Hitherto his Egeria had been Madame de Charrière, a charming middle-aged monitress, Dutch by birth, but French by right of intellect and choice of language. Her delicate penetration and subtle sympathy with minor moods had doubtless for years responded precisely to his ideal; for if she might not excite neither could she bore him; and she must have understood his fastidious notions even before he could express them. She was, in fact, perfection, as long as he was still too young to mind feeling old; but there necessarily came a moment when that unconscious comedy was played out. The fitful energy of his nature had gradually vanquished his early lassitude, and he needed to renew his utterances at the founts of some Sybilline inspiration.
Madame de Staël appears simply to have overwhelmed him; and the effect which he produced on her was not less startling. Her salon was the rallying-ground of contradictory individualities. She believed in those days that she could reconcile Irreconcilables, and she welcomed Conventionnels like Chénier and Roederer, stranded “survivals” of a vanished epoch like Suard, Morellet and Laharpe; and aristocrats, some of them altogether soured and worn out, like Castellane, Choiseul and Narbonne. Into this political menagerie Constant fell like a spirit from another world. Applauding the Revolution, yet having played no part in it, he was its virgin knight. There was something strange and attractive also in his appearance; a certain awkwardness in figure and gesture joined to a handsome, clever, young face and long, fair hair. Just at that moment (1795) the predominant tendency in Madame de Staël’s salon was hostile to the Government. She professed herself already to be converted to Republicanism, and probably was so in theory, but she had not yet overcome her aversion to the real revolutionaries. Either directly through her influence or with her tacit consent, Constant was induced to publish three letters protesting against the admission of two thirds of the old Convention into the new body of Representatives. The success which followed was prodigious. All the women of the Royalist party flattered and caressed him, and all the journalists extolled him to the skies. Constant, however, was not the man to bear that kind of petting long, he required excitement with some keener edge to it, and was, moreover, too logical, too naturally enlightened and liberal to endorse reactionary platitudes. He hastened to disavow the letters, and although he did not find it easy to disabuse the public mind of its first impression, he was careful not to deepen this by any further mistakes. During the following four years his intimacy with Madame de Staël flourished and grew apace. They acted and reacted upon one another by the law of their opposing natures. His ardor was as uncertain as hers was steady; but whenever he caught fresh fire, it came from her. On the other hand, the tormenting kind of cruelty which belonged to his cynical caprice seems to have cast a spell over Madame de Staël’s own warm and frank simplicity which she found it difficult to break.
To Constant, at this time, belongs the merit of having appreciated her thoroughly and defended her warmly—if not invariably, at any rate in his truer moments. On his very first meeting with her, which was in Switzerland, she enthralled him instantaneously; perhaps all the more so that, like most people, he had been prejudiced against her by hearsay. He wrote to Madame de Charrière, who seems to have felt and expressed some bitterness regarding his new acquaintance, that she should get rid of the idea that Madame de Staël was nothing more than a “talking machine.”
He praised her lively interest in everyone who suffered, and her courage in scheming for the escape of her friends and enemies. He admitted that she might be active partly because she could not help it; but silenced further carping by the remark that her activity was well employed. In about a month more his admiration had risen to enthusiasm, and he could hardly find words in which to praise the brilliancy and accuracy of mind, the exquisite goodness, the generosity and social politeness, the simplicity and charm of his latest friend. He declared that she knew just as well how to listen as to talk (a point on which many both before and after Madame de Charrière differed from him), and that she enjoyed the talents of other people quite as much as her own. This was perfectly true. No woman ever breathed who was less envious than Madame de Staël; but, on the other hand, what woman’s intellect was ever so unapproachable? At the time, however, of her first acquaintance with Constant, her literary reputation was still to make, and it is not to be wondered at, consequently, if Madame de Charrière felt more inclined to question than agree when informed that this restless female politician was a being of so superior a sort that her like could not be met with once in a century.
About 1796 Madame de Staël took a new departure. Perhaps thanks to Constant’s enlightened views, perhaps thanks merely to her own common sense, she felt the full futility of reactionary effort, and ranged herself frankly on the side of the Directory. The royalist Club de Clichy was by this time an accomplished fact; and to neutralize its mischievous influence the Cercle Constitutionnel had been formed at the Hôtel de Salm. For some time Madame de Staël was the soul of these meetings, and Constant was their orator. Finally, when a fresh division in the Convention declared itself, and a large number of deputies deserted the Directory, Madame de Staël and Constant exerted themselves to prove that such dissensions could profit only the two extremes of Royalists or Terrorists, but never the Moderates. Naturally, the latter were deaf (when have Moderates eyes to see or ears to hear in moments of vital significance?), and Madame de Staël’s worst previsions were justified by the events of the 18th Fructidor. The establishment, two years later, of the Consulate, while filling Madame de Staël’s noble soul with dismay, offered Constant the opportunity assigned to him by his talents. He entered then upon the course of opposition from which he did not again deviate until sixteen years later, when he yielded either to Napoleon’s personal charm, the fascination of his deeds, and the hope of his repentance, or to the profound disgust of a world-worn man with the imbecility of the Restoration.
This is how Constant, in 1800, described the state of the public mind in France:—
“The predominating idea was: Liberty has done us harm, and we wish for it no longer; and those who modestly pointed out to these candidates for slavery that the evils of the Revolution came precisely from the fact that the Revolution had suspended liberty, were hounded through the salons under the names of Jacobins and Anarchists. A nation which begged for slavery from a military chieftain of thirty, who had covered himself with glory, might count upon its wishes being gratified; and they were.”
These few lines are a good example of Constant’s incisive intellect and biting style. Another man with such gifts would have retired disgusted from all opposition; but Constant loved fighting for its own sake. Perhaps he loved the combat better than the cause; but that is one of the secrets which it is given to no one to fathom. Whatever the central motive, the final fact of his complex and interesting nature, he proved himself the ideal leader of a forlorn hope.
By the contemporaries of Constant and Madame de Staël the connection between these two brilliant minds was, as might be expected, variously judged. Later critics have asserted that he was completely under her influence, but it is more likely that his native cynicism and spurious passion alternately irritated and dominated her. She may have inspired, but she could not mould, a nature so original and perverse.
Chênedollé said of Madame de Staël about this time that she had more intelligence than she could manage, and in this there was probably some truth. She had hardly begun to write as yet, having published (besides some pamphlets) only the Letters on Rousseau, and her work on the Passions. Her turbulence of ideas, scarcely then reduced to any system, must necessarily have been crystallized at moments by contact with a more definite mind.