Madame de Staël

by Bella Duffy

This year of 1811 was fruitful of sorrow. Mathieu de Montmorency and Madame de Récamier were both exiled immediately after a visit paid by them to their illustrious friend. According to Madame Lenormant, the writer of Coppet et Weimar, as well as to Madame de Staël herself, the letter from the Minister of Police which conveyed the order of exile to Mathieu de Montmorency distinctly signified that friendship with the mistress of Coppet was the cause of his disgrace. Sismondi, however, who showed himself incredulous, and to a certain extent unsympathizing throughout all these circumstances, when writing to the Countess of Albany, was concerned to correct such an impression, and declared that not only had the Prefect of Geneva and the Minister of the French Police disclaimed the idea as unfounded, but he himself had never seen that anybody was in the least compromised by going to Coppet. Nevertheless, in a very short time Schlegel was ordered to quit the Château on the preposterous plea that he had pronounced the Phædra of Euripides to be superior to that of Racine! Madame de Staël went to Aix for the sake of her youngest son’s health, but at the end of ten days was recalled by a letter from the Prefect, who advised her not to venture more than two leagues from Coppet. Very naturally she was irritated to the last degree and often deeply distressed at all these incidents. The exile imposed on Mathieu de Montmorency and Madame Récamier caused her the greatest grief, more especially as she never doubted but that unwittingly she was the cause. She had other causes of suffering also in her health at the time, and doubtless was far from being as brilliant as of yore.

Circumstances (she had a son by Rocca in 1812) condemned her to an isolation which fretted her almost beyond endurance; and Sismondi, not possessing the key to the situation, was aggrieved at her sombre mood and nervous irritability. He wrote that he sometimes “bores himself” at Coppet (O Ichabod!); and he was induced to take refuge with sundry amiable persons at Geneva who soothed his wounded self love.

At last Madame de Staël—inconsolable for the loss of Schlegel’s society, panting to escape beyond the narrow limits of Coppet, where her sons had no career before them, and her daughter no chance of marrying, and she herself was harassed by hints and admonitions from the Prefect at every turn—resolved upon escape. She was informed through Schlegel, who was in Berne at the time, that if she would even now write something in praise of Napoleon her fate would be considerably mitigated. It is no slight credit to her that, agitated and ill as she was, she firmly declined. Nothing, indeed, at such a moment could have been more courageous than her refusal, for she was torn with a thousand fears at her impending journey. The passport would have been an insuperable difficulty, as the permission to go to America, once accorded, had now been withdrawn from her; entrance into Italy was also denied, and the Government was determined that she should not take refuge in England.

Yet to England she was resolved to go. The only route open to her was through Russia and Sweden. Through her friend the Grand Duchess of Weimar she obtained a passport, which was to be handed to her in Vienna. All this took months to settle, and it was only on the 23rd of May, 1812, that she was at last able to start. It was necessary to leave in such a way as not to excite the attention of the lynx-eyed Prefect of Geneva.

The eve of her departure she wandered about the park of Coppet a prey to the utmost grief. She had been unwilling to return there at one time, but now she was heart-broken at having to bid a long, perhaps a last, farewell to the tomb of her father and the scenes associated with his memory. To her, both by nature and system, such a parting was particularly poignant.

At 2 o’clock on the afternoon of the 23rd, she got into her carriage, announcing that she would return for dinner. Only two of her servants were in the secret. Albertine, Auguste and Rocca were with her; her second son was to follow in a few days, and join her at Vienna with her baggage. For the present, all the necessaries which the travellers absolutely needed were stowed away in the pockets of Auguste and Rocca; Madame de Staël and Albertine only carried fans.

The escape thus ingeniously planned was carried out with a success that it is quite pleasant to read of, even to this moment. The police never awoke at all to the fact of the flight until the luggage followed the fugitives, and then Madame de Staël was beyond their reach. History draws a veil over the feelings of the Prefect.

At Berne, Schlegel joined the party, and Auguste de Staël separated from it, in order to return to Coppet to see after things there. The travellers pushed on, but, because of Madame de Staël’s health, in no great haste, through Switzerland and the Tyrol. Her one haunting fear all this time was that in Bavaria an agent of the French Government might have preceded her with an order for her arrest. The abject subservience of the German Governments at that time to Napoleon made it very likely that in such a case passports would be so much waste-paper.

Vienna was reached in safety, and there Madame de Staël at first determined to remain three weeks, while a courier was despatched to Wilna to obtain the Russian passport from the Emperor Alexander. The first ten days of her sojourn were marked by cloudless pleasure. Security had returned to her; and, after her late repression, varied chiefly by the Prefect of Geneva’s solemn exhortations, it was a real delight to find herself in the midst of a society where Napoleon was frankly abused. But the Emperor and Empress of Austria were at Dresden, and the official mind, left to itself, soon became frightened at the idea of sheltering the dangerous authoress. Spies were stationed at her door, and cropped up, like poisonous fungi, with silent rapidity along her path. Moreover, an order had arrived for the arrest and return of Rocca as a French officer—the fact of his wounds and inability to serve being waived in the interests of persecution. At this point one pauses to ask why, after all, Madame de Staël herself was not arrested. There seems but little doubt that the obsequiousness of the Austrian police would have been equal to the task. Perhaps Napoleon shrank from the odium of such a proceeding; perhaps he was, in reality, rather glad to be rid of Madame de Staël. This would agree with a well-known conversation which he had held four years previously with Auguste de Staël, who, going to him to plead for his mother’s recall, was told, with insolent, good-humored contempt, that the whole of Europe, except France, was open to her; that she would not be imprisoned, as then she might have some cause to complain, but that she alone could be unhappy when allowed to wander at will through every capital of Europe except Paris.

But if this explanation be accepted, it becomes difficult to account for the later persecutions of Madame de Staël at the hands of the French and Swiss police. Could it be that Savary and his underlings, through excess of zeal, interpreted their instructions with liberal severity and that Napoleon was not responsible for every individual act, but only for the angry hatred which promised approval of each and all of them?