This is one of her touching allusions to her father, of whom all “good gray heads” reminded her. But the Prince de Ligne and Necker were two very different people. The former was the ideal of a grand seigneur, clever, brave, handsome, all in a supreme degree; the descendant of a chivalrous race, and as gallant and noble himself as any of them. He was extremely witty, and quickly achieved the conquest of the Empress Catherine when he was sent on a mission to Russia in 1782. He followed in her suite through the Crimea on the occasion of her famous journey there with Joseph II., and his amusing account of this expedition is one of his claims to literary reputation. The last years of his brilliant life were embittered by the loss of his property, consequent on the French invasion of Belgium, and by the death in battle of his eldest and best-beloved son.
Madame de Staël probably enjoyed his society all the more that the Viennese gentlemen appeared to her singularly uninteresting. She complained of them in her letters to the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and also to Madame Récamier, and declared that she felt the need of a summer at Coppet to indemnify her for the frivolous monotony of the Austrian capital. She seems to have been in an unusually depressed state of mind, and recurred perpetually to the hardships of exile.
In April, 1808, shortly before starting again for Weimar, she addressed a letter to her former friend, the ungrateful Talleyrand, begging him to interest himself for the payment of the two millions left by her father in the French Treasury. She alluded sadly, and at some length, to all her sufferings again in this letter, and reminded him that he wrote thirteen years previously to her from America, “If I must remain even one year longer here I shall die.”
One is not much surprised to divine from subsequent circumstances that this appeal produced no effect. Amiable, and even pathetic as it was, Talleyrand was not the man to be moved by it. Like Napoleon, to whom he perhaps showed it, he would be likely to think that Madame de Staël’s “exile” was singularly mitigated. It is one thing to be proscribed and banished, not only from one’s own country but from friends and fortune; to wander, as so many illustrious refugees have done, a lonely stranger in a foreign land, not daring to invoke the protection of any authority, and constantly eking out a miserable existence by teaching or worse. It is another thing to be wealthy, influential, admired; to be the guest of sovereigns, and the honored friend of the greatest minds in Europe; to be surrounded with sympathy, and followed at every step by the homage of a brilliant and cultured crowd. Such was the existence of Madame de Staël. Her sorrows were great because her fiery temperament rebelled against her grief, at the same time that her great intellect fed it with lofty and lyric thoughts. But her sorrows were of the affections exclusively. She never felt the sting of the world’s scorn, nor knew the bitter days and sleepless nights of poverty. If she ever “ate her bread with tears,” they were not those saltest tears of all which are wrung from burning eyes by unachieved hopes and frustrated endeavor. Every field of social and intellectual activity was open to her except the salons of Paris, and those were very different under the blight of Napoleonic bureaucracy from what they had been even during the mingled vulgarity and ferment of the Directory.
She returned to Weimar, and had a touching meeting with the Grand Duchess, whose recent troubles, and the courage she displayed under them, had not only endeared her to her subjects and her friends, but had won the applause of the world. On her way thither she presumably delayed a short while in Berlin, and it must have been to that period that Ticknor refers when relating a very amusing anecdote in his Life and Letters. She asked Fichte to give her in a quarter of an hour a summarized idea of his famous Ego, professing to be, as she doubtless was, entirely in the dark about it. Fichte’s consternation may be imagined, for he had been all his life developing his system, and intended it to comprehend the universe. Moreover he spoke very bad French, and even if Madame de Staël were momentarily silent in speech, we may fancy how voluble she looked, and how nervous the prescience of her imminent rapid speech must have made the philosopher. However, he made up his mind to the attempt, and began. In a very few moments Madame de Staël burst out:
“Ah! that is enough. I understand perfectly. Your system is illustrated by a story in Munchausen’s travels.” Fichte’s expression at this announcement was a study; but the lady went on: “He arrived once on the banks of a wide river, where there was neither bridge nor ferry, neither boat nor raft; and at first he was in despair. But an idea struck him, and taking hold of his own sleeve, he jumped himself over to the other side. Now, Monsieur Fichte, is not this exactly what you have done with your Ego?”
This speech charmed everybody except Fichte himself, who never forgave Madame de Staël, or at least so Ticknor’s informant said, and it is easy to believe him.
During the remainder of 1808, and the whole of 1809 and 1810, Madame de Staël remained alternately at Coppet and Geneva, working steadily at the Allemagne. It was only about this time that she acquired habits of sustained occupation. Her father had entertained so strong and singular an objection to seeing her engaged in writing, that, rather than pain him, she used to scribble at odd hours and in casual positions—sometimes, for instance, standing by the chimney-piece. In this way she was able to hide her work as soon as he appeared, and thus spare him the annoyance of supposing that he had interrupted her. She talked so continually that it was a marvel how she ever wrote at all; and her friends used often to wonder where and how she planned her works. But the truth seems to have been that they sprang full grown from her brain, after having been unconsciously developed there by perpetual discussion.
During the years above mentioned society at Coppet, although normally composed as of old by Schlegel, Sismondi, Constant (for a time), Madame Récamier, and Bonstetten, was varied once more by new and interesting visitors. Among these was Madame Le Brun, who not only painted a portrait of Madame de Staël, but noted many things which now afford pleasant glimpses of the life at the Château. Of course, like everybody else who sojourned as a guest at Coppet, she fell under the spell of the hostess. Byron himself some years later recorded how much more charming Madame de Staël was in her own house than out of it; and she seems to have possessed the art of dispensing her hospitality, which was royal, with as much grace as cordiality.
Among the new figures in these years at Coppet were Werner and Oehlenschläger. Both were poets and cursed with the irritability of the genus, so that their mutual exasperation was great, and Madame de Staël had some trouble to keep the peace between them. Sismondi in one of his letters described Werner as a man of many intellectual gifts, who considered himself the apostle of Love and bound to preach it in his wanderings through the world. Occasionally his utterances were a little puzzling to sober-minded people, who were too much taken aback by his mystical mixtures of passion, sentiment, and piety to be always ready with an answer.