However this may be, Madame de Staël’s fears were not long in reasserting themselves. Too impatient to wait for the passport, she started with her son and daughter for Galicia, having extracted from a friend the promise of hurrying after her as soon as the expected paper arrived. In her Memoirs she admits that this was a mistake; for at Vienna she had friends to intercede in her favor, while in Galicia there was no shield between herself and the servility towards France of inferior officials. As a consequence she was driven along her route by the unceasing admonitions to “move on” of the police. Her immediate goal was Lanzut—the home of her friends Prince and Princess Lubomirski. Here she was to meet Rocca, who had also proceeded on his way, but disguised. At some point of the road her passport reached her. This was a ray of light; and a letter from Madame Récamier, which overtook her somewhere near Olmutz, was another. But, as a rule, her sensations were all gloomy. The discomforts of her journey through such a country and under such circumstances increased her sadness, to which the finishing touch was put by the aspect of the desolated countries, and of the overtaxed, starving populations withering beneath the Napoleonic blight, and mingling curses on the oppressor with prayers to heaven for relief.
These tragic pictures were ludicrously, but by no means reassuringly relieved by the sight of placards, in the various towns where the passports had to be examined, which ordained that Madame de Staël was to be submitted, wherever she appeared, to the surveillance of the police!
At Lanzut she had been informed that she was not to stay more than twenty-four hours. This, however, was previous to her receiving the Russian passport. With that to show, she hoped for more indulgence.
The hope was vain, for at Lanzut a police agent presented himself, having received orders from his chief, the Governor of the district, to see that Madame de Staël did not remain more than eight hours at the Lubomirski’s Château. And when she left, he followed her carriage in a calèche, thus causing her much alarm lest Rocca, on joining them, should be recognized.
Fifty leagues of Austrian territory had still to be traversed. The police agent, who is described as carrying out his instructions with a most vexatious pertinacity, quitted the travellers at the limit of his “circle”; but Madame de Staël says that grenadiers were still found posted along the route to observe her, and she did not breathe freely until she found herself on Russian territory. Even there she could not allow herself to feel quite secure, for Napoleon’s huge army—destined by its apparent power and its oncoming doom to typify the falling might of France—was hastening by forced marches to Moscow; and Madame de Staël, to avoid meeting it, had to reach St. Petersburg by a circuitous route. Her terror of being arrested and imprisoned still abode with her; she was evidently convinced that the Emperor was furious with her for having escaped his clutches; and she began seriously to consider what she would do if any portion of the army threatened to overtake her. Her plan was to hasten on to Odessa, and thence proceed to Greece and Constantinople.
Fortunately, her companions succeeded in persuading her that she could travel by post much faster than an army; and partially calmed, she at last gave herself up to some enjoyment of the scenes and people around her. Her Dix Années d’Exil, always vivid, becomes from this point a charming book. She is a little too optimistic, and indulges, as usual, too much in generalization, but seizes on salient points with swiftness, and describes them with remarkable force.
She was delighted with her reception by the nobles and the Imperial family. Of the Czar she speaks with a fervent admiration that later generations have not shared. He had the facile amiability and conventional philanthropy of a sovereign who finds his benevolent theories so constantly crossed by circumstances as to release him, in most instances, from the responsibility of applying them. But any promise of political reform and any appeal to general principles of excellence found so ready a response in Madame de Staël’s own heart that, especially where a monarch spoke, she ceased to be severely critical.
According to Galiffe, she met in Russia with immense social success, and enchanted everybody. He, personally, found her much improved since the days of her brilliant, but too self-asserting youth.
Stein was struck with her air of simplicity and goodness, and sought to convey her great unaffectedness of manner by saying that “she gave herself no trouble to please”—quite a man’s judgment on a woman, and curiously inaccurate as a necessary consequence. Madame de Staël was so intensely interested in every new person who appeared to her at all distinguished, that she must always have cared supremely to please. But what Stein probably meant was that she had none of the airs and graces of worldly coquettes; and very often, when launched in conversation, she must have been more bent on convincing than seducing.
Madame de Staël passes over in her Memoirs a scene at the theatre, during her visit to St. Petersburg, which wounded her deeply, and is related by Arndt. She went with her son and somebody else to the “Théatre Français,” to see Racine’s Phèdre. Scarcely was she seated, when somebody in the pit denounced her and her companions as French. Instantly the people rose and clamored for them to be turned out. The performance was stopped, the actors decamped, and poor Madame de Staël, sobbing with indignation and grief, was led away. Even then she felt the insult chiefly as levelled at Racine, and repeated incessantly, “Oh! les barbares, les barbares! Oh, mon Racine!” Arndt was rather astonished at her taking such a scene so much to heart; but, on reflection, arrived at the conclusion that German women might be the better for a little of the same passionate patriotism.