Madame de Staël

by Bella Duffy

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.