Ten Years' Exile / Memoirs of That Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness De Stael-Holstein, Written by Herself, during the Years 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813, and Now First Published from the Original Manuscript, by Her Son.

by Madame de Staël

CHAPTER 4.

Exile of M. de Montmorency and Madame Recamier—New persecutions.

This continual chicanery upon my most trifling actions, rendered my life odious to me, and I could not divert myself by occupation; for the recollection of the fate of my last work, and the certainty of never being able to publish any thing in future, operated as a complete damper to my mind, which requires emulation to be capable of labor. Notwithstanding, I could not yet resolve to quit for ever the borders of France, the abode of my father, and the friends who remained faithful to me. Every day I thought of departing, and every day I found in my own mind some reason for remaining, until the last blow was aimed at my soul; God knows what I have suffered from it.

M. de Montmorency came to pass several days with me at Coppet, and the wickedness of detail in the master of so great an empire is so well calculated, that by the return of the courier who announced his arrival at Coppet, my friend received his letter of exile. The emperor would not have been satisfied if this order had not been signified to him at my house, and if there had not been in the letter itself of the minister of police, a word to signify that I was the cause of this exile. M. de Montmorency endeavoured, in every possible way, to soften the news to me, but, I tell it to Bonaparte, that he may applaud himself on the success of his scheme, I shrieked with agony on learning the calamity which I had drawn on the head of my generous friend; and never was my heart, tried as it had been for so many years, nearer to despair. I knew not how to lull the rending thoughts which succeeded each other in my bosom, and had recourse to opium to suspend for some hours the anguish which I felt. M. do Montmorency, calm and religious, invited me to follow his example; the consciousness of the devotedness to me which he had condescended to show, supported him: but for me, I reproached myself for the bitter consequences of this devotedness, which now separated him from his family and friends. I prayed to the Almighty without ceasing, but grief would not quit its hold of me for a moment, and life became a burden to me.

While I was in this state, I received a letter from Madame Recamier, that beautiful person who has received the admiration of the whole of Europe, and who has never abandoned an unfortunate friend. She informed me, that on her road to the waters of Aix in Savoy, to which she was proceeding, she intended stopping at my house, and would be there in two days. I trembled lest the lot of M. de Montmorency should also become hers. However improbable it was, I was ordained to fear every thing from hatred so barbarous and minute, and I therefore sent a courier to meet Madame Recamier, to beseech her not to come to Coppet. To know that she who had never failed to console me with the most amiable attention was only a few leagues distant from me; to know that she was there, so near to my habitation, and that I was not allowed to see her again, perhaps for the last time! all this I was obliged to bear. I conjured her not to stop at Coppet; she would not yield to my entreaties; she could not pass under my windows without remaining some hours with me, and it was with convulsions of tears that I saw her enter this chateau, in which her arrival had always been a fete. She left me the next day, and repaired instantly to one of her relations at fifty leagues distance from Switzerland. It was in vain; the fatal blow of exile smote her also; she had had the intention of seeing me, and that was enough; for the generous compassion which had inspired her, she must be punished. The reverses of fortune which she had met with made the destruction of her natural establishment extremely painful to her. Separated from all her friends, she has passed whole months in a little provincial town, a prey to the extremes of every feeling of insipid and melancholy solitude. Such was the lot to which I was the cause of condemning the most brilliant female of her time; and thus regardless did the chief of the French, that people so renowned for their gallantry, show himself towards the most beautiful woman in Paris. In one day he smote virtue and distinguished birth in M. de Montmorency; beauty in Madame Recamier, and if I dare say it, the reputation of high talents in myself. Perhaps he also flattered himself with attacking the memory of my father in his daughter, in order that it might be truly said that in this world, under his reign, the dead and the living, piety, beauty, wit, and celebrity, all were as nothing. Persons made themselves culpable by being found wanting in the delicate shades of flattery towards him, in refusing to abandon any one who had been visited by his disgrace. He recognises but two classes of human creatures, those who serve him, and those, who without injuring, wish to have an existence independent of him. He is unwilling that in the whole universe, from the details of housekeeping to the direction of empires, a single will should act without reference to his.

"Madam de Stael," said the prefect of Geneva, "has contrived to make herself a very pleasant life at Coppet; her friends and foreigners come to see her: the emperor will not allow that." And why did he torment me in this manner? that I might print an eulogium upon him: and of what consequence was this eulogium to him, among the millions of phrases which fear and hope were constantly offering at his shrine? Bonaparte once said: "If I had the choice, either of doing a noble action myself, or of inducing my adversary to do a mean one, I would not hesitate to prefer the debasement of my enemy." In this sentence you have the explanation of the particular pains which he took to torment my existence. He knew that I was attached to my friends, to France, to my works, to my tastes, to society; in taking from me every thing which composed my happiness, his wish was to trouble me sufficiently to make me write some piece of insipid flattery, in the hope that it would obtain me my recall. In refusing to lend myself to his wishes, I ought to say it, I have not had the merit of making a sacrifice; the emperor wished me to commit a meanness, but a meanness entirely useless; for at a time when success was in a manner deified, the ridicule would not have been complete, if I had succeeded in returning to Paris, by whatever means I had effected it. To satisfy our master, whose skill in degrading whatever remains of lofty mind is unquestionable, it was necessary that I should dishonor myself in order to obtain my return to France,—that he should turn into mockery my zeal in praise of him, who had never ceased to persecute me,—and that this zeal should not be of the least service to me. I have denied him this truly refined satisfaction; it is all the merit I have had in the long contest which has subsisted between his omnipotence and my weakness.

M. de Montmorency's family, in despair at his exile, were anxious, as was natural, that he should separate himself from the sad cause of this calamity, and I saw that friend depart without knowing if he would ever again honor with his presence my residence on this earth. On the 31st of August, 1811, I broke the first and last of the ties which bound me to my native country; I broke them, at least so far as regards human connections, which can no longer exist between us; but I never lift my eyes towards heaven without thinking of my excellent friend, and I venture to believe also, that in his prayers he answers me. Beyond this, fate has denied me all other correspondence with him.

When the exile of my two friends became known, I was assailed by a whole host of chagrins of every kind; but a great misfortune renders us in a manner insensible to fresh troubles. It was reported that the minister of police had declared that he would have a soldier's guard mounted at the bottom of the avenue of Coppet, to arrest whoever came to see me. The prefect of Geneva, who was instructed, by order of the emperor he said, to annul me (that was his expression), never missed an opportunity of insinuating, or even declaring publicly, that no one who had any thing either to hope or fear from the government ought to venture near me. M. de Saint-Priest, formerly minister of Louis XVI. and the colleague of my father, honored me with his affection; his daughters who dreaded, and with reason, that he might be sent from Geneva, united their entreaties with mine that he would abstain from visiting me. Notwithstanding, in the middle of winter, at the age of seventy-eight, he was banished not only from Geneva, but from Switzerland; for it is fully admitted, as has been seen in my own case, that the emperor can banish from Switzerland as well as from France; and when any objections are made to the French agents, on the score of being in a foreign country, whose independence is recognised, they shrug up their shoulders, as if you were wearying them with Metaphysical quibbles. And really it is a perfect quibble to wish to distinguish in Europe anything but prefect-kings, and prefects receiving their orders directly from the emperor of France. If there is any difference between the soi-disant allied countries and the French provinces, it is that the first are rather worse treated. There remains in France a certain recollection of having been called the great nation, which sometimes obliges the emperor to be measured in his proceedings; it was so at least, but every day even that becomes less necessary. The motive assigned for the banishment of M. de Saint-Priest was, that he had not induced his sons to abandon the service of Russia. His sons had, during the emigration, met with the most generous reception in Russia; they had there been promoted, their intrepid courage had there been properly rewarded; they were covered with wounds, they were distinguished among the first for their military talents; the eldest was now more than thirty years of age. How was it possible for a father to ask that the existence of his sons, thus established, should be sacrificed to the honor of coming to place themselves en surveillance on the French territory? for that was the enviable lot which was reserved for them. It was a source of melancholy satisfaction to me, that I had not seen M. de Saint-Priest for four months previous to his banishment; had it not been for that, no one would have doubted that it was I who had infected him with the contagion of my disgrace.

Not only Frenchmen, but foreigners, were apprised that they must not go to my house. The prefect kept upon the watch to prevent even old friends from seeing me. One day, among others, he deprived me, by his official vigilance, of the society of a German gentleman, whose conversation was extremely agreeable to me, and I could not help telling him, on this occasion, that he might have spared himself this extraordinary degree of persecution. "How!" replied he, "it was to do you a service that I acted in this manner; I made your friend sensible that he would compromise you by going to see you." I could not refrain from a smile at this ingenious argument. "Yes," continued he with the most perfect gravity, "the emperor, seeing you preferred to himself, would be displeased with you for it." "So that" I replied, "the emperor expects that my private friends, and shortly, perhaps, my own children, should forsake me to please him; that seems to me rather too much. Besides, I do not well see how a person in my situation can be compromised; and what you say reminds me of a revolutionist who was applied to, in the times of terror, to use his endeavours to save one of his friends from the scaffold. I am afraid, said he, that my speaking in his favor would only injure him." The prefect smiled at my quotation, but continued that train of reasoning, which, backed as it is with four hundred thousand bayonets, always appears the soundest. A man at Geneva said to me, "Do not you think that the prefect declares his opinion with a great deal of frankness?" "Yes," I replied, "he says with sincerity that he is devoted to the man of power; he says with courage that he is of the strongest side; I am not exactly sensible of the merit of such an avowal."

Several independent ladies at Geneva continued to show me marks of the greatest kindness, of which I shall always retain a deep recollection. But even to the clerks in the custom houses, regarded themselves as in a state of diplomacy with me; and from prefects to sub-prefects, and from the cousins of one and the other, a profound terror would have seized them all, if I had not spared them, as much as was in my power, the anxiety of paying or not paying a visit. Every courier brought reports of other friends of mine being exiled from Paris, for having kept up connections with me; it became a matter of strict duty for me to avoid seeing a single Frenchman of the least note; and very often I was even apprehensive of injuring persons in the country where I was living, whose courageous friendship never failed itself towards me. I felt two opposite sensations, and both, I believe, equally natural; melancholy at being forsaken, and cruel anxiety for those who showed attachment to me. It is difficult to conceive a situation in life more painful at every moment; for the space of nearly two years that I endured it, I may say truly that I never once saw the day return without a feeling of desolation at having to support the existence which that day renewed. But why should not you leave it then? will be said, and was said incessantly to me from all quarters. A man whom I ought not to name*, but who I trust knows how much I esteem the elevation of his character and conduct, said to me: "If you remain, he will treat you as Elizabeth did Mary Stuart:—nineteen years of misery, and the catastrophe at last." Another person, witty but unguarded in his expressions, wrote to me, that it was dishonorable to remain after so much ill-treatment. I had no need of these recommendations to wish, passionately wish, to depart; from the moment that I could no longer see my friends, that I was only a burden to my children's existence, was it not time to determine? The prefect, however, repeated in every possible way, that if I went off, I should be seized; that at Vienna, as well as at Berlin, I should be reclaimed; and that I could not make the least preparation for departure without his being informed of it; for he knew, he said, every thing that passed in my house. In that respect he was a boaster, and, as the event has proved, exhibited mere fatuity in matters of espionnage. But who would not have been terrified at the tone of assurance with which he told all my friends that I could not move a step without being seized by the gendarmes!

* Count Elzearn de Sabran.