MADAME DE STAËL IS COURAGEOUS FOR HER FRIENDS.
Necker’s victory over the rage of the populace was a fleeting one. He
had, indeed, overstepped the prerogatives of a Minister in asking for the
amnesty. Misled by the elation of his gratified vanity and the impulse
of his benevolent heart, he, an ardent defender of order, forgot that in
placing himself between the Assembly and King on the one hand and the
people on the other, he practically recognized the right of a faction
to act without the consent of the Government. It was for the latter to
reverse the decree of the Commune and not for the electors of Paris.
His dream of smiling peace installed by his hand on the ruins of the
Revolution was rudely and rapidly dispelled. Madame de Staël sorrowfully
records that on the very evening of that glorious day the amnesty was
retracted, and ascribes this result in great part to the influence of
Mirabeau. But, in truth, a very little reflection must have sufficed
to convince anybody that the utopian demands of Necker were singularly
misplaced. The very electors who had acceded to them asserted that all
they had ever intended was to shield the arrested royalists from the
fury of the populace, but in no sense from the action of justice. The
Assembly confirmed this view, and from that moment Necker’s influence
was practically gone. It was proved to be a bubble; and his triumph,
respectable as were some of the motives which had urged him to invoke
it, became ludicrous when contrasted with the stern and tragic realities
of the moment. This Madame de Staël did not, could not see. She was fain
to console herself with the compassionate reflection that, after all, De
Besenval—an old man—was saved.
She narrates with dolorous pride the efforts honestly, courageously, and
to a certain degree successfully, made by her father, during fifteen
months, to avert the disaster of famine; and innocently appeals to them
against the failure as a statesman, to which she resolutely shuts her
eyes.
One measure after another opposed by Necker was voted—the confiscation
of the property of the clergy, the suppression of titles of nobility,
and the emission of assignats. No popularity could have resisted such
successive blows; and Necker was popular no longer. Still, Madame de
Staël touchingly begs the world, in her writings, not to allow itself to
be turned from the paths of virtue by the spectacle of a good man so
persecuted by fate. She claims our admiration for a series of quixotic
acts, and is perpetually insisting on the amazing magnanimity which would
not allow her father to become base because he had ceased to be useful.
Thoroughly discouraged at last (perhaps partly convinced that to preach
kindness to savages, and self-abnegation to the vile, was a task to be
resumed in better times) Necker tendered his resignation, and had the
mortification of seeing it accepted with perfect indifference both by the
Assembly and the King.
Before leaving Paris forever, he deposited in the royal treasury two
millions of his own property. The exact object of this munificence is
not clear; even Madame de Staël failed to explain it on any practical
grounds. But she admired it extremely, and so may we.
The journey with the terrified and suffering Madame Necker to Switzerland
was a great contrast to the return in the previous year to Paris. Then
it had been “roses, roses all the way”; now it was nothing but insults.
At Arcis-sur-Aube the carriage was stopped by an infuriated crowd, who
accused M. Necker of having betrayed the cause of the people in the
interests of the emigrant nobles. The accusation was an absurd one, since
he had only endeavored to be superhumanly kind to everybody. He had
wished to preserve the people from crimes and starvation, the clergy from
ruin, and the emigrant nobles from detection, and this was the result.
It was hard, but inevitable, and as there were many worse fates than
M. Necker’s in those days one cannot quite free oneself from a feeling
of impatience at Madame de Staël’s perpetual lamentations over the
inconceivable hardships of her parent’s lot.
We now approach an episode in Madame de Staël’s life which it is
necessary to touch on with discretion. This is her connection with the
Count Louis de Narbonne. The stories circulated in regard to them are
familiar to all readers of Madame d’Arblay’s memoirs. Dr. Burney thought
himself in duty bound to warn his little Fanny against her growing
adoration for Necker’s great, but, according to him, not blameless
daughter, who, during her stay at Mickleham, exerted herself to win the
friendship of the author of _Cecilia_. Fanny, as we know, was at first
greatly shocked, and completely incredulous. She described Madame de
Staël as loving M. de Narbonne tenderly, but so openly, and in a manner
so devoid of coquetry, that friendship between two men, in her opinion,
could hardly be differently manifested. But the seed of suspicion once
cast in the little prude’s mind, quickly germinated, and led eventually
to a total cessation of her acquaintance with the woman whose brilliancy
and goodness had so fascinated her. This is not the place in which to
discuss Fanny’s conduct; but was the information on which she based it
correct? Who shall say? Madame de Staël was extremely imprudent, and she
seems to have been dangerously near to loving a number of men.
Miss Berry, in her memoirs, accuses her of a “passion” for Talleyrand,
and spoke as though concluding it to be a theme of common gossip. She
certainly liked to absorb a great deal of her friends’ affection, and
was avowedly displeased when they married. Her sentiments towards Baron
de Staël, full of a sweet and fresh cordiality at first, seems rapidly
to have changed to aversion. As far as it is possible to judge, she
unhesitatingly sacrificed him on all occasions to her filial love or her
intellectual aims. When he was in Paris she left him in order to console
M. Necker in his mournful retirement at Coppet. When he was at Coppet she
remained in Paris, there to form and electrify a constitutional salon.
Various anecdotes attest to the scandal uttered about her, and the truth
of some of these stories admits of little doubt. But, on the other hand,
it must be remembered that detraction is ever busiest with the greatest
names; that Madame de Staël, always preoccupied with her subject and
never with herself, irritated the nerves and stirred the bile of inferior
people who were proportionately gratified to hear her attacked; and that
she lived in the midst of a society where conjugal fidelity was rare
enough to be hardly believed in. Countless passages in her writings prove
how exalted was her ideal of family life; and if they also prove her
constant, restless yearning after some unattained, unattainable good,
there is at least no sign of the satiety of exhausted emotion in them.
Let us be content, then, that in many instances a veil should hide from
us the deeper recesses of Madame de Staël’s heart. Grant that there were
two Germaines—one her father’s daughter, lofty-minded, pure, catching
the infection of exalted feelings, and incapable of error; the other her
husband’s wife, thrust into the fiery circle of human passion, thence
to emerge a little scorched and harmed. The hidden centre of that dual
self cannot be revealed to us; but what we do know is sometimes so grand
and always so great that we can afford to be indulgent when reduced to
conjecture.
In 1791, after having paid a visit of condolence to her father at
Coppet, Madame de Staël had returned to Paris, and made her salon the
rallying-point for the most distinguished Constitutionels. Conspicuous
among these, in principles although not in name, was De Narbonne,
described by Madame de Staël herself as “_Grand seigneur, homme d’esprit,
courtisan et philosophe_.” He was a brilliant, an enlightened, a
generous and charming man. His sympathies were liberal; it would have
been too much to expect from him that they should be subversive. He
had been brought up in the enervating atmosphere of the Court, yet had
adopted many of the new ideas. After having accomplished the difficult
and perilous enterprise of escorting the King’s aunts to Rome, and
establishing them under the roof of the Cardinal de Bernis, he returned
to Paris and ranged himself on the side of the Constitution. His
soldier-soul (he was an extremely gallant officer) would not allow of his
going any farther along the facile descent of change. The King’s abortive
attempt at escape and subsequent imprisonment in the Tuileries restored
to Narbonne all the fervor which his allegiance as a courtier might
originally have lacked. But he was a very intelligent man, so much so,
that Napoleon himself years later rendered justice to his sagacity. He
had serious tastes and a great love of knowledge, and was almost as witty
as Talleyrand himself. He was made Minister of War in December, 1791,
and the general impression prevailed that Madame de Staël’s influence
had contributed to his appointment. He was young and full of hope, and
proposed to himself the impossible task of encouraging the action of the
Assembly at the same time as he sought to reconstruct the popularity of
the King. He also exerted himself to prepare France for resistance to
the armies of foreign invaders; visited the frontier; reported the state
of things there to the Assembly; provisioned the forts; re-established
garrisons, and organized three armies. But what he could not do was to
inspire anybody with confidence in himself. “Too black for heaven, too
white for hell,” he could neither rise to the sublime ineptitude of
deluded royalism nor sink to the brutal logic of facts. Curtly dismissed
by the King, at the end of three months, on resigning the portfolio he
resumed the sword.
To defend his ungrateful sovereign was his religion, since, in spite
of his talents, he did not reach the point of perceiving that there
is a moment in the history of every nation when individuals must be
sacrificed to principles. Perhaps this preoccupation of minds, naturally
enlightened, with merely personal issues is the real key to all that
was tragically mysterious in the Revolution. Madame de Staël herself
deplored the fate of the King and Queen with precisely the same wealth
of compassion that she would have expressed on the occasion of some
catastrophe involving hundreds of obscure lives. It seemed as though
only such sanguinary monomaniacs as Robespierre or St. Just, only such
corrupt and colossal natures as Mirabeau or Danton, could look below the
accidental circumstances of an event to its enduring elements. All that
was morally and vitally, as distinguished from mentally and potentially,
best in France threw itself into passionate defence of persons; while all
that was strong, original, consistent, was drawn into the fatal policy of
blood.
A few months after Narbonne’s fall, Madame de Staël endeavored to
associate him in a plan which her pity had suggested to her for the
escape of the Royal Family. She wished to buy a property that was for
sale near Dieppe. Thus furnished with a pretext for visiting the coast,
she proposed to make three journeys thither. On the first two occasions
she was to be accompanied by her eldest son, who was the age of the
Dauphin, by a man resembling the King in height and general appearance,
and by two women sufficiently like the Queen and Madame Elisabeth. In her
third journey she would have left the original party behind and taken
with her the whole of the Royal Family. But the King and Queen refused
to co-operate in this romantic and courageous plan. Their motives were
not unselfish. Louis XVI. objected to Narbonne’s share in the scheme;
and Marie Antoinette, who regarded the double representation of the Tiers
Etat as the cause of all her woes, detested Necker’s daughter.
When the Tuileries was invaded by the mob, M. Necker, who was already
at Coppet, and knew that the Baron de Staël had been recalled to
Sweden, wrote urging his daughter to join him. But she was chained to
Paris, fascinated by the very scenes that revolted her, and anxious to
intervene if only to save. She assisted, with slender sympathy for the
revolutionaries, at the celebration of the 14th July in the Champs de
Mars, and was wrung with pity for the tear-stained countenance of the
Queen, whose magnificent toilet and dignified bearing contrasted with the
squalor of her cortège. Madame de Staël’s eyes were fixed with longing
compassion on the figure of the King as he ascended the steps of the
altar, there to swear for the second time to preserve the Constitution.
His powdered head, so lately desecrated by the _bonnet rouge_, and
gold-embroidered coat struck her imagination painfully as the vain
symbols of vanished ease and splendor.
Then came the terrible night of the 9th August, during which, from
midnight to morning, the tocsins never ceased sounding. “I was at my
window with some of my friends” (wrote Madame de Staël), “and every
fifteen minutes the volunteer patrol of the Constitutionels brought us
news. We were told that the faubourgs were advancing headed by Santerre
the brewer and Westermann.… Nobody could foresee what would happen the
next day, and nobody expected to survive it.… All at once (at 7 o’clock)
came the terrible sound of cannon. In this first combat the Swiss Guards
were victors.”
The tidings—partly false, as afterwards proved—were brought her of the
massacre of Lally Tollendal, Narbonne, Montmorency, and others of her
friends; and at once, regardless of peril, she went out in her carriage
to hear if the news were true. After two hours of fruitless efforts to
pass, she learnt that all those in whom she was most interested were
still alive, but in hiding; and, as soon as the evening came, she sallied
forth once more to visit them in the obscure houses where they had taken
refuge. Later, she came to have but one thought, which was to save as
many as she could of her friends. They were unwilling at first to take
shelter in her house as being too conspicuous; but she would listen to
no such objections. Two yielded to her persuasions, and one of these was
Narbonne. He was shut up with his companion in the safest room, while the
intrepid hostess established herself in the front apartments, and there,
in great anxiety, awaited a domiciliary visit from the authorities. They
were not long in coming and in demanding M. de Narbonne. To permit a
search was practically to deliver up the victim. Madame de Staël’s whole
mind was consequently bent on averting investigation.
The police agents were exceptionally ignorant, and of this fact she was
quick to take advantage. She began by instilling alarm into them as to
the violation of rights which they committed in invading the house of
an ambassador, and she followed this up by informing them that Sweden,
being on the frontier of France, would descend upon that offending land
immediately. She next passed to pleasantries, and succeeded so well
in cajoling her visitors that they finally allowed themselves to be
gracefully bowed out. Four days later a false passport supplied by a
friend of Madame de Staël allowed Narbonne to escape to England.
The Swedish ambassadress herself could easily have left France at any
moment, but she lingered on from day to day, unwilling to quit the
country while so many of her friends were in danger; and she was rewarded
at last by the opportunity of interfering to save Jaucourt, who had been
conveyed to the Abbaye—now aptly named “the Ante-chamber of Death.”
Madame de Staël knew none of the members of the Commune, but, with her
unfailing presence of mind, she remembered that one of them, Manuel,
the _procureur_, had some pretensions to be literary. These pretensions
being greater than his talent, Madame de Staël rightly concluded that he
possessed sufficient vanity to be moved by solicitation. She wrote to
ask for an interview, which was accorded her for the next morning at 7
o’clock in the official’s own house.
“The hour was democratic,” she remarks, but she was careful to be
punctual. Her eloquence achieved an easy victory over Manuel, who, unlike
so many of his colleagues, was no fanatic; and on the 1st of September he
made Madame de Staël happy by writing to inform her that, thanks to his
good offices, Jaucourt had been set at liberty.
She now, at last, determined to quit France the next day, but not alone.
Resolute to the end in risking her life for that of others, she consented
to take the Abbé de Montesquion with her in the disguise of a domestic,
and convey him safely into Switzerland. A passport obtained for one
of her servants was given to one of his, and a place on the high road
indicated as a rendezvous where the Abbé was to join her suite.
When the next morning dawned a fresh element of terror had invaded the
public mind. The news of the fall of Longwy and Verdun had arrived and
Paris was in effervescence. Again in all the sections the tocsin was
sounding; and everybody whose own life was his chief preoccupation kept
as quiet as possible. But Madame de Staël could not keep quiet—that
was impossible for her at all times—and at this moment the image
paramount in her mind was that of the poor Abbé waiting anxiously at
his rendezvous—perhaps only to be discovered if his generous deliverer
delayed.
Turning a deaf ear to all remonstrance, she started in a
travelling-carriage drawn by six horses, and accompanied by her servants
in gala livery. This was an unfortunate inspiration. Instead of filling
the minds of the vulgar with awe, as she had vainly hoped, it aroused
their vigilant suspicions. The carriage had hardly passed under the
portals of the hotel before it was surrounded by a furious crowd of old
women, “risen from hell,” as Madame de Staël energetically expressed it,
who shrieked out that she was carrying away the gold of the nation. This
intelligent outcry brought a new contingent of exasperated patriots of
both sexes, who ordered the fugitive Ambassadress to be conveyed to the
Assembly of the Section nearest at hand.
She did not lose her presence of mind, but on descending from the
carriage found an opportunity of bidding the Abbé’s servant rejoin his
master and tell him of what had happened. This step proved to be a very
dangerous one. The President of the Section informed Madame de Staël
that she was accused of seeking to take away proscribed royalists, and
that he must proceed to a roll-call of her servants. One of them was
missing, naturally, having been despatched to save his own master; and
the consequence was a peremptory order to Madame de Staël to proceed to
the Hôtel de Ville under charge of a gendarme. Such a command was not
calculated to inspire her with any sentiment but fear. Several people had
already been massacred on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; and although
no woman had yet been sacrificed to popular fury, there was no guarantee
for such immunity lasting; and, as a point of fact, the Princess de
Lamballe fell the very next day.
Madame de Staël’s passage from the Faubourg Saint Germain to the Hôtel
de Ville lasted three hours. Her carriage was led at a foot-pace through
an immense crowd, which greeted her with reiterated cries of “Death!” It
was not herself they detested, she says, but the evidences of her luxury;
for the news of the morning had brought more opprobrium than ever on the
execrated name of aristocrat. Fortunately, the gendarme who was inside
the carriage was touched by his prisoner’s situation and her delicate
condition of health, and her prayers, and promised to do what he could to
defend her. By degrees her courage rose. She knew that the worse moment
must be that in which she would reach the Place de Grève; but by the time
she arrived there aversion for the mob had almost overcome in her every
feeling but disdain.
She mounted the steps of the Hôtel de Ville between a double row of
pikes, and one man made a movement to strike her. Thanks to the prompt
interposition of the friendly gendarme, she was able, however, to reach
the presence of Robespierre in safety. The room in which she found him
was full of an excited crowd of men, women and children, all emulously
shrieking, “_Vive la Nation!_”
The Swedish Ambassadress was just beginning to protest officially against
the treatment she had met with, when Manuel arrived on the scene. Never
was any apparition more opportune. Greatly astonished to see his late
illustrious visitor in such a position, he promptly undertook to answer
for her until the Commune had made up its mind what to do with her; and
conveying her and her maid to his own house, shut them up in the same
cabinet where Madame de Staël had pleaded for Jaucourt.
There they remained for six hours, “dying of hunger, thirst, and
fear.” The windows of the room looked out upon the Place de Grève,
and consequently offered the spectacle of bands of yelling murderers
returning from the prisons “with bare and bleeding arms.”
Madame de Staël’s travelling carriage had remained in the middle of the
square. She expected to see it pillaged; but a man in the uniform of the
National Guard came to the rescue and passed two hours in successfully
defending the luggage.
This individual turned out to be the redoubtable Santerre. He introduced
himself later in the day to Madame de Staël, and took credit for his
conduct on the ground of the respect with which M. Necker had inspired
him when distributing corn to the starving population of Paris.
In the evening Manuel, pallid with horror at the events of that awful
day, took Madame de Staël back to her own house, through streets of which
the obscurity was only relieved at moments by the lurid glare of torches.
He told her that he had procured a new passport for herself and her maid
alone; and that she was to be escorted to the frontier by a gendarme.
The next day Tallien arrived, appointed by the Commune to accompany her
to the barriers. Several suspected aristocrats were present when he was
announced. Most people under such circumstances would have taken care to
be found alone; but Madame de Staël remained undaunted to the end. She
simply begged Tallien to be discreet, and he fortunately proved so. A few
more difficulties had to be encountered before she was fairly in safety;
but at last she reached the pure air and peaceful scenes of the Jura.