Savary thus claimed for himself, and not for his master, the glory of this precious proceeding; but as nobody suspected him of acting except under orders, he blew this trumpet to the desert air.
The blow to Madame de Staël was a terrible one. Her first impulse was to go to America; but fearing the long sea-voyage for her daughter at that season of the year (it was October), she once again set her face most reluctantly towards Coppet. This place, which she henceforward describes as a “prison,” was shortly afterwards made further distasteful to her by a change of Prefect. Monsieur de Barante, who was a friend of hers, was removed, and the successor appointed to him, M. Capelle, was one of the functionaries now turned out by the gross from the Imperial mould. He regarded Napoleon as a deity and himself as a prophet, and conceived the brilliant idea of distinguishing himself by persuading Madame de Staël to write something flattering of the Emperor. Naturally he failed; the mind of a bureaucrat prostrate before the fetich of his own alarmed idolatry alone could have conceived the possibility of success. And naturally, again, his failure rankled, and caused him to visit his disappointment on the creator of it by numerous small vexations.
CHAPTER XII.
MADAME DE STAËL’S SECOND MARRIAGE.
Madame de Staël arrived at Coppet in a condition of despair, which she partially solaced by writing to Madame Récamier and thanking her again and again for the constancy of her friendship. Evidently many of her friends had already dropped away, or she fancied they had. Perhaps she wearied them a little with her lamentations, for one knows that silence was never her forte. But all at once a happy change came over her. Sismondi, writing to the Countess of Albany, mentioned the transformation, and spoke of their friend with admiration for her new-born but to him inexplicable courage. She had given up literary work, and no longer alluded to her afflictions; and yet, in spite of that, her gaiety was great and her conversation as charming and sparkling as ever. Sismondi doubtless considered that Reason—his beloved Reason was at last asserting its sway over “Corinne’s” excitable imagination. He must have been greatly surprised a long time afterwards when he learnt that the magician was Love. Years previously, when Sismondi had himself been in love in his decorous fashion, and had reproached Madame de Staël for a want of sympathy in his trouble—a want which he had not expected in the author of Delphine—she said to him: “I have never loved that I have not felt in myself two persons—one who laughed at the other.” But when she made that answer she was young and restless, and, like all great and burning minds, claimed from life a destiny too radiant to be ever realized. Now she was middle-aged; she had drunk of the waters of bitterness and known some of the tragic awakenings of passion; she had experienced an immeasurable sorrow in the loss of her father; she had become familiar to satiety with the triumphs of the world; and was, as she wrote to Madame Récamier, “wearied of suffering.” In short the moment had come when the one imperious cry of her soul was for peace. In such a state of mind what seems ridiculous becomes possible, and the spirit of mocking youth in Madame de Staël, which once could laugh at the passionate half of her nature, was buried with most of her hopes and almost all of her illusions.
It was shortly after her return to Switzerland that, going to Geneva to spend some little while, she first met Rocca. He was twenty-three, she was forty-five; but that disparity of years did not prevent his conceiving for her a most romantic passion. He was extremely handsome—a fact to which Frederica Brun and Byron alike bear witness, and was further interesting through having been wounded in the war in Spain, and so badly that his health was never restored. He was the son of a Councillor of State in Geneva, and descended from a noble Piedmontese family which had emigrated to Switzerland during the persecution of the Protestants. He had some culture and considerable intelligence; was even something of an author; and, finally, was a splendid horseman. He was wont to ride a magnificent black Andalusian steed, and performed unheard-of feats of jumping and galloping under the windows of the house in Geneva where Madame de Staël was staying. These varied attractions finally proved irresistible to the object of his homage, and before the year 1811 a secret marriage took place. Why it was a secret is one of those mysteries which has never been satisfactorily cleared up. One explanation is that Bonaparte, out of hatred of Madame de Staël, would order Rocca, who, of course, was in the French army, away on service. But if this had been the real reason, it was sufficiently strong to have rendered any further explanation unnecessary. Nevertheless, a very good authority, the authoress of Coppet et Weimar, gives two other reasons: one that Madame de Staël would “never have consented to give up the aristocratic name which she had made so illustrious”; the other, that the world would have turned such a marriage into ridicule. In this connection it is worth while to state that Constant has given Madame de Staël’s unwillingness to change her name as a reason why she would not consent to an open marriage with him.
The union with Rocca seems to have been a very happy one; but inasmuch as it passed for years in the eyes of everybody for a connection of another nature, there is no doubt that it brought Madame de Staël into some discredit. Many of the guests at Coppet admired Rocca, but Sismondi, for one, disliked him extremely. Sismondi, however, was not unfrequently disposed to be rather severe on Madame de Staël and her guests; he even carped a little at the lovely Juliette. “She (Madame Récamier) has put in a fleeting appearance here,” he wrote in August, 1811. “She is full of kindness and graciousness towards Madame de Staël, and is not less pretty than two years ago, and yet I am glad that she is going; for whenever she is present, all true conversation is destroyed. She always beguiles her neighbor into low-toned tête-à-tête talk. Her small airs and graces weary me, and her intelligence—for she is intelligent—in no way profits the public.”
Sismondi sometimes visited Madame de Staël herself with criticism not less captious, although he was generally vanquished in the end by her heroism and her charm. During the summer of 1811 she was in a very restless and unhappy mood, which often drew forth his censure.
The conviction of the extreme disfavor with which Napoleon regarded her was now widely spread, and one of its results was a real or fancied falling-off of friends, which wounded her exceedingly. To nothing was she so sensitive as to any failure of affection, and the ardor with which she sought to defend herself from blame was caused not so much by offended self-love as by slighted feeling of a more amiable kind. Just about this time she wrote to Camille Jordan a very characteristic letter. Its tone was indignant, for Jordan, always rather cold and repellent, had evidently stung her by some censure of her conduct. Apparently also, he had sought to justify himself for not coming to see her, for she assured him that she had never dreamed of blaming him, nor entertained a thought against his loyalty. She quivered under a shaft which had struck more deeply home, and in one sentence made an allusion applying apparently to Rocca. She owned that being placed, as it appeared to her, on the highest pinnacle of moral dignity, she had felt some wonder at the fact that Jordan, “indulgent towards the inconceivable conduct of Girando,” should have reserved all his wrath for an unhappy woman who, “while resisting all attacks and defending her children and her talent at the risk of happiness, security, and life,” had allowed herself to be momentarily touched by the self-sacrificing chivalry of a young man. Her anger was but fleeting, and a few months later she wrote as affectionately as ever to Camille, who, perhaps, for once had been shaken from his prudent calm by her fiery words, and had calmed her by protesting unaltered regard.