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.