Madame de Krüdener, worn and wasted with sybilline fervor, had commenced her religious gatherings, and the Czar was drawn daily within the circle of her spells, while Madame Récamier was banished from it because her beauty could still claim glances that were vowed to heaven. Constant, going once, never went again; perhaps because Juliette was wanting; perhaps because such mystic utterances as fell from the inspired priestess’s lips were too vague to find an echo in his passion-tossed soul. To Paris also had come Bonstetten, younger than ever in spirit, and hopeful, for all his burden of years.
The dawn of the new era—so quickly clouded for more serious and prescient souls than his—filled him with delight. He was brighter and more contented now than he had been in youth; the world seemed a better place to him, and he almost wondered how anybody could be sad in a universe so full of new ideas and dazzling intellectual possibilities.
Besides all these interesting figures, other and more splendid, if not more illustrious, personages crowded Madame de Staël’s salon. Thither came the Czar, so chivalrous and sympathetic in these days; thither came her old friend the Duke of Saxe Weimar; and Wellington presented himself to be received with the utmost cordiality, and to inscribe himself on the long list of Madame Récamier’s admirers.
At first Madame de Staël’s heart beat high with patriotic hopes. She had become monarchical in her feelings again, and expected great things for France from the liberal disposition of the King. She exerted herself quite in her old way to talk over dissidents and reconcile malcontents; for her one longing was that the new constitution of France might be made on the pattern and informed with the spirit of England. But she was not slow to discover how ill-founded were such aspirations. Egotism stalked through the exhausted land—egotism under various forms and professing various creeds; now wearing the super-annuated uniform of the Maison Rouge; now decorated with the medals conferred by Napoleon; now prating of old services before the emigration; now professing a servile repentance for base obedience to Bonaparte. They were but differences in the mask after all; yet over these differences men wrangled, and meanwhile the poison of a deadly indifference crept through the veins of France. Madame de Staël saw all this and felt it with a passionate regret. In the last volume of her Considerations she shows how everything was accorded in the letter, only to be constantly violated in the spirit. She deplored the irreconcilable folly of the émigrés; the abject cringing of converted Bonapartists, who only cared for power; and the disastrous reactionary influences which hampered the action of the Court.
She returned for the summer to Coppet—a very welcome refuge to her now that she went thither of her own free will. Her health was beginning to fail about this time, while that of M. Rocca gave her constant anxiety. Originally she had been blest, if not with a splendid constitution, at least with a royal disdain of physical influences. She had felt neither heat nor cold, and spoke even with a certain impatience of invalid considerations. But she had lived at such high pressure intellectually from her very earliest years; had thought, felt, talked, and done so much, that her existence could not be counted, like most people’s, by years. In the sense of accumulated efforts and results it had been a very long life, and the expenditure of nervous energy so constantly kept up was beginning to tell at last. Even Bonstetten, the optimist, saw a change in her when in July, 1814, he visited her at Coppet. She was, indeed, very depressed in spirits; but he appeared to allude only to a physical alteration, for he declared her to be as brilliant and good as ever. He might have added as indefatigable. She found somebody to translate Wilberforce’s work on the Slave Trade, and wrote a preface to the French edition. Also she published, in pamphlet form, an appeal for Abolition addressed to the Sovereigns met together at that time in Paris; and she was busy with her work, Considerations, of which the first two parts alone were eventually revised by herself.
In July, from Coppet, she wrote a characteristic letter to Madame Récamier, telling what difficulty she experienced in keeping up the fine love of solitude, which had beguiled her momentarily into seeking that picturesque and sacred but monotonous retreat. “My soul is not sufficiently rural,” she writes. “I regret your little apartment and our quarrels and conversations, and all that life which is yours.” In this sturdy love of streets Madame de Staël resembled Dr. Johnson and, perhaps, if the truth were known, she resembled all good talkers.
She returned to Paris in the winter of 1814-15, and, conscious that her strength was failing, she became extremely anxious to marry her darling daughter to some man who would be worthy of her. Her circumstances had been recently much improved by the repayment from the Treasury of the two millions which Necker had left there. Such wealth, joined to her own brilliant social position, entitled her to look out for a good parti for Albertine; but she was resolute that the match should be a happy one. Her ideal of felicity was conjugal love. She preached, indeed, a code of wifely submission that would seem very insipid to some emancipated damsels in our days, and was perhaps a little too perfect to be possible. But she put into it all her own rare faith in good, and often laughingly declared that “she would force her daughter to make a marriage of the heart.”
In the midst of these amiable preoccupations, and while enjoying once again the delight of social intercourse, unhampered by foreign modes of speech and thought, and untroubled by the irritation of exile, Madame de Staël was still haunted by a foreboding of evil. Such presentiments were very common with her. She had the quick, indefinable instinct of imaginative minds, and felt that subtle vibration of events which precedes, or perhaps causes, change in them. Probably she hardly knew what she anticipated; and yet, when the news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba arrived, it seemed as if the expected disaster could only be that. An hour after she met M. de la Valette, and said to him: “If Bonaparte triumph, liberty is lost; and if he be beaten, our national independence is over.”
A few days of utter consternation followed—a pause of bewildered, incapable silence, through which, as Châteaubriand so graphically says, “the sound of Bonaparte’s advancing footsteps echoed.” Then came the news of one town and province after another rallying round the standard of the resurgent conqueror. Ney departed, vowing to bring back his former master in an iron cage; and the vain boast, so quickly yet not ludicrously disproved, inspired as little confidence as it deserved.
The Court prepared for ignominious flight, and Madame de Staël had no choice but to follow its example. But a few months previously she had by chance become aware of a conspiracy against Napoleon’s life, and, for all her hatred of him, had been so moved by the menace of peril to her ancient and implacable foe, that she had found means to despatch a warning to him. Yet now, when she heard of his return, all her terror of him revived in its pristine force, bringing back with it the flood of agitated imagination which had so long poisoned her life.