“She is well enough!” (“assez bien”—) Madame Neckar would say, with a resigned shrug, when congratulated upon her child’s brilliant success in literature and society. “But nothing to what I would have made her, had not her father interfered.”
The deprecated interference was the result of the decision of the best physician in France that the girl was dying under the mother’s intolerable regimen of study and home-etiquette. She was blooming too rapidly in a social and educational hot-house, and the doctor summoned by the father, earned the mother’s enmity by saving the patient’s life at the price of a long, idle vacation at Coppet.
Madame Neckar was, prior to her marriage, madly beloved by—some say, the betrothed of Gibbon the historian. She wedded Neckar to establish herself well in life. To the same end she married her daughter, at twenty, to Baron de Staël, a Swedish nobleman.
“Her mother had done wrong,” writes sensible Madame de Genlis of Mademoiselle Neckar at sixteen—“in allowing her to spend three-fourths of her time with the throng of wits who continually surrounded her, and who held dissertations with her upon love and the passions.”
These disquisitions and their subjects did not enter into her calculations in accepting the hand of a man double her age. She was weary of her mother’s tyranny and the restraints of singlehood. Married to this good-natured nobleman, who had engaged not to take her to Sweden, she could begin to live. The Baron’s portrait is in the Coppet salon,—at a reasonable remove from his lady-wife, as she liked to keep him when both were alive. A portly figure and round, florid visage, as blank as to expression, as the wall behind him; a fine court-suit, with plenty of gold and thread-lace—these are what the canvas presents to us. Diagonally opposite is David’s celebrated portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise-Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein (née Neckar). A Persian shawl is wound, turban-wise, about her head, dark curls falling below it upon her forehead and bare shoulders. Her short-waisted dress is of crimson silk, with short sleeves. A dark-blue Cashmere shawl falls low upon her skirt, and is caught up by one arm. The other is bare, and lies lightly on a table by which she stands, the hand drooping over the edge. In the right hand, the arm crossing her figure horizontally to hold the shawl, is the green spray without which she would not talk in company. Captious critics affirmed that she held and twirled and gesticulated with the leafy scepter to attract admiration to her beautiful hands. These, her eyes, and her finely-moulded arms were all that commended her to the eye. In form she was clumsy; her complexion was muddy and rough; her mouth large, and her teeth were so prominent that the lips hardly met over them. Yet this portrait, not cloaking these defects, is of the queen this woman undoubtedly was. The head is turned slightly, as in listening,—a thing which, by the way, she never did,—and a little upraised; the eyes are full of life and spirit;—the glow of inspiration, as unlike the factitious animation of the “Corinne” in the other room, as day-light to gas-glare, shines through and from the heavily-cast features. The colors are as rich and fresh as if laid on but yesterday.
Auguste de Staël, her son, at thirty, hangs near, a fresh-colored gentilhomme, without a trace of the refined loveliness of his sister, or of his mother’s genius, in his Swedish physiognomy. Yet, it is related that, when a lad of seventeen, he pleaded well and bravely with Napoleon for the recall of his mother from exile, offering his personal guarantee that she would not meddle with politics were she suffered to return to Paris. Napoleon knew better than to trust her, but he liked the young fellow’s fearlessness so well that he playfully pulled his ear in denying his petition.
Down-stairs are the library and bed-chamber of Madame de Staël, opening by long windows upon balcony and parterre. The bed-room is large, and furnished in a style befitting the fashion, then popular, of using what we regard as the penetralia of a home,—to wit—“my lady’s chamber”—for morning-receptions. The French single bed in a distant corner alone indicates that the occupant of the apartment really slept there. The walls are hung with tapestry,—Gobelin, or a fair imitation of it;—chairs and sofa are embroidered to match, in designs from Æsop’s Fables. A tall mirror is set between the windows. In the center of the room, on a large Turkish rug, is Madame de Staël’s escritoire, at which she always wrote, a chair before it, as she used to have it. It is a cumbrous affair,—long and not high,—with pigeon-holes, carved legs and brass-handled drawers. The mistress, as Sappho, looks down upon it from the wall. We liked this portrait least of all. It is a Bacchante, in inflamed complexion and wild eyes. The original preferred it to all others. The library adjoins the bed-room, and is lined with book-shelves to the ceiling. The floor is polished to glassiness,—the dark wood of doors and casement-frames and the ranks of sober-hued volumes reflected in it, as in a somber pool.
We looked back into the shadow and silence from the threshold, thinking of the goodly company of intellectual athletes who frequented it when the most wonderful woman of her age held court here as regally as when in Paris. De Goncourt described her as a “man of genius, by whose hands France signed a treaty of alliance with existing institutions, and, for a period, accepted the Directory. The daughter of Neckar”—he continues—“forbade France to recall the line of kings; she retained the Republic; she condemned the throne.”
Or, as when forbidden to approach within thirty miles of Paris, she established her household at precisely that distance, and her residence was crowded with guests from the Capital.