitations of her destiny. It was not given to any mortal, eighty years ago, to foresee all this; and Madame de Staël, who was in most things of a preternatural acuteness, only foresaw the coming despotism and its immediate, not its ultimate, results. Nevertheless, had her bias against Napoleon not been a personal one, she might have submitted more quietly to his first acts of tyranny, and only protested when his insatiable ambition had prostrated France at the feet of the nations. She might have done this, because she was constantly led away by her feelings, and could be blind on occasion. That she was not more dazzled by Napoleon must be considered a lucky accident.

In Germany the feeling in regard to her was not generally favorable. The mightiest minds, indeed, admired her great intellect; and Goethe’s unwilling homage is the brightest jewel in her crown. But it was as a woman that she excited a somewhat sour antipathy. Her plaintive little friend Madame de Beaumont had called her a tourbillon, and Heine has only added a doubtful picturesqueness to this description when designating her a “whirlwind in petticoats.” But as a most disturbing element she certainly did introduce herself into German society. Rahel Varnhagen acidly—it is difficult to help thinking ungenerously—echoes the usual complaint of her obstreperousness, saying, with striking lack of originality, by the way, “She is nothing to me but an inconvenient hurricane.”

Schiller, as is well known, was infinitely more magnanimous. He had made up his mind as to her kind of intellect before she came. In 1798 he had already pronounced her to be of an “exalted, reasoning, entirely unpoetical nature”; and, although he clung, after seeing her, to his conviction that “of poetry she had no conception,” he was obviously surprised and enchanted at her native goodness, her healthy simplicity of mind, and unaffectedness. To her penetration, brilliancy and vivacity, he does full justice. And if, as her book on Germany afterwards showed, his statement that “nothing existed for her unless her torch could illuminate it,” was as misleading as are most metaphors, still its descriptiveness enables one exactly to understand the particular sort of splendor with which Madame de Staël flashed through the windings of the German mind.

Schiller—poor man!—was quite pathetic over her amazing volubility, which left him, with his halting French, a hopeless distance behind her. It is rather comic to trace the dismay at her exhausting personality which pierces through all his admiration for, and interest in, her mind. To Goethe, who was coquetting at Jena, and wished the brilliant stranger to come there to him, Schiller later writes: “I saw the De Staël yesterday, in my house, and again to-day at the Dowager Duchess’s. One would be reminded of the sieve of the Danaïdes, if Oknos with his donkey did not then occur to one.” He fears she will have to discover that the Germans in Weimar can be fickle, as well as the French, unless it strikes her soon that it is time she went. To Körner he complained that the devil had brought the French female philosopher to torment him just in the middle of his new play.

He found her, of all mortals within his experience, “the most gesticulative, combative, and talkative,” even while admitting that she was almost the most cultivated and intellectual of women. But he declared that she destroyed all poetry in him, and waxed plaintive once again over his ineffectual struggles with French. He proclaimed that not to admire her for her fine mind and liberality of sentiment was impossible; and he breathed a sigh of the most unfeigned relief when she departed. All the Court personages felt that they had been having a severe time of it; although the bright and petulant Duchess Amelia was enchanted in the first instance, and wrote to Goethe imploring him to come and study the phenomenon. He resisted for a long while, but finally arrived—not without a previous sneer or two. Madame de Staël was charmed to know him—in fact, her days in Weimar passed in a perfect effervescence of delight. While the Germans were coldly, sometimes rather snarlingly, criticizing her, she was admiring them. Schiller she speaks of with the liveliest enthusiasm. Their acquaintance began with an animated discussion on the respective merits of French and foreign dramas. Madame de Staël maintained that Corneille and Racine were unsurpassable. Schiller, of course, differed; and managed to make her heed his reasons, in spite of his difficulty in speaking French. His quiet simplicity and earnestness, as well as his originality of mind, became instantly manifest to the illustrious stranger. With her, admiration meant always the most ungrudging friendship; and this was the sentiment with which Schiller inspired her for the rest of his days. Goethe she found cold, and she was characteristically disappointed at his no longer displaying the passionate ardor of Werther “Time has rendered him a spectator,” she says; yet she admits the universality of his mind and his prodigious information when once prevailed on to talk. It is provoking to think that she never saw the best of Goethe, and that this disappointing result was—although she was far, indeed, from guessing it—her own fault chiefly; for she informed the poet that she intended to print his conversation, and of this Goethe had a horror. He states as much in a letter to Schiller, and gives as his reason the sorry figure which Rousseau had cut in his correspondence—just then published—with Madame de la Tour Franqueville and her friend.

The Dowager Duchess Amelia was a vivacious, pleasure-loving, singularly intelligent, and liberal-minded woman, who had governed the duchy during her son’s minority admirably, and made allies for herself among the best German intellects. Thanks to her, her son Karl August had been so trained, that, in the midst of a court circle to which the light of the eighteenth century had barely penetrated, he showed a most manly contempt for the ideals of mistresses of the robes and silver sticks in waiting, and swept all such fripperies away to become the dearest friend of Goethe. His duchess (whose courage both extorted Napoleon’s admiration and saved her husband from further proofs of his ire) was a woman of grand character, and as great a contrast, except in what was really best in both of them, to her lively mother-in-law as could well be imagined. She insisted on the most uncompromising observance of etiquette, and wore to the last day of her life the costume which had prevailed in the years when she was young.

Of this remarkable trio of exalted personages it was the reigning duchess whom Madame de Staël selected for her friend. Indeed, she never mentions the Dowager Duchess in corresponding with the daughter-in-law, and in her Allemagne dismisses the Grand Duke with a few lines, in which she alludes to his military talents and speaks of his conversation as piquante and thoughtful.

From Weimar, Madame de Staël went to Berlin, with letters from their highnesses of the little court to the lovely and charming Queen Louise.

In a well-known letter to the Grand Duchess (the first of their long correspondence), she records a fête which took place immediately after her arrival. It was a masquerade representing Alexander’s return to Babylon; and the beautiful queen, of whom Madame de Staël is lost in admiration, danced in it herself. To this pageant succeeded various costume quadrilles, in which Kotzebue appeared as a priest of Mercury, poppy crowned, caduceus in hand, and so ugly and awkward, that Madame de Staël wonders why her imagination was not irretrievably ruined by the sight of him.

One likes to think of her at this court in the midst of such famous and distinguished people; the personages so outwardly brilliant, so inwardly dull, who surrounded her having vanished down the gulfs of Time, her own unique personality stands out vividly against the picturesque but confused background reconstructed by our fancy.

At Berlin she first saw and liked August Wilhelm Schlegel, destined later to be so unwelcome to Sismondi, Bonstetten, and her other friends at Coppet. She succumbed at once to the varied attractions of his colossal learning, his surprising linguistic accomplishments, and his great conversational powers. She felt that here was a foeman worthy of her steel, and she magnanimously overlooked his acerbity, his pedantry and vanity. She had indeed a royal indifference to the defects of great minds. It was only the greatness she cared for.

Berlin was destined to be associated with the greatest, perhaps the most genuine, grief of her life. She left it pleased with her reception, enriched with new friends, new experiences, and new ideas. She had been happier there than six months previously she would have admitted she could ever be again; far happier than at Coppet, which for years past had only been a place where she tarried and amused herself as she could until the moment came for returning to Paris. She had treasured up a wealth of conversation for her father—all kinds of novel and delightful impressions which she felt would be listened to by nobody so appreciatively as by him; and she started for Vienna, there to glean a little more. But she had hardly set foot in Austria when a courier brought her the news that her father was dangerously ill. He was, in truth, dead, and the messenger knew it; but the fact was withheld, to be broken to her later on. She instantly quitted Vienna, where, as she expresses it, “her happiness had ended,” and started homewards. On the road her father’s death was communicated to her. Her grief was overpowering and demonstrative to the last degree. It was not only sorrow that she felt, but an overmastering terror, for it seemed to her that with her father her last moral support had vanished. Henceforward she would bend to the storms of life like a reed.

On arriving at Coppet, she sank into a condition that temporarily resembled dementia. The idea that in losing her father her whole existence was irretrievably wrecked from its moorings, and would drift aimlessly in the future, again filled her mind, and this time with greater force. To every remonstrance she only answered, “I have lost my father.” She soon recovered—strangely soon as it seemed to many—her old elasticity and fire, but a curious secret change was wrought in her from the hour of her loss. She showed mystic yearnings, and became even a little superstitious. She invoked her father in her prayers, and nothing deeply agreeable to her ever happened without her saying, “My father has obtained this for me.”

One of Necker’s latest acts was to write a letter to Napoleon begging him to rescind the order for Madame de Staël’s exile. Needless to say that the pathetic request had no effect upon the person to whom it was addressed. Domestic sentiment at no time appealed strongly to Napoleon, and at this period he had almost reached his final pitch of unreasoning and arrogant egoism. The murder of the Duc d’Enghien had hardened all his nature, and in preparing to have himself proclaimed Emperor he had kicked away any useless rubbish in the shape of scruples that might still encumber him.

Now, when the first germ of decay had begun to consume the core of his splendor, his attitude towards Madame de Staël itself altered. His persecution of her ceased to be a capricious thing compounded of spasmodic spite on his side and sporadic fears on hers, and became an organized system of repression which placed its originator in a light all the meaner that the woman against whom it was directed rose from this time to a new and grander moral altitude.

CHAPTER XI.
MADAME DE STAËL AND AUGUSTE SCHLEGEL AT ROME.

Madame de Staël sought to solace her grief for her father’s death by writing “The Private Life of Necker,” a short sketch intended to serve as preface to a volume of his fragmentary writings. Constant spoke very feelingly of this sketch, and pronounced it to be a revelation of all that was best in the writer’s head and heart. He said that all her gifts of mind and feeling were here devoted to express and adorn a single sentiment, one for which she claimed the sympathy of the world.

This is all quite true, but it is natural that the sketch should affect us less than it did Madame de Staël’s contemporaries. Necker was a good and intelligent man. He had varied talents of no common order, and an incorruptibility of character which would be rare—given the circumstances—in any age, and, by his admirers, was supposed to be especially so in his. But joined to all these qualities in him were just the foibles which spoil an image for posterity. He had a profound compassion for what he considered the hardships of his lot. It is touching to read the way—so simple, loving, and yet ingenuous—in which Madame de Staël records such facts as the following:—“It was painful to him to be old. His figure, which had grown very stout and made movement irksome to him, gave him a feeling of shyness that prevented his going into society. He hardly ever got into a carriage when anybody was looking at him, and he did not walk where he could be seen. In a word, his imagination loved grace and youth, and he would say to me sometimes, ‘I do not know why I am humiliated by the infirmities of age, but I feel that it is so.’ And it was thanks to this sentiment that he was loved like a young man.”

For the rest, the sketch is one long impassioned elegy in prose. One is astonished at the sudden creative force of expression in it. It is graphic by mere power of words without any help from metaphor.

It was not in Madame de Staël’s nature to mourn in solitude, and we have Bonstetten’s authority for the fact that the summer of 1804 was one of the most delightful which he had ever passed at the Château. Schlegel, Constant, Sismondi, were all there, as well as Bonstetten, himself, and Madame Necker de Saussure, now more than ever devoted to her cousin. Madame de Staël had also a new visitor, Müller, the historian, whose learning was stupendous, and who wrangled from morning till night on subjects of amazing erudition with Schlegel. The mistress of the house, although far from being the equal of the two combatants in learning, sometimes rushed between them with her fiery eloquence, like an angel with a flaming sword; but most of the society were reduced to silence. Sismondi felt a perfect ignoramus, and talked plaintively to Bonstetten of going to Germany, there to drink in facts and theories at the source of the new intellect. In short, the German “Revival” was beginning, and Madame de Staël in bringing Auguste Schlegel to Switzerland had broken a large piece off the mountain of learning, like somebody in the fairy tale who carried away a slice from the Island of Jewels.

In October, 1804, Madame de Staël started with Schlegel and her three children for Italy, and it is to this journey that the world owes Corinne. It is said that Schlegel first taught Madame de Staël to appreciate art—that is, painting, sculpture, and architecture. For music she had always had a passion, and both sang and played agreeably. But plastic beauty had as yet been a sealed book to her, and she had not even any great appreciation of scenery. A spontaneous feeling for all these she perhaps never acquired. Ste. Beuve, indeed, complains that the spot on Misenum where she places Corinne on one occasion, was the least picturesque of many beautiful points of view. Nevertheless, Italy revived her. She found hope and thought and voice anew beneath that magic sky. There was nothing but the still-abiding sense of loss to mar the pleasure of her visit. The diplomatic agents of Napoleon abstained from interference with her, and Joseph had given her letters introducing her to all the best society in Rome. Unlike her own Corinne, however, she found it very uninteresting, and wrote complainingly to Bonstetten that Humboldt was her most congenial companion. The Roman princes she found extremely dull, and preferred the cardinals, as being more cultivated, or more probably more men of the world. For the rest, she was received with the liveliest respect, and even enthusiasm; was made a member of the Arcadian Academy, and had endless sonnets written upon her. Unfortunately, her Dix Années d’Exil does not speak of this Italian journey, and so, for the impression she received, one has to turn to Corinne, where, of course, everything reappears more or less transfigured. One would have liked to know the genesis of that work, on what occasion it took root, and how it grew, in Madame de Staël’s mind. How much did she really know of that poor, lampooned, insulted, and squint-eyed Corilla who was the origin of her enchanting Sibyl? How far below the surface did she really see of that strange Roman world, so cosmopolitan, so chaotic after the French invasion, so thrilled with fugitive novel ideas, so steeped in time-worn apathy? It would be delightful to know what was the impression which Madame de Staël herself produced in the few salons where a little culture prevailed, and what was the true notion concerning her in that motley and decaying society of belated Arcadians, exhausted cicisbei and abatini lapsed forever from the genial circles where their youth had passed in gossiping and sonneteering.

Hers must have seemed a curious and forcible figure among all those frivolous “survivals”; and great and strange, mad and merry as were the many foreigners who found their way at various times to Rome, probably no more striking couple ever appeared there than Madame de Staël and Auguste Schlegel.

As soon as she returned to Switzerland she began Corinne. At Coppet some of her old circle immediately gathered round her again: Madame Necker de Saussure, of course, and Madame Rilliet-Hüber, Schlegel, Constant, and Sismondi, assembled to enjoy her society once more. The private theatricals in which she delighted were again resumed, and such tragedies as Zaire and Phèdre performed, as well as slight comedies composed by the châtelaine herself. Madame de Staël was fond of acting; and although she had no special talent, her imposing presence, and the earnestness with which she played, made her performance a pleasing one—at any rate, to her admirers.

When Corinne was drawing to an end, its authoress could no longer resist her old and recurring temptation to return to France. She went first to Auxerre; then, profiting by the indulgence of Fouché, who, when it was possible (and politic), always shut one eye, she accepted an invitation to Acosta, a property near Meulon belonging to Madame de Castellane. Some of her old friends ventured there to visit her, and in peace and reviving hope she completed Corinne. It was no sooner published than it was hailed with universal applause.

All this success annoyed Napoleon, possibly because it revealed in his enemy greater powers than he had hitherto suspected, hence a greater influence with all enlightened minds. According to some, an article which appeared in the Moniteur attacking Corinne was written by the Imperial hand. And this first sign of ire was followed by a new decree of banishment, which sent Madame de Staël back to Coppet. There a few new figures came to join the usual set, among them Prince Auguste of Prussia, who straightway fell a victim to Madame Récamier. For a few weeks this love affair introduced a new element of romantic, yet very human, interest into the intensely intellectual life of Coppet. The Prince wished Madame Récamier to marry him; and for a short time, either dazzled by the prospect of such splendor, or really attracted by her royal wooer, she hesitated. But such a step would have involved a divorce from M. Récamier. He was old; he had lately lost his fortune; he had always been good to her; and Juliette made up her mind that it would be too unkind to leave him.

Some other scenes not altogether literary were passing just then in the Château. The relations between Madame de Staël and Constant, of late much strained, had now become constantly stormy. Sismondi, some years later, in writing to the Countess of Albany, referred to them as really distressing, and apparently Madame Récamier was in the flattering but uncomfortable position of having to listen to and, as well as she could, soothe both parties.

Constant would have married Madame de Staël, but she desired a secret marriage, and he would only hear of an open one. It was only in 1808 he finally put an end to his perplexities by marrying Charlotte von Hardenberg. He carefully avoided telling Madame de Staël of his intention beforehand, being still too much under her influence to bear her criticisms and possible reproaches with equanimity.

About November, 1807, Madame de Staël had returned again to Germany, accompanied by two of her children, by Constant, Sismondi, and Schlegel. From Munich she wrote one of her characteristic letters to Madame Récamier:—

“I have spent five days here, and I leave for Vienna in an hour. There I shall be thirty leagues farther from you and from all who are dear to me. All society here has received me in a charming manner, and has spoken of my beautiful friend with admiration. You have an aerial reputation which nothing common can touch. The bracelet you gave me [this bracelet contained Madame Récamier’s portrait] has caused my hand to be kissed rather oftener, and I send you all the homage which I receive.”

In another she significantly remarks:—

“The Prince de Ligne is really amiable and good above all things. He has the manners of M. de Narbonne, and a heart. It is a pity he is old, but all that generation fill me with an invincible tenderness.”

This is one of her touching allusions to her father, of whom all “good gray heads” reminded her. But the Prince de Ligne and Necker were two very different people. The former was the ideal of a grand seigneur, clever, brave, handsome, all in a supreme degree; the descendant of a chivalrous race, and as gallant and noble himself as any of them. He was extremely witty, and quickly achieved the conquest of the Empress Catherine when he was sent on a mission to Russia in 1782. He followed in her suite through the Crimea on the occasion of her famous journey there with Joseph II., and his amusing account of this expedition is one of his claims to literary reputation. The last years of his brilliant life were embittered by the loss of his property, consequent on the French invasion of Belgium, and by the death in battle of his eldest and best-beloved son.

Madame de Staël probably enjoyed his society all the more that the Viennese gentlemen appeared to her singularly uninteresting. She complained of them in her letters to the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and also to Madame Récamier, and declared that she felt the need of a summer at Coppet to indemnify her for the frivolous monotony of the Austrian capital. She seems to have been in an unusually depressed state of mind, and recurred perpetually to the hardships of exile.

In April, 1808, shortly before starting again for Weimar, she addressed a letter to her former friend, the ungrateful Talleyrand, begging him to interest himself for the payment of the two millions left by her father in the French Treasury. She alluded sadly, and at some length, to all her sufferings again in this letter, and reminded him that he wrote thirteen years previously to her from America, “If I must remain even one year longer here I shall die.”

One is not much surprised to divine from subsequent circumstances that this appeal produced no effect. Amiable, and even pathetic as it was, Talleyrand was not the man to be moved by it. Like Napoleon, to whom he perhaps showed it, he would be likely to think that Madame de Staël’s “exile” was singularly mitigated. It is one thing to be proscribed and banished, not only from one’s own country but from friends and fortune; to wander, as so many illustrious refugees have done, a lonely stranger in a foreign land, not daring to invoke the protection of any authority, and constantly eking out a miserable existence by teaching or worse. It is another thing to be wealthy, influential, admired; to be the guest of sovereigns, and the honored friend of the greatest minds in Europe; to be surrounded with sympathy, and followed at every step by the homage of a brilliant and cultured crowd. Such was the existence of Madame de Staël. Her sorrows were great because her fiery temperament rebelled against her grief, at the same time that her great intellect fed it with lofty and lyric thoughts. But her sorrows were of the affections exclusively. She never felt the sting of the world’s scorn, nor knew the bitter days and sleepless nights of poverty. If she ever “ate her bread with tears,” they were not those saltest tears of all which are wrung from burning eyes by unachieved hopes and frustrated endeavor. Every field of social and intellectual activity was open to her except the salons of Paris, and those were very different under the blight of Napoleonic bureaucracy from what they had been even during the mingled vulgarity and ferment of the Directory.

She returned to Weimar, and had a touching meeting with the Grand Duchess, whose recent troubles, and the courage she displayed under them, had not only endeared her to her subjects and her friends, but had won the applause of the world. On her way thither she presumably delayed a short while in Berlin, and it must have been to that period that Ticknor refers when relating a very amusing anecdote in his Life and Letters. She asked Fichte to give her in a quarter of an hour a summarized idea of his famous Ego, professing to be, as she doubtless was, entirely in the dark about it. Fichte’s consternation may be imagined, for he had been all his life developing his system, and intended it to comprehend the universe. Moreover he spoke very bad French, and even if Madame de Staël were momentarily silent in speech, we may fancy how voluble she looked, and how nervous the prescience of her imminent rapid speech must have made the philosopher. However, he made up his mind to the attempt, and began. In a very few moments Madame de Staël burst out:

“Ah! that is enough. I understand perfectly. Your system is illustrated by a story in Munchausen’s travels.” Fichte’s expression at this announcement was a study; but the lady went on: “He arrived once on the banks of a wide river, where there was neither bridge nor ferry, neither boat nor raft; and at first he was in despair. But an idea struck him, and taking hold of his own sleeve, he jumped himself over to the other side. Now, Monsieur Fichte, is not this exactly what you have done with your Ego?”

This speech charmed everybody except Fichte himself, who never forgave Madame de Staël, or at least so Ticknor’s informant said, and it is easy to believe him.

During the remainder of 1808, and the whole of 1809 and 1810, Madame de Staël remained alternately at Coppet and Geneva, working steadily at the Allemagne. It was only about this time that she acquired habits of sustained occupation. Her father had entertained so strong and singular an objection to seeing her engaged in writing, that, rather than pain him, she used to scribble at odd hours and in casual positions—sometimes, for instance, standing by the chimney-piece. In this way she was able to hide her work as soon as he appeared, and thus spare him the annoyance of supposing that he had interrupted her. She talked so continually that it was a marvel how she ever wrote at all; and her friends used often to wonder where and how she planned her works. But the truth seems to have been that they sprang full grown from her brain, after having been unconsciously developed there by perpetual discussion.

During the years above mentioned society at Coppet, although normally composed as of old by Schlegel, Sismondi, Constant (for a time), Madame Récamier, and Bonstetten, was varied once more by new and interesting visitors. Among these was Madame Le Brun, who not only painted a portrait of Madame de Staël, but noted many things which now afford pleasant glimpses of the life at the Château. Of course, like everybody else who sojourned as a guest at Coppet, she fell under the spell of the hostess. Byron himself some years later recorded how much more charming Madame de Staël was in her own house than out of it; and she seems to have possessed the art of dispensing her hospitality, which was royal, with as much grace as cordiality.

Among the new figures in these years at Coppet were Werner and Oehlenschläger. Both were poets and cursed with the irritability of the genus, so that their mutual exasperation was great, and Madame de Staël had some trouble to keep the peace between them. Sismondi in one of his letters described Werner as a man of many intellectual gifts, who considered himself the apostle of Love and bound to preach it in his wanderings through the world. Occasionally his utterances were a little puzzling to sober-minded people, who were too much taken aback by his mystical mixtures of passion, sentiment, and piety to be always ready with an answer.

Werner had had a Sturm und Drang period of extreme dissipation, had taken to Freemasonry, and imbibed, apparently, some of the ideas of the Illuminati; and, besides his mysticism in religion, inclined to socialism in politics. After all this vagueness of thought, joined to a highly impressionable and very vivid temperament, it is not surprising to learn that he eventually became a Roman Catholic priest and rose to great renown as a preacher.

Oehlenschläger has left a spiteful picture of Werner, with his nose full of snuff, discussing his esoteric doctrines in an execrable patois which was intended for French. Both poets, however, united in admiring and praising, almost worshipping, Madame de Staël, and she on her side seems to have cared little for any peculiarity in their habits as long as there was originality in their characters.

It was during this visit of the two poets at Coppet that Karl Ritter appeared for a short time on the scene. He enjoyed a great reputation in Germany, being considered as the inventor of the Science of Comparative Geography. He was also a gentle, earnest man, and became extremely religious in his old age. He records an animated, indeed perfervid and amazingly eloquent, speech pronounced before him by Madame de Staël in favor of the metaphysical origin of religion, and in answer to Sismondi who maintained that its basis should be reasoned morality. Madame de Staël declared that religion was the condition of virtue; and that without it there could be no higher life, by which she meant no communion with God. In support of this thesis she displayed the most surprising power both of analysis and illustration, while her logic appearing to Ritter unanswerable, caused the discussion, as he avers, to be an epoch in his intellectual life. This new interest of Madame de Staël in such questions was largely due to the ever-growing influence of Madame de Krüdener, now irrevocably “regenerate” and rapidly rising to fame as a priestess and prophetess, while leading a life of the utmost asceticism. She had been in Coppet again, and had left there the trail of her sacerdotal tendencies. Poor Bonstetten, daily growing younger in mind and heart, was comically disgusted at the change which was coming over the intellectual life at the Château. The confusion of dogmas prevailing could not console him for the fact of there being any dogmas at all. Between Catholics, Boehmists, Martinists and Mystics, he appeared at times to be quite worn out, and attributed the whole revolution to the influence of his pet aversion Schlegel. How he made this out is not very clear, for the theological spirit was as cosmopolitan in its representatives as varied in its forms. Mathieu de Montmorency was a Catholic, somebody else a Quietist, a third an Illuminist, while Rationalism was left to the doubtful prowess of Baron Voght, who was reported by Bonstetten to be as gyratory in his opinions as a weathercock.

We now approach an event in Madame de Staël’s life so well known and so often recounted, that it will not be necessary to relate it again in detail. This was the suppression of her Allemagne, Napoleon’s crowning act of meanness, and a deed which obtained for Madame de Staël the entire and unquestioning sympathy of every enlightened mind and generous heart.

Madame de Staël determined, after some hesitation, to publish the work in Paris, after submitting it in the first instance to the approval of the Imperial Censors. Why she took this unfortunate resolution it is difficult to conceive; for she had been plentifully illuminated with regard to Napoleon’s spite, and even if all her penetration did not enable her to foresee the full lengths to which this would carry him, she might, one would think, have guessed that the censors in Paris would judge her work with the utmost severity.

However this may be, she took up her abode near Blois for the sake of correcting the proofs as they issued from the press. She had, before leaving Coppet, caused her passports to be made out for America, in which country she had property, and whither, for the sake of her children she said, she was gradually making up her mind to go. One cannot imagine Madame de Staël in the New World such as it was in those days; and as she entertained the project for a long while, put it off from month to month, and finally abandoned it altogether, it is more than probable that she never liked it sufficiently to have resolved upon it seriously.

At Blois she established herself first in the famous Château of Chaumont-sur-Loire, haunted by such various memories as the Cardinal d’Amboise, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and Nostradamus. But the owner of the house shortly returning, she removed to another mansion at Fossé, the home of a M. de Salaberry. She had addressed a letter to Napoleon in which she presented her work to his notice, craved an interview in very respectful terms, and urged on his notice the advantage which it would be for her sons’ career and her daughter’s eventual marriage (Albertine was then thirteen) if she were allowed to reside again in the neighborhood of Paris.

While awaiting the answer to this, she gathered round her a group of her usual friends, among them Madame Récamier, Adrien and Mathieu de Montmorency, Prosper de Barante, and Benjamin Constant. This society amused itself with music (an Italian musician, Albertine’s master, who played the guitar, being of the company), and with a quaint invention named La petite poste. This consisted in abolishing conversation and substituting for it little notes, which were passed from one to the other. A very innocent amusement; but either it, or the guitar-playing, or “Corinne’s” famous name made some noise in the neighborhood.

Finally, one evening Madame de Staël went to the theatre at Blois, and, on leaving it, was surrounded by a curious crowd. Some officious person communicated this fact, probably with various others, some true, some false, to the Minister of Police, who wrote to the Prefect of the department to complain that his master’s celebrated foe was the centre of a little court. In a short time the blow fell. No answer came from Napoleon, but, instead of it, the announcement that her book had been seized, that all copies of it were destroyed, and that the authoress was to leave France within three days either for America or Coppet. At the same time, the Prefect of Loir and Cher demanded the surrender of the MS. of the work. Fortunately Madame de Staël possessed a rough copy, which she gave him, while her son saved the real one.

She wrote to Savary, Duke of Rovigo (“permitted,” she says bitingly “to hide his name under a title”), and represented to him that the interval allowed her for her departure was insufficient. She received a reply which has become classic for its baseness, its insolence, and its ludicrous arrogance. All the littleness and none of the force of Napoleon was reflected from the mind of his underling. He told her that she need not seek for the cause of her exile in the silence regarding the Emperor which she had observed in her work, for that no place in it could have been found worthy of him! For the rest, the air of France did not suit her, and as for its inhabitants, they were not yet reduced to taking as models the nations whom she admired. Her last work was not French, and it was he (this worthy official) who had forbidden it to be printed.

Savary thus claimed for himself, and not for his master, the glory of this precious proceeding; but as nobody suspected him of acting except under orders, he blew this trumpet to the desert air.

The blow to Madame de Staël was a terrible one. Her first impulse was to go to America; but fearing the long sea-voyage for her daughter at that season of the year (it was October), she once again set her face most reluctantly towards Coppet. This place, which she henceforward describes as a “prison,” was shortly afterwards made further distasteful to her by a change of Prefect. Monsieur de Barante, who was a friend of hers, was removed, and the successor appointed to him, M. Capelle, was one of the functionaries now turned out by the gross from the Imperial mould. He regarded Napoleon as a deity and himself as a prophet, and conceived the brilliant idea of distinguishing himself by persuading Madame de Staël to write something flattering of the Emperor. Naturally he failed; the mind of a bureaucrat prostrate before the fetich of his own alarmed idolatry alone could have conceived the possibility of success. And naturally, again, his failure rankled, and caused him to visit his disappointment on the creator of it by numerous small vexations.