The uprooted primroses did not lose their character for bravery. Embedded in a bank of moss laid within a dish, and supplied with moisture, they lived for days, unfurling buds and leaves as assiduously as if the teeming bulk of their native earth had underlain them, subject to the call of the torn fibers. Our “primrose-bank,” renewed again and again in the season of their bloom, was a cherished feature of our salon, that happy Spring-time. The fragrance is faint, but pleasant, and has, in a peculiar degree, the subtle associativeness possessed by some other wood-flowers, granting us, with the inhalation, visions of the banks on which they grew; of tossing brooks and wet, trailing grasses, swinging in the eddying water; of ferny glades, cool in the hottest noons; of moss-grown hollows under shelving rocks; of bird-call; the grasshopper’s rattle and the whirr of the quail;—the thousand nameless pleasures of Memory that are the mesmeric passes with which Imagination beguiles us into forgetfulness of sorrow, time and distance.
CHAPTER XXX.
Corinne at Coppet.
THE sail of nine miles up the lake to Coppet, the residence, for so long, of Madame de Staël, is one of the pleasantest short excursions enjoined by custom upon the traveler sojourning for a few days in Geneva.
The village is nothing in itself;—a mere appanage, in olden days, of the Neckar estate. The château is reached by a short walk up a quiet street—or road—for there is neither side-walk nor curbing. The house-front is lake-ward, but entrance is had from the street through a paved court-yard at the side. A brick wall surrounds this. A pair of great gates admit the passage of carriages. We were met at each visit, in the lower hall, by a plump housekeeper in white cap and black silk, who showed the mansion and received our douceur at parting, with gentle dignity. The main hall is large and nearly square. Wide settees are set against the walls. A bust of Neckar is in one corner. A flight of oaken stairs, broad and easy, ascends to the upper hall. The floors are of polished wood, as slippery as glass. The salon, entered from the second-story hall, is handsomely plenished with antique furniture and pictures, mostly family portraits. Mad. de Staël is here as Corinne. David was the artist, but the likeness is not pleasing. The “pose” in character is too apparent. The abstracted stare and fixed intellectuality are plainly “done to order.” The Duchess de Broglie, the daughter of the great De Staël, hangs at the other end of the room. As châtelaine of Coppet,—a home preferred by her to Paris salons,—her memory is held in grateful esteem by rich and poor neighbors. Her face is purely and sweetly womanly, with a pensive cast that tells of long-sustained physical or mental pain. She had passed Life’s prime when the portrait was taken, but was still very lovely. In her youth she was far more beautiful and infinitely more amiable than her distinguished mother. Beside the mantel is a painting—cabinet size—of three grandchildren of Madame de Staël, children of her only son by her first marriage. They died in infancy and early youth, and are here depicted sleeping in the arms and against the knees of the Saviour. Design and painting are exquisite.
This salon communicates with another, not quite so large, but more interesting. Neckar is here, as at the height of his splendid career as the prince of financiers; saviour of the realm from bankruptcy; reverenced by the sovereign and adored by the populace.
“I shall never cease to regret”—says the daughter to whom he was ever the greatest and dearest of men—“that it had not pleased God to make me his wife, instead of his child.”
She who was his wife in law, if not in spirit and affection, is also in this gallery of family-pictures—a haughty dame whose hard, passionless features sustain the stories of the severity of discipline practised in the education of her only child. In looking from her to the noble, frank gentleman who lifted her from the station of governess in a Swiss country-house to rank and wealth, one easily comprehends the daughter’s fond partiality for one of her parents.