Her reception in English society was marked by all the enthusiasm which we are accustomed to lavish on illustrious foreigners. She was mobbed at routs and assemblies, and ladies mounted on chairs and tables to stare at her.
She took up her abode at 30, Argyll Place, Regent Street, a house now a bathing establishment. It was here that she received the mixed but brilliant society which Byron declared reminded him of the grave, inasmuch as all distinctions were levelled in it!
These social meetings formed her protest against the enormous and overcrowded gatherings which were dignified then, as now, with the name of “society” in London, and where Madame de Staël found that all intellectual enjoyment was smothered by sheer force of numbers. She was willing enough to admit that clever men and women in England were transcendentally interesting when caught in sufficiently small groups to make rational conversation possible; but declared that all qualities of mind were annihilated in the crowds, where the only superiority necessary was physical force to enable one to elbow one’s way along.
Byron and Madame de Staël became very good friends, although she rated him about his conduct in love; and he laughed, with quiet malice, at many of her peculiarities. One of his favorite diversions—or, at least, so he said—was to plague her by declaring that he did not believe in Napoleon’s “persecutions.” Nothing made her more angry, he declared, inasmuch as she was proud of the danger, which, as she believed, threatened Napoleon’s Government from her eloquence and her fame. Byron, in his Conversations with Lady Blessington, told one or two stories of “Corinne,” more diverting probably than veracious, and complained of her overwhelming declamation (as distinguished from talk), her tendency to metaphysical subtleties, her extraordinary self-complacency, and the strange simplicity which caused her to be perpetually mystified. But he admitted that she was “a fine creature with great talent and many noble qualities”; and he loudly proclaimed her immeasurable superiority to every woman with pretensions to literary fame in England. He even found several things to admire in her appearance, which in a man of his taste was a very precious testimony, and might have consoled Madame de Staël, had she only known of it, for those personal defects which were said to afflict her.
The person who in all England appears to have been the best match, conversationally, for Madame de Staël was Sir James Mackintosh, who, perhaps, gave the best of all descriptions of her when he said, “She is one of the few persons who surpass expectation. She has every sort of talent, and would be universally popular if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talents—pleasantry, anecdote, and literature, which are so much more suited to conversation than her eloquence and genius.” At another time he remarked: “Her penetration was certainly extraordinary, with an air of apparent occupation in things immediately around her.” He recorded, not always approvingly, some of her sweeping judgments, as for instance, that “Political Economy was prosaic and uninteresting,” and that “Miss Austen’s novels were commonplace.”
Her stay in England was saddened, although apparently not very deeply so, by the violent death of her younger son. Byron’s flippant allusion to this tragic event has brought him into much disrepute. “Madame de Staël,” he wrote, “has lost one of her young Barons, who has been carbonaded by a vile Teutonic adjutant.… ‘Corinne’ is, of course, what all mothers must be, but will, I venture to prophesy, do what few mothers could—write an essay upon it. She cannot exist without a grievance and somebody to see or read how much grief becomes her.” All these epigrammatic previsions turned out to be apparently unfounded; for there is no proof that Madame de Staël mourned her son with anything approaching to the passion with which she had grieved for her father. Sismondi, indeed, always censorious, is rather severe on what he is pleased to consider her want of maternal feeling; and, as she was never known to hide her sentiments, it is only fair to conclude that comparative silence meant comparative insensibility. Albert de Staël was very high-spirited and impetuous, and rather wild. Judging from a severe and somewhat self-righteous epistle addressed to him on one occasion by his mother, he had many of the faults that irritated, and none of the qualities that pleased her. Auguste and Albertine, inspired by their adoring veneration, presumably tried to mould their tastes and pursuits by hers; but Albert appears to have been different—for his mother reproaches him with remaining unmoved by her own intellect, the dignity of his brother, the charm of his sister, and the talents of M. Schlegel! She assures him that he is unfit to appreciate the mother whom he possesses, and very characteristically requests to be told of what service it has been to him to be “the grandson of Necker.” Neither the invocation of this august memory, nor the general drift of the arguments, strike one as happily chosen for moving a thoughtless lad in his teens, who was probably drawn towards his brother and sister by other reasons than their respective dignity and charm, and was more than likely to be secretly bored by the disquisitions of the learned Schlegel. However this may be, the letter gives the full measure of the contempt which Madame de Staël could feel for folly and frivolity; and, if those were the distinguishing characteristics of Albert, it is very comprehensible that, the first pangs of natural grief overcome, his loss would not leave a great void in her active existence.
In the autumn of 1813 L’Allemagne was published. It appeared in London, and straightway caused the greatest ferment known for a long while in the literary world. The circumstances under which it saw the light—the social position, sex, and history of its author—and its own intrinsic merits, combined to make it an event. It is notorious how much Sir James Mackintosh and Byron admired it; and articles concerning it, critical and laudatory, poured from the European press. Goethe admitted that no previous writer had so largely revealed the riches of German literature to the intelligence of an unappreciative generation; and although the great Teutonic race was not fully satisfied with the work at the time, and has since become somewhat captious regarding it, the talent which it displayed has never been called in question. By a sufficiently striking coincidence the publication of L’Allemagne took place in the same month as the battle of Leipzic. Only a brief period then elapsed before Napoleon abdicated, and Madame de Staël, her splendid and triumphant exile terminated, was enabled once more to re-enter the gates of beloved but, alas! humiliated Paris. She was far too patriotic not to entertain saddened feelings on seeing the streets of the capital filled with soldiers in German, Russian and Cossack uniforms; for while rejoicing in the overthrow of Napoleon, she mourned the tarnished glory of the French arms.
She was received with the utmost cordiality by Louis XVIII., and her salon quickly became the rallying-ground for all the brightest intellects of France. It is interesting to read that Talleyrand—the supple, silent, time-serving Talleyrand—was among her guests. She forgave him, of course, for his long oblivion of her old claims on his friendship; but not more thoroughly, in all probability, than he forgave himself. To Paris had returned the Abbé de Montesquion, Lally, Tollendal, Lafayette. How changed were the times since the latter had hurried thither to plead, and plead in vain, for his imprisoned King; since the Abbé had waited in disguise on the high road for Madame de Staël to arrive in her carriage and convey him out of France; since Lally, “the fattest of susceptible men,” had brought his eloquence and sensibility to help in enlivening the sylvan glades of Mickleham.
Madame Récamier had returned and Constant, at the ripe age of forty-eight and married for the second time, was so in love with her as to resent any allusion to the past which could divert him, even momentarily, from his all-absorbing passion.