THE STATUE OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON THE ISLAND IN THE RHONE, GENEVA.
From Madame de Staël and her salon at Coppet (to cite one example) what invitations crowd to literary pilgrimages! Madame de Staël was destined by birth for that literary limelight which she loved so well. Her mother, Mademoiselle Curchod, afterwards Madame Necker, was the charming young Swiss who inspired a discreet passion in the stately bosom of Gibbon, the historian of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon had been sent to Switzerland by his father because he had shown leanings towards the Roman Catholic faith. The robust Protestantism of Lausanne was prescribed as a cure for a religious feeling which was not welcome to his family. The cure was complete, so complete that Gibbon was left with hardly any Christian faith at all. Whether because that left an empty place in his heart, or in the natural order of things, Gibbon took refuge in a love affair, a very discreet, cold-blooded affair on his part; but, judging by the correspondence which has survived, a more serious matter to the girl whose affections he engaged.
Gibbon tells the story of his early love himself, in a letter which is full of unconscious humour, since he writes of it without a tremor and with all the decorous stateliness which he gave to the narrative of a Diocletian:
I need not blush at recollecting the object of my choice; and though my love was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment. The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Susan Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of the mind. Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable. Her mother, a native of France, had preferred her religion to her country. The profession of her father did not extinguish the moderation and philosophy of his temper, and he lived content with a small salary and laborious duty in the obscure lot of minister of Crassy, in the mountains that separate the Pays de Vaud from the county of Burgundy. In the solitude of a sequestered village he bestowed a liberal, and even learned, education on his only daughter. She surpassed his hopes by her proficiency in the sciences and languages; and in her short visits to some relations at Lausanne, the wit, the beauty, and erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. She permitted me to make two or three visits at her father's house. I passed some happy days there, in the mountains of Burgundy, and her parents honourably encouraged the connection. In a calm retirement the gay vanity of youth no longer fluttered in her bosom, and I might presume to hope that I had made some impression on a virtuous heart. At Crassy and Lausanne I indulged my dream of felicity; but on my return to England I soon discovered that my father would not hear of this strange alliance, and that without his consent I was myself destitute and helpless. After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son: my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life. My cure was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and esteem.
Gibbon was a very pompous gentleman, but a gentleman. He might otherwise, without departing from the truth, have shown that the little Swiss beauty was far more in love with him than he with her, and her tranquillity and cheerfulness in giving him up were of hard earning. She contrived in time to forget the lover who probably would have made her more famous than happy, and married a Mr. Necker, a rich banker of her own country. (Berne at that time was one of the chief financial centres of Europe.) To him she bore the girl who was to be Madame de Staël, as pompous in mind as Gibbon, but somewhat warmer in temperament.
Many years after the romance had died, when Madame Necker was a happy matron, Gibbon, still a bachelor, decided to make Switzerland his permanent home. Motives of economy, not of romance, dictated this choice. In 1783 he moved to Lausanne, where he completed his history, established a literary salon, and enjoyed life in spite of somewhat serious attacks of gout. M., Mdme., and Mslle. Necker (the last to become Madame de Staël) were frequent visitors, and he attached himself to Madame Necker by the bonds of a close but strictly Platonic friendship. In 1787 Gibbon completed his famous history, and seems to have contemplated afterwards a marriage "for companionship sake." But he never fixed on a lady, and died a bachelor six years after.
During Gibbon's life the Neckers had established their country-seat at Coppet, near Geneva, which was afterwards the seat of Madame de Staël's court. Though born Swiss, Madame de Staël was altogether French in sympathy, detested Switzerland, and was impatient at any talk of its natural beauties. "I would rather go miles to hear a clever man talk than open the windows of my rooms at Naples to see the beauties of the Gulf," she said once. Napoleon, as the greatest man of the age, of course, attracted her. I suspect that she would have been a most ardent Napoleonist if he had made love to her. "Tell me," she said to Napoleon once, "whom do you think is the greatest woman in France to-day?" And Napoleon answered, "The woman who bears most sons for the army." It was not an ingratiating reply. But Napoleon, who detested the idea of petticoat government and was never inclined to chain himself by any bonds to an interfering and ambitious woman, disliked Madame de Staël: and she in time learned to hate him, and intrigued against the man whom she could not intrigue with. The upshot was exile for her. She was turned out of Paris, much to her rage. On several occasions she sought to return. But Napoleon was inexorable. She replied to his enmity by industry as a conspirator. Fouché, who speaks of her as "the intriguing daughter of Necker," credits Madame de Staël with having been regarded by Napoleon as "an implacable enemy," of having been the focus of the Senate conspiracy against Napoleon in 1802, and of being "the life and soul" of the opposition to him in 1812. It was certainly a remarkable woman who could thus stand up against Napoleon.
Madame de Staël's salon at Coppet became a centre famous over all Europe. Her powers of intrigue supplemented her literary fame, and that was very great and well deserved. As an essayist she has a clear and warm style, and as a writer she could be betrayed into forgetting her personal rancours. There is, for example, no more true criticism of the literary style of Napoleon (who wrote newspaper "leaders" in his day) than that it was, as de Staël wrote, so vigorous that you could see that the writer "wished to put in blows instead of words."
An American traveller who paid a pilgrimage to the shrine of Madame de Staël at Coppet gives this picture of the lady: