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.