Madame de Staël was in Paris during the fatal August that decided the fate of the French monarchy. On the 9th of that month she stood at her window with some friends, and heard the forty-eight tocsins of Paris sound the alarm, which continued all night their monotonous, frequent, and lugubrious tolling. The volunteer patrole sent her intelligence of all that passed, but no one knew what the morrow would bring forth. The attack on the Tuileries began early in the morning; madame de Staël was told that three of her friends, who guarded the outside of the palace, had been seized and massacred. She instantly, with all the intrepidity of a French woman, hurried out to learn the truth. Her carriage was stopped on the bridge. She was told that the work of slaughter was going on the other side. Still she persisted, and, after a delay of two hours, crossed the bridge, and learnt that her friends were alive, and hiding from the enraged multitude. In the evening she went to see them in the obscure houses in which they had taken refuge; drunken men were lying about on the steps of doors, who roused themselves only to vociferate oaths and execrations. Many women were in the same state; their howlings were still more frightful. She fled when the patrole approached; for they maintained order by protecting the assassins, and assisting them in the work of murder. The interval between the 10th of August and the 2d of September was one of horror; arrests were frequent, and it became known that the massacre of the prisoners was meditated. The outlawed friends of madame de Staël went from house to house as danger menaced; she received two in her own, hoping that, though her husband was absent, the name she bore, of Swedish ambassadress, would protect her from a domiciliary visit. She was mistaken; the commissioners of police, men named from among the lowest class, accompanied by the soldiery, who guarded the outlets of the house to prevent escape, demanded to search. She resolved to dispute their right, as the only means of saving her friends. She talked to the men; told them that the laws of nations declared an ambassador's house inviolable, and assured them that Sweden was a country on the frontiers of France, and that it would declare war at once if its ambassadress were insulted. She perceived that her arguments made some impression; and, while her heart sank within her, she roused herself to joke them on the folly of their suspicions, and dismissed them with every appearance of politeness and gaiety.
She had already prepared to leave France, and obtained passports. She delayed a few days, anxious to be re-assured with regard to her friends, before she placed herself in safety. During this interval she exerted herself to save M. de Lally-Tollendal, and succeeded, by applying to Manuel, a member of the commune of Paris: he who published Mirabeau's letters, written in the prison of Vincennes, and who, six months afterwards, during the reign of terror, died on the scaffold. On the 2d of September, when the news of the taking of Longwy and Verdun had roused the ferocity of the Parisians to the utmost, and those massacres of helpless prisoners began which remain a perpetual sanguinary stain on the French character, she prepared to set out. Her passports were all regular; and, fancying that the title of wife of a foreign ambassador would be her safeguard, she set out in her carriage, drawn by six horses, and her servants in full livery. Her calculations failed; scarcely had her carriage advanced a few steps when it was surrounded by a crowd of furious women, who seized the horses, and, with ferocious cries, ordered the postilions to drive to the assembly of the section of St. Germain, to which she belonged. She entered the chamber of the assembly, which was in full deliberation, and by it she was ordered to proceed to the Hôtel de Ville. To reach this latter place she was obliged to traverse Paris; and on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville several men had been assassinated on the 10th of August. She trembled to obey, and yet had no resource. She was three hours on her way, as she was slowly drawn through a crowd who threatened death with hideous shouts and unremitting cries. She addressed several gendarmes who passed near, asking protection; they replied by disdainful and menacing gestures. At length, one gendarme, who had been put in the carriage with her, was touched by her situation (she was with child), and promised to defend her at the peril of his life. She alighted from the carriage at the Hôtel de Ville, in the midst of an armed multitude, and advanced under an avenue of pikes. As she went up the steps a man pointed one against her; the gendarme protected her with his sabre, and she reached the chamber of the commune, where Robespierre presided. Collet d'Herbois and Billaud Varennes acted as his secretaries. The hall was full of people—men, women, and children, shouting Vive la nation! She was taken to the raised platform where the president sat, and told to sit down. While she was representing her right, as ambassadress from Sweden, to depart, Manuel, whom she had persuaded to liberate Lally-Tollendal, entered: he was astonished to see her in such a miserable position, and, answering for her, withdrew her from the dreadful hall, and shut her up in his cabinet with her maid. They remained for six hours, oppressed by hunger, thirst, and terror. The windows of the room looked on the Place de Grève, and assassins passed from the prisons, their arms bare and covered with blood, uttering horrible shouts. Her carriage remained in the square. The crowd wished to pillage it: it was defended by Santerre. He respected the daughter of Necker, whose exertions to victual Paris during the scarcity he had witnessed; and besides he made this task his pretext for not doing his duty in protecting the prisoners. He boasted to Madame de Staël of the service he rendered her; but she could not help reminding him of the manner in which he ought to have been employed. Manuel exclaimed, as he entered, "Ah! how glad I am I set your two friends at liberty yesterday!" When night came on he conveyed her home in his carriage. The lamps were not lighted in the streets, but men passed with torches, whose flare occasioned more terror than darkness itself. The following day she was allowed to depart with her maid only, and a gendarme to conduct her as far as the frontier, so to make sure that she should take with her none of the unfortunate outlaws doomed to death. Tallien conducted her to the barrier. After some difficulties it was passed. "Leaving the capital," she writes, "the tempestuous waves grew calmer, and the mountains of Jura gave no token of the frightful tumults of which Paris was the theatre." And there she found calm refuge beneath her father's roof. Such were the scenes that awaited the early womanhood of madame de Staël:—the sight of every cruel and horrible passion in action in others,—pity, fear, and generous self-devotion excited to their height in her own heart,—harrowing grief, when those whom she loved were butchered,—throbs of transport, when she felt that she had secured their safety. Had she been of a concentrated disposition, such scenes and emotions must have given sublimity to her character. As it was, it confirmed the active generosity and warm benevolence of her disposition; it gave animation to her expression of every sad and heart-moving feeling; while to her credit it must be said, that, even in the midst of such iniquitous and cruel scenes, she gathered no misanthropy, no gall, no hatred, and no revenge.
She paid at this period a short visit to England, and then returning to Geneva, found personal safety and peace with her parents at Coppet; but the political events passing in France, and the horrors of the reign of terror, spread darkness and dismay even to Switzerland. Her father published a pamphlet, the object of which was to save Louis XVI.; and she wrote an eloquent appeal in favour of Marie Antoinette. Soon even the impression made by the fate of these illustrious victims was almost lost in that of the death of added thousands immolated by Robespierre. Madame de Staël by turns feared for the lives and deplored the death of beloved friends, who day after day died under the axe of the guillotine. She concealed in her house many of the friends of liberty outlawed by the revolutionary tribunal. They assumed Swedish names, under the sanction of M. de Staël. Scaffolds were erected for them on the frontier by their countrymen, as enemies of freedom; foreign nations held them in detestation, as accomplices of the butchers of Paris; but Necker and his daughter, with sounder views and more humane hearts, befriended and saved virtue, whatever might be the opinions which it assumed as the guise in which to manifest its spirit to the world. "One of the reflections that struck us most," madame de Staël writes, "in our long walks on the shores of the lake of Geneva, was the contrast of the beautiful nature by which we were surrounded with the desolation of mankind." In these walks she conversed with her father: his benevolence; the pain he expressed at the idea of being hated by the French, to serve whom he had sacrificed so much; the interchange of intimate and virtuous thought, filled her heart with still more ardent affection towards him, and made him, in her eyes, the greatest as well as the best of men. 1794.
Ætat.
28. It was at this time of comparative retirement that she wrote "Reflections on the Peace," which Fox quoted as full of sound political views and just argument.
This period was checkered by the illness, and finally the death, of madame Necker. She died of a lingering nervous disorder. Her husband was unwearied in his attentions and watchful tenderness, and madame de Staël shared his fatigues, and sympathised with and consoled him in his grief. The warmer kindness testified by her father caused her to prefer him; and madame Necker herself, looking on her daughter as a rival in her husband's affections, had repelled her. But death obliterated these passions, and madame de Staël acknowledged her mother's talents and virtues; she lamented her death, and respected her memory.
It might be thought that madame de Staël, escaped from the sanguinary scenes of the reign of terror, would have been averse to returning to that Paris which had been the theatre of such harrowing tragedies. Far from it. Accustomed to the society of the French, the pedantic, precise, and presumptuous tone of the Genevese was particularly disagreeable to her. While considering herself a French woman, she was eager to mix in the busy scenes that followed the death of Robespierre—to be of use to her friends, and even to influence the choice of a system of government which was to be established in France. She had some remorse in quitting her father; but he encouraged her to go. He felt for her struggle between her dislike to leaving him and her tastes, her friends, her hopes of glory, which called her to France; and, with the truest feelings of sympathy, persuaded her to seek her own happiness, promising to find his in her letters from the scene of action.
1795.
Ætat.
29.
M. de Staël being sent by the king of Sweden as minister to Paris, she repaired thither. Her arrival formed an epoch in society. She threw open her drawing-rooms, and all foreigners of distinction, ambassadors, and literary men were charmed to meet in them. It attracted universal attention, and became the signal of the revival of refinement in the capital. Her chief exertions tended to getting the names of various friends erased from the list of emigrants, which, while party spirit ran so high, and the name of monarch and Bourbon was still held in detestation and terror, was matter at once of difficulty and odium. Legendre, a man who had figured during the reign of terror, denounced her in the tribune of the convention, while the newspapers complained of the influence exercised by women in their salons dorés, as they were vulgarly called, and by the society that gathered there. She succeeded in benefiting several of her friends, and this happiness counterbalanced the attacks made against her.
1797.
Ætat.
31.
During the whole of the reign of the directory, the influence of madame de Staël was great. The expectation of a civil war became more imminent as the royalists rested their hopes on the armies of la Vendée, and the victories of the republican troops on the eastern frontiers, supporting the new state of things, gave energy to the men in power. Moderate and enlightened lovers of freedom desired to reconcile the two parties, and prevent a struggle. Madame de Staël attempted to effect this reconciliation. She had no desire for the return of the Bourbons; for such a change could only have been operated through the subjugation of France by foreign troops, a circumstance to be looked upon as the lowest fall in its political greatness. She was the centre of a brilliant society, which, while it regarded the chiefs of the republic as vulgar, was attached to a form of government full of promise of distinction and power to able and daring men. In France the influence of women is one of the engines used by the other sex for their advancement. Madame de Staël had already placed one of her friends in an elevated post; she exerted herself for others. She was generous and active. No gall—no bad feelings of hatred, or love of mischief, mingled in her desire to be influential. But passionately loving glory, and eager to take a part in the busier scenes of life, she made her house the rendezvous of all parties, and sought her own elevation in trying to reconcile them all, and to diffuse abroad a spirit of moderation and mutual toleration, and was often exposed to the danger of imprisonment and exile from the preponderance of the more popular party. Her mind was active, her imagination lively; but she was without prudence. Her father said of her, that she was like the savages, who sell their cabin in the morning and find themselves without shelter at night. Ardent but without forethought, ambitious of distinction without selfishness, she looked on danger as a crown of laurel, and, as far as she was personally concerned, cared more for the excitement of the combat than the repose of success. Thus, though she failed in her attempts to reconcile contending factions, she felt neither despondency nor sorrow. Meanwhile, the struggle of parties—the violence of each occasioning the weakness of all—became the stepping-stone to the man who, raising himself by the sword, and establishing and increasing his power by the same method, fell, when his weapon failed to be able to deal with all the enemies from the extremities of the earth whom he challenged to the contest.
Bonaparte and madame de Staël were neither impressed favourably by the other when first they met. He saw in her a factitious but a not the less powerful influence with which he could only cope by trampling it in the dust; and she found in him a man unimpressible by words or sentiments, aiming at one goal, and wholly indifferent to the thousands to be mowed down or the one tortured by the methods he used for his success. In their encounter she felt her existence strike against a rock which, while it wrecked whole fleets, did not disdain to swamp a skiff which had every right to expect shelter beneath its shadow. When, after the treaty of Campo-Formio, Bonaparte arrived in Paris, he and madame de Staël often met in society. She declared that a feeling of fear always overcame her in his presence. She was struck by his superiority, but repelled by a certain coldness that remained as a wall between them. When, for the sake of amassing funds for his expedition to Egypt, Bonaparte proposed the invasion of Switzerland to the directory, madame de Staël regarded the cause of the independence of that country as so sacred, that she sought a conference with the general for the purpose of turning him from his design. Nothing can better show the difference of French manners from ours than this circumstance; and Bonaparte, a child of the army, little conversant with the spirit of French society, regarded a woman's interference on such a subject as impertinent and out of character with her sex; but, although he was not to be moved by her, such was her acknowledged influence that he did not disdain to discuss the question with her with an appearance of candour, till, having pronounced certain words which he considered sufficient to refute her arguments, declaring that men must have political rights, and advancing the falsehood that the Swiss would have more as a portion of France than as an independent insignificant state, he turned the conversation, and talked of his love of retirement,—of the country and the fine arts,—expressing himself as sharing many of the lady's own tastes. Madame de Staël felt the influence of his power of pleasing, but was mortified to be treated like a mere woman. He, on the other hand, perceiving that she had talents sufficient to persuade and influence men, and that she was likely to exert this power against himself, conceived a dislike, which he afterwards showed in a series of persecutions.