Her interest in life remained undiminished to the last. Not only Châteaubriand, but Constant, Mathieu de Montmorency, Sismondi, all her old friends, were daily with her. She was even glad to welcome strangers, although frequently so ill that her physicians forbade such visits for several days at a time. It was after one of these intervals that Ticknor saw her. She received him in bed, and her weakness was already so great that she could hardly stretch out her hand to touch his. She alluded to her approaching end with a calmness infinitely pathetic and admirable in one who suffered none of that slow extinction of the faculties which blunts the anguish of the end for so many departing souls. Seeing that her words pained her daughter, she changed the subject to America, and spoke of the great future of that country with characteristic enthusiasm of belief. Of Europe, Ticknor said, “she despaired.” She might well do so, for the era then beginning was one with which she could not have sympathised. Whatever its virtues, its force, its promise, the oracles by which it was inspired must have sounded strange in her ears. Herself, she had been a kind of priestess; through her some unknown God had spoken, and amid the thunder of great events her faith, for all its ideal grandeur, had hardly seemed too mighty. But that age had passed, and it was fit she should pass with it.
All witnesses except the captious Sismondi bear testimony to the devotion with which Rocca nursed his wife in her last illness. Silent, pallid, sad as a phantom itself, he sat day by day beside her bed. According to Madame d’Abrantes, she never looked long at him without feeling that she might still live. The sense that her existence was necessary to him seemed to inspire her for a moment with the courage to take up anew the increasing burden of her days. But at other times her thoughts turned with a grateful sense of coming rest to the great change, and to the thought of her father “waiting for her,” as she said, “on the other shore.” Constant passed the last night of her life by her bedside. She had seemed so much better that at eleven o’clock Mathieu de Montmorency left, convinced that in the morning he would find her revived. She suffered no pain during the concluding hours, and the brightness of her intellect was not even momentarily dimmed. Sleep visited her as usual; then at 5 o’clock she opened her eyes again, for the last time on the world. A few moments later she passed away, so quietly that her watchers did not note the precise moment in which her great soul was exhaled. The date of her death was 14th July, 1817.
The news of it was the signal for, perhaps, the most widely-spread and most genuine outburst of grief ever known. Joubert, indeed, asserts the contrary, and not only declares that she was not regretted, but adds that Constant, meeting him casually the very day after the event, did not even allude to it. It never seems to have occurred to Joubert that Constant might have had some other and deeper cause for silence than indifference. From such a nature reserve was perhaps the only tribute that could be more eloquently expressive than the loud lamentations of other friends. These abounded, and even Châteaubriand, who, after all, had not been bound to the dead woman by such ties of constant friendship as attached Schlegel, Sismondi, and others—even he records with a sort of jealous care that in the last letter she ever wrote to Madame de Duras, a letter penned in “large, irregular characters like a child’s,” there was an affectionate allusion to “Francis.”
Bonstetten and Sismondi have both left records of their grief at her funeral. The latter, writing immediately after it to his mother, said: “My life is painfully changed. I owe more to her than to any other person.” Bonstetten’s sorrow finds a more energetic expression: “I miss her as though she were a part of myself. I am maimed henceforward in thought.”
She was buried at Coppet, and they laid her coffin at the foot of her father’s. A crowd of friends, of humble mourners, and of official functionaries, assembled to do her homage; but Rocca was too ill to be present. He died, indeed, only seven months later, and the son whom Madame de Staël had borne him hardly reached early manhood before he also passed away. Auguste de Staël had preceded him along the road to eternity, and the Duchess de Broglie did not live to be old.
Twenty years had hardly elapsed before, with the sole exception of her faithful friend and cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, no near relative of Madame de Staël was still alive; but those who had known her did not need to be reminded of her. She was constantly present to them, a radiant, imperishable vision. “I wish I could see you asleep,” Bonstetten had said one day to her. “I would like to feel sure that you sometimes close your eyes, and are not always thinking.” She had remained so bright and full of life to the last, that even Death’s inexorable hand could not for many long years efface the recollection of her vivid personality.
In a page of the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, Châteaubriand has left a description of a visit paid by himself and Madame Récamier to the grave at Coppet. It was fifteen years after Madame de Staël’s death. The Château was closed, the apartments deserted. Juliette, wandering through them, recognised one after another the spots where Madame de Staël had played the piano, had talked to those gathered round her, or had written.
The two friends went into the park where the autumn leaves already were reddening and falling. The wind subsided by degrees, and the sound of a millstream alone broke the stillness. Madame Récamier entered the wood into whose depths the grave is hidden, while Châteaubriand remained looking at the snowy line of the Alps, and at the glittering lake. Above the sombre heights of Jura the sky was covered with golden clouds “like a glory spreading above a bier.” Suddenly Madame Récamier, pale and tearful, phantom-like among phantoms, emerged from the wood. And on her companion’s melancholy spirit fell a sense of all the emptiness of glory, of all the sad reality of life. “Qu’est-ce que la gloire?” asked Madame de Staël. “Ce n’est qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur.” We could wish that the most famous of women might have held a less hopeless creed.