Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

[IX]

EXILE

When the edict banishing Mme. de Staël from Paris was made known to her, she inquired through Joseph Bonaparte, who was among the number of her friends, whether she would be permitted to travel in Germany or would be brought back from there. After some delay a passport was sent her, and she set out for Weimar. There she made the acquaintance of the ducal family, had long conversations with Schiller on the reciprocal relations of French and German literature, and pestered Goethe with questions upon every subject in heaven and earth. The eager discussion of problematical questions was, he says, her special passion. But what surprised both Goethe and the other German celebrities most was, that she not only wished to make their acquaintance, but to influence affairs generally; she always talked as if the moment for action had come, and they must all be up and doing. She went on from Weimar to Berlin, made acquaintance with Prince Louis Ferdinand, was taken up by the Fichte, Jacobi, and Henriette Herz circles, and carried off A. W. Schlegel as tutor to her children.

The following year she travelled in Italy, studied its ancient monuments, its art, the southern manners and customs of its people, and absorbed impressions of Italian nature at every pore. Then she returned to Coppet and wrote Corinne, ou l'Italie.

Her longing for France, however, gave her no peace. She had been forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, but she took up her abode just outside that limit, first at Auxerre, then at Rouen. (The prefect of this latter town was suspended for having shown her some courteous attention.) She eventually received permission to superintend the publishing of Corinne from a country house only twelve leagues from Paris. But the book was barely published before a new edict banished her from France altogether. Corinne was a grand success, and Napoleon could not endure any success in which he had no share. Mme. de Staël returned to Coppet, and, like the Emperor, continued to extend her realm. It grew as her emotional nature expanded, her intellectual grasp widened, and the number of her friendships increased. She held a regular court at Coppet. Remarkable men from all parts of Europe gathered round her there. In her house were to be met statesmen like Constant—whom in her infatuation she calls the cleverest man in the world—historians like Sismondi, poets like Zacharias Werner and Oehlenschläger, German princes, Polish princes and princesses, the flower of the aristocracy of birth and of intellect. Since her visit to Germany she had steadily continued to study the German language and literature, but she found that it would be necessary for her to make another sojourn in that country if she desired to present to her countrymen a complete picture of the new world which had revealed itself to her. She had been in North Germany, now she spent a year in Vienna, and upon her return to Switzerland set to work upon her great three-volume book, De l'Allemagne. It was completed in 1810. The next thing was to get it published in Paris.

A law had been passed which forbade the publication of any book until it had been approved of by the Censors; on this followed another regulation, specially aimed at Mme. de Staël, which gave the Chief of the Police authority to suppress a book if he saw fit, even though it had been published with the approval of the Censors. This was a law which did away with all law. Having again received permission to take up her abode at a distance of forty leagues from Paris to superintend the publication of her book, Mme. de Staël went to Blois, lived first at the château of Chaumont-sur-Loire, then at Fossé, and afterwards at the country-houses of friends in the neighbourhood; she fluttered round her beloved Paris at the required distance, as a moth flutters round a candle. Once she even ventured into the capital. Meanwhile the Censors examined her book, corrected, deleted, and gave the mangled remains their imprimatur. Ten thousand copies were printed. But on the day on which they were to be issued, the Chief of the Police sent his gendarmes into the publisher's shop, after placing a sentinel at every exit, and, by order of the Government, performed the heroic feat of hacking the ten thousand copies to pieces. The mass was kneaded into a dough, and the publisher received twenty louis d'or in compensation. Mme. de Staël was at the same time ordered to deliver up her manuscript (representing the labours and hopes of six years) and to leave France in the course of twenty-four hours. In the letter which she received from the Chief of the Police on this occasion occur the following sentences: "You are not to seek the reason of the command I have communicated to you in your omission of all reference to the Emperor in your last work; that would be a mistake; no place could be found for him in it that would be worthy of him: your banishment is the natural consequence of the course you have persistently pursued for some years past. It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you; as for us, we are, fortunately, not yet reduced to seeking models amongst the people you so much admire. Your last work is not French."

That was what doomed her—it was not French. And to think that it was the epoch-making book, De l'Allemagne, epoch-making in French literature, because, not accidentally but on principle, it broke with all antiquated literary traditions and indicated new sources of life—to think that it was this book which the spiritual policeman of the nation presumed to condemn as not French! And the cruelly ironical attempt to assume a tone of gallantry! "It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you "—therefore be kind enough to betake yourself elsewhere! We seem to hear the intoxicated vanity of France itself speak: "Because you have ventured to love liberty even now, when the rest of us are happy under tyranny; because, whilst we have been sunning ourselves in the beams of Napoleon's glory, you have dared to depict in Corinne the sovereign independence of genius, and, yourself banished from Paris, have crowned your ideal at the Capitol; because, at the moment when the eagles of France are shining resplendent with the glory of a thousand victories, and foreign nations have become our lieges, you, a weak woman, have had the audacity to represent to us our sources of spiritual life as almost dried up, and to point us to the despised Germany as a land whose poetry far outshines our own, to hated England, perfidious Albion, as a country whose love of liberty is more persistent and genuine than ours, and to dying Italy, the subjugated province of France, as a country whose simple manners and customs and vast superiority in art are worthy of imitation—because of all these things, you shall be stigmatised as unpatriotic, the cockade of your country shall be torn from your brow, your books shall be destroyed, even your manuscripts shall be torn into fragments, and you yourself, with a couple of spies at your heels, shall be chased like a wild animal across the frontier of France before twenty-four hours have passed."

The Prefect of the department was sent to demand the manuscript of the book; Mme. de Staël succeeded in saving it by giving him a rough copy. But anxiety about her book was for the moment the least of her anxieties. She had hoped to cross to England, but, expressly to prevent this, the Chief of the Police had added a postscript to his letter, forbidding her to embark at any northern port. She was half inclined to sail in a French ship bound for America, on the chance of the ship being captured by the English, but abandoned this plan as too adventurous. Despondent and sorrowful, she retired once more to Coppet.

Here fresh persecutions of every description awaited her. The Prefect of Geneva, on the strength of the first order he received, gave her two sons to understand that they also were forbidden ever to return to France, and this merely because they had made a fruitless attempt to obtain an audience of Napoleon on behalf of their mother. A few days later Mme. de Staël received a letter from the Prefect, in which he, in the name of the Chief of the Police, demanded the proof-sheets of her book on Germany. It had been ascertained by means of spies that the proofs must be in existence, and the French Government had no intention of resting contented with half measures, with the destruction of the printed book; the work was to be completely annihilated, any future edition of it made impossible. The authoress replied that the proofs had already been sent abroad, but that she would willingly promise never again to print any of her works on the Continent of Europe. "There was no great merit in such a promise," she remarks in her Dix Années d'Exil, "for of course no Continental government would have sanctioned the publication of a book which had been interdicted by Napoleon." Not long after this, the Prefect of Geneva, Barante, the father of the historian, was banished for having shown too great leniency towards Mme. de Staël. Her son falling ill, Mme. de Staël accompanied him by the advice of the doctors to the baths of Aix in Savoy, some twenty leagues from Coppet. Scarcely had she arrived there when she received, by special messenger, an intimation from the Prefect of the Department of Mont Blanc that she was not only forbidden to leave Switzerland on any pretext whatever, but even to travel in Switzerland itself; two leagues from Coppet was indicated as the distance beyond which she might not go. Not satisfied with transforming her sojourn upon her own estate into an imprisonment, the Government took care that she should suffer not only from the loss of freedom, but from that special curse of prison life, solitude—doubly painful to one of her peculiarly social disposition. Schlegel, who had lived in her house as tutor to her children for eight years, was ordered to leave, on the foolish pretext that he influenced her against France. To the inquiry how he did this, the answer was returned, that in the comparison which he, as literary critic, had instituted between Racine's Phèdre and the Phædra of Euripides, he had pronounced himself in favour of the latter. Montmorency was exiled for having spent a few days at Coppet, and Mme. Récamier, whom Mme. de Staël had not time to warn of the punishment attending even a brief visit, was forbidden to return to France, because on her way through Switzerland she had gone to cheer her old friend with a little conversation. Even a man of seventy-eight, St.-Priest, an old ministerial colleague of her father's, was exiled for having paid a polite call at Coppet.

The isolation which is the lot of those who set themselves in opposition to despotic power was not new to her. For long no man of rank or fame, no politician who wished to stand well with the Government, had dared to visit her at Coppet. They were all prevented by business or illness. "Ah!" she said once, "how weary I am of all this cowardice which calls itself consumption!" But now, to the pain of seeing herself abandoned by so many former friends was added that of seeing her real friends punished with exile for the slightest expression of good-will towards her. She complained that she spread misfortune round her like an infectious disease.