_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.
“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.
“She pretends”—growled the Emperor—“to speak neither of public affairs,
nor of me. But it happens invariably that every one comes out of her
presence less attached to me than when he went in.”
Hunted to Coppet, she was attended there by Benjamin Constant—“the
scribe of her dictation; the aid-de-camp of her thought; the man who
almost equaled her in conversational power;”—visited there, by Byron,
Schlegel, Sismondi, and so many other men of mark and power that a
cordon of French police was drawn about the house near enough to watch
all comers and goers without revealing their proximity. Madame Récamier
braved the danger of discovery and the consequent wrath of Napoleon by
journeying thither by post-carriage from France, expressly to see her
persecuted friend. Arriving under cover of the darkness, she tarried
but a night, departing early the next morning. So soon as the news
could travel to Paris and a post be sent in reply, a messenger overtook
her in her Swiss tour with an order from the Emperor, prohibiting her
return to the metropolis under penalty of fine and imprisonment.
Above the broad arch of the doorway, within which the two women—one as
eminent for her beauty as was the other for her genius, met and parted,
is carved the Neckar coat-of-arms. The court-yard is full of flowers,
the high iron fence separating it from lawn and park, wreathed with
roses and white jasmine. The central building and two wings of the
château encompass it on three sides. Great iron gates give egress in
the direction of the grounds. These are extensive and of much natural
beauty. A road bends around a lawn brightened by beds of geraniums and
coleas. An oval pond is in the center, a solitary willow drooping above
it. Beyond pool and circling drive, is an old stone bench from which
we got the best view of the house. It is of gray stone, shaded darkly
by age. Above the second story is a high, sloping roof, pierced by
dormer windows and many chimneys. The wings are peaked towers, capped
by quaint wooden knops and spires that may be seen far up and down the
lake. Masses of chestnuts and limes, diversified by a few hemlocks
and spruces, embower the mansion. The undulating line of the Juras is
visible above it, like another roof-tree. Branching off from the wider
road are foot-paths, overhung by trees. A swift brook is the limit of
the lawn at the right. The banks are steep and green with turf and the
ivy that has strayed downward from the tree-boles. Lime and poplar
leafage make the clear water darkly deep. Foot-bridges span it by which
one can pass into the meadows beyond.
“Ah, madame!” said Chateaubriand, while walking in the peaceful demesne
with its mistress,—“If the Emperor would but banish me, likewise—to
Coppet!”
She paced these walks like a caged lioness; ate her heart out in the
fine old house yonder.
“I would rather,” she cried, passionately,—“live in the Rue Jean Pain
Mollet, with two thousand francs a year, than upon one hundred thousand
at Coppet!”
Her egotism was as magnificent as her genius. For the food of one and
the display of the other, Paris was the only place upon the globe.
It was while she lived at Coppet that she made her love-match with De
Rocca, a young French officer, and an invalid, absent from the army
on furlough at Geneva. He was eminently handsome, and she worshiped
beauty. The suit of a man of twenty-two to a widow twenty years his
senior, was dangerous flattery to one who drew in admiration as the
very breath of life. Other men had paid court to her intellect, her
position, her wealth. This man loved the _woman_ he would make his wife.
“My name belongs to Europe!” she replied to his first offer.
“I will love you so well as to _make_ you love me!” was his answer.
The marriage was a secret, kept until disclosed in her will after her
death. We gain a glimpse of the morals of the day that is a shock
to our ideas of decorum, when we read in the same paragraph of his
residence at Coppet; his companionship in her travels, and that their
son was born without the revelation of their relation as husband and
wife.
It was not until our third trip to Coppet that we were able to see the
bust of De Rocca in one of the upper rooms not shown to strangers while
the family are at home. It is a beautiful head, with a sweet manliness
of look that excuses the seemingly absurd union, to susceptible
lady-visitors.
Neither then, nor at any other time, could we prevail upon any employé
of the De Broglies (Madame de Staël’s grandson now owns the estate) to
unlock the rusty gate of the family cemetery across the road. It is
environed by neglected commons, and the brick wall is, at least, ten
feet high. It looks like a fortified forest, so dense is the unpruned
foliage of the tall trees. We walked all around it, each recalling
something he, or she had heard or read of the burial-chapel of the
Neckars so safely hidden in the heart of the wood. Of Neckar’s tomb
and recumbent statue, and his wife’s at his side. Of their daughter’s
request that her grave might not be made a show-place, and the pious
respect accorded by her son and daughter and their descendants to a
wish so incongruous with the passion for notoriety that swayed her from
the nursery to the death-bed.
She had suffered intensely in her latest years. Natural nervousness
was aggravated by the use of opium in such quantities to dull severe
paroxysms of pain, that it lost its effect as a sedative. She seemed
to have forgotten how to sleep. But her mind retained its strength and
clearness.
“I know now,” she said, “what the passage from life to death is. The
goodness of GOD makes it easy. Our thoughts become indistinct. The pain
is not great.”
The habit of analytical thought was strong to the last.
In spite of the sternly-barred gates, prying curiosity has found its
way to the sequestered chapel. At one angle of the wall, out of sight
of the house, bricks have been picked out at intervals to supply a
foothold for the climber, and the coping is fractured. A gentleman of
our party put his toe into a crevice and looked over.
“More than one person has passed in this way,” he said. “The grass is
trampled and the underbrush broken. The place is a jungle of matted
bushes and large trees.”
He stepped back gently to the ground, and we strolled on.
“_Hic tandem quiescit, quæ nunquam quievit_,” reads her tombstone. The
embosoming trees; the lofty wall; the locked gate are not without their
meaning.
GOD rest her soul in keeping yet more wise and tender!