Now that the empire of the salons, she observes, has passed away with that of women, it would be difficult to convey to our youthful France an idea of the influence which certain of these were wont to exercise, in state affairs and in the choice of men in power. To have a salon is far from an easy thing; a crowd of people may, and do every day, give concerts and balls in their gilded apartments, and yet they may never have salons. Essential conditions are required which can rarely be found in conjunction. The most important of all is the talent and character of the lady who does the honours. Without being old, she must have passed the age in which a woman is chiefly spoken of for her prettiness or her dress, and be at that point of time when a woman's mind may rule over the self-love of a man more than her youthful attractions enabled her to rule over his heart.
Rank and fortune were important items, not quite indispensable, however; for Mme du Deffand was poor, and Mme Geoffrin was the wife of a manufacturer. In the salons of these two women edicts were framed, and academicians reared; but the questions discussed there were not nearly of the importance of those to which Mme de Staël's salon gave rise. It was essential that the mistress of the house should have a decided and superior taste in a variety of ways; also a total absence of those little, envious feelings which might have tended to exclude the fashionable woman or successful author. She must know how to bear enemies in her presence, to place talents according to their worth, to shew the tiresome the way to the door—things which require address and courage.
The salon of Mme de Staël, during three different periods of her life, took considerable modification from the changes of the time; but it was always the same in power, if not in brilliancy.
Under the first Revolution, it was the scene of most momentous deliberations. Barnave, Talleyrand, Lameth, Dupont, Boissy d'Anglas, Portalis, Chénier, Rœderer, and Benjamin Constant, discussed at the place of familiar meeting many a half-formed decree, and many important state nominations. The only member of the Directory who visited there was Barras; and it was a common saying, that every visit cost him a good deed; for Mme de Staël never slackened in her intercessions for the victims of the tribunals. She infused courage into the hearts of those who were pleaders for them. Through her means, Talleyrand was recalled, and even named minister of foreign affairs. 'He wanted some help,' she said, 'in order to arrive at power, but none to enable him to keep it when gained.' Her sagacity was at fault, if she persuaded herself that the returned emigrant-priest would bring harmony into public counsels. On these evenings, pregnant with deeds both evil and good, it was said that some very foul conspiracies were concocted, and some of these were directly imputed to Mme de Staël; but she earnestly denied the truth of such surmises. Her salon, not herself, was guilty. Most generously did she exert herself in behalf of those who suffered after such conspiracies; but some one was heard to say: 'She is a good woman, but would push any of her friends into the water for the delight of fishing them up again with her own tackle.'
When the Consulate was established, Mme de Staël's salon empire was watched by the rising influence of the day with a jealous eye. It was certainly a turbulent scene. Very bitter were the complaints of the men of the Revolution. They had risked so much; they had fought so courageously for liberty! They saw the disorders of the time, but they could not bear to lose all the fruits of their toil; and Garat and Andrieux, Daunon and Benjamin Constant, urged on by the eloquence of Mme de Staël, framed powerful appeals on these occasions for the morrow. Bonaparte could not tolerate this. His power was too recently gained—his projects too unripe. In vain did the friends of Mme de Staël say, that a salon could never be dangerous to a rule like his. 'It is not a salon,' said he; 'it is a club.' It was, in fact, the antagonism between mind and physical force. The First Consul had said before, of the orators of the Tribune: 'I have no time to answer these refractory speechifiers: they do nothing but perplex all things; they must be silenced.' And one great point of attack was Mme de Staël's salon. It was necessary she should abdicate her throne. A sentence of banishment condemned the brilliant lady to lay down the sceptre. Exiled to Geneva, surrounded by friends, sharing her father's lot, occupied with her daughter's education, she had, it may be thought, plenty of objects: she was unquestionably the first literary woman in Europe, too, and as such, Geneva was as her salon, where she received the homage of royalty and talent. Yet, a true Frenchwoman, unable to bear separation from the peculiar atmosphere in which she had been reared, she pined after it—pined still more for the friends who visited her only to be partakers of her exile; and so she passed the whole period of the Napoleon dynasty.
Meanwhile, in the interval between the banishment of Mme de Staël and her return, the most captivating mistress of a Paris salon appears to have been Mme de Beaumont. She was the daughter of M. de Montmorin, the minister of foreign affairs, who had immediately followed Necker. She married early, and not happily. She lived with her father, separated from her husband, and was intrusted to transcribe some of the very important correspondence between Mirabeau and the court. In the Reign of Terror, her father, and it is thought others of her family, fell by the guillotine; but she herself was spared, even against her will. She retired for awhile into the country, visiting among her friends, who did all they could to console her. She was the object of the strongest attachment on the part of Châteaubriand, Joubert, Fontanes, Molé, and many others; and when, once more, quiet and order were restored, even at the sacrifice of much of liberty, she came to Paris again. Her old friends rallied about her, her spirits seemed to revive for awhile, and her salon was for a year or two a scene of remarkable enjoyment. One who truly appreciated her, and who was worthy to be himself the centre of a social circle—M. Joubert, the author of some beautiful thoughts on literature and divers other subjects—thus tenderly commemorates the evenings to which we have alluded: 'Peaceful society! where none of those disuniting pretensions which spoil enjoyment could come; where acknowledged talent was not divorced from good temper; where praise was given to whatever was praiseworthy; where nothing was thought of but what was really attractive. Peaceful society! whose scattered members can never unite again without speaking of her who was the connecting link that brought them all together.'
To our minds, there seems something unique and infinitely touching in this bursting out, though but for a short time, of the slumbering fires of an older society, from underneath the heaps of hard and alien material which had gone far to extinguish every spark of gentleness and refinement. The relics of families—their hearts still bleeding from their wounds—came to forget, if possible, the terrible past, and indulge their quiet hopes for the future. Very soon, indeed, the dream was dispelled; the tyranny proved to some unbearable; and some it vanquished in their highest part—their inward conscience—making them subservient when they might have shunned the danger altogether. But while the quiet interval lasted, it was like an Indian summer, prolonging the intellectual and tasteful beauty which was soon to be overwhelmed by the vulgar splendours of the Empire.
The greatest loss this circle could have had was the first. Mme de Beaumont died at Rome in 1804—attended only by Châteaubriand—who has given an account of the closing scene in his memoirs, and thenceforth it does not appear that the same society reassembled.
But another and third edition of the salon, under Mme de Staël, was witnessed at the Restoration. Hitherto we have sketched from Mme Sophie Gay's pictures. At this period, she declares herself unable to bear the mortification of mingling with the public of Paris: she could not see the Cossacks without shuddering. She shut herself up in her house, and knew what passed only through the kindness of friends, who wrote narratives for her amusement of any remarkable incidents they might note. Among these communications, Mme Sophie Gay has preserved one from the Marquis de Custine, and she has given it as a faithful picture of one of the last of Mme de Staël's soirées in Paris.
'I am just returned, and will not go to bed without telling you what has most amused me—not that amused is the right word, for Mme de Staël's salon is more than a scene of amusement: it is a glass in which is reflected the history of the time. What we see and hear there is more instructive than books, more exciting than many comedies....