MADAME DE STAËL RETIRES TO COPPET.
Madame de Staël arrived at Coppet about the beginning of September,
1792. The life there, after her recent experiences in Paris, so far from
seeming to her one of welcome rest, fretted her ardent spirit almost
beyond endurance. She longed to be back in France, even under the shadow
of the guillotine, anywhere but in front of the lake, with its inexorable
beauty and maddening calm.
“The whole of Switzerland inspires me with magnificent horror,” she wrote
to her husband, who was still in Sweden. “Sometimes I think that if I
were in Paris with a title which they would be forced to respect, I might
be of use to a number of individuals, and with that hope I would brave
everything. I perceive, with some pain, that the thing which least suits
me in the world is this peaceful and rustic life. I have put down my
horses for economy’s sake, and because I feel my solitude less when I do
not see anybody.”
By “anybody” it is to be presumed that she meant the good Swiss, whose
expressions of horror, doubtless as monotonous as reiterated, must have
been irritating to one whose single desire night and day, was to cast
herself into the arena, there to combat and to save. One outlet she found
for her activity in perpetual plans for enabling her friends, and often
her enemies, to escape from Paris.
The scheme which she projected was to find some man or woman, as the case
might be, who would enter France with Swiss passports, certificates,
etc., and after getting these properly _visés_, would hand them over to
the person who was to be saved.
Nothing could be simpler, Madame de Staël averred; and as she provided
money, time, thought, energy, and presumably infected her agents with a
little of her own enthusiasm, her efforts were often successful. Among
those who engaged her attention were Mathieu de Montmorency, François de
Jaucourt, the Princess de Poix and Madame de Simiane.
Among the people whom she saved, and whose rescue she records with the
most complacency, is that of young Achille du Chayla. He was a nephew
of De Jaucourt’s, and was residing at Coppet under a Swedish name—(M.
de Staël had lent himself to many friendly devices of that kind). The
news came that Du Chayla, when trying to escape across the frontier
under cover of a Swiss passport, had been arrested at a frontier town on
suspicion of being what he truly was—a refugee Frenchman. Nevertheless,
the authorities declared themselves willing to release him if the
Lieutenant Baillival of Nyon would attest that he was Swiss. What was
to be done? To bring M. Reverdil, the functionary aforesaid, to such a
declaration seemed well-nigh hopeless, and Jaucourt was in despair. His
nephew, if once his identity were discovered, had no chance of escape
from death; for not only was his name on the list of the suspected ones,
but his father actually held a command under Condé’s banner. This was one
of the opportunities in which Madame de Staël delighted. Her spirits rose
at once in the face of such difficulties. Fortunately, M. Reverdil was
an old friend of her family; she believed that she would be able to melt
him, and she hurried away to try.
The task was more arduous than she had anticipated. M. Reverdil (by her
own confession one of the most enlightened of Swiss magistrates) turned
out to have a sturdy conscience and an uncomfortable amount of common
sense. He represented to his ardent visitor, first, that he would be
wrong in uttering a falsehood for any motive; next, that in his official
position he might compromise his country by making a false attestation.
“If the truth be discovered,” he urged, “we shall no longer have the
right of claiming our own compatriots when arrested in France; and thus
I should jeopardize the interest of those who are confided to me for
the sake of saving a man towards whom I have no duties.” M. Reverdil’s
arguments had “a very plausible side,” Madame de Staël allowed thus
much herself; but the good man little knew with whom he had to deal if
he thought that such cold justice would have the least effect on his
petitioner. She swept all paltry considerations as to the remote danger
of unknown, unromantic Swiss burghers to the winds. Her object was to
bring back to Jaucourt the assurance of his young nephew’s safety; and
from this no abstract principles could turn her.
She remained two hours with M. Reverdil, arguing, entreating, imploring.
The task she proposed to herself was, in her own words, “to vanquish his
conscience by his humanity.” He remained inflexible for a long while,
but his visitor reiterating to him, “If you say No, an only son, a man
without reproach, will be assassinated within twenty-four hours, and your
simple word will have killed him,” he ultimately succumbed. Madame de
Staël says it was his emotion that triumphed; it is just possible that it
was sheer physical exhaustion. Madame de Staël was at no time a quiet
person to deal with; when excited, as in the present instance, she must
have been overpowering.
It was shortly after these events that Madame de Staël visited England,
and while there went to Mickleham, there to be introduced to, and for
a time to captivate, Fanny Burney. Except Talleyrand, she was the most
illustrious of the brilliant band of exiles gathered together at Juniper
Hall, and familiar to all readers of the memoirs of Madame d’Arblay and
the journal of Mrs. Phillips. It is well known how Fanny withdrew from
her intimacy with the future author of _Corinne_ on learning the stories
which connected the latter’s name with Narbonne. Mrs. Phillips herself
was much more indulgent, and Madame de Staël appears to have felt a
grateful liking for her; but it is evident that she was deeply hurt at
Fanny’s coldness. The approbation of a nature so narrow could hardly
have affected her much, one would think, and yet it is plain that she
longed for it—she longed indeed, all her life for such things as she
possessed not. She could sacrifice her wishes at all times generously and
unregretfully, but she never knew how to bear being denied one of them.
In all the glimpses one obtains of Madame de Staël, in different
countries and from different people, she never seems quite so womanly,
so imperfect and yet so pathetic, as in these journals of Mrs. Phillips.
Perhaps the reason of it is that one divines in her at this time a
sentiment which, if erring, was simple and _true_, while many of her
later sorrows gained a kind of factitious grandeur from the train of
political circumstances attendant on them. Mrs. Phillips was present when
Madame de Staël received the letter which summoned her to rejoin her
husband at Coppet, and relates the effect produced upon her. She was most
frankly inconsolable, spoke again and again of her sorrow at going, and
made endless entreaties to Mrs. Phillips to attend to the wants, spirits
and affairs of the friends whom she was leaving. She even charged her
with a message of forgiveness for the ungrateful Fanny, and fairly sobbed
when parting with Mrs. Folk.
Madame de Staël did not leave Coppet again until after the Revolution.
Her life seems to have passed with a monotony that the long drama of
horror slowly culminating in Paris rendered tragically sombre. She
continued her efforts—every day more difficult of accomplishment and
sterile of results—to save her friends and foes; and when the Queen was
arraigned, she wrote, in a few days, that eloquent and well-known defence
of her which called down upon the writer the applause of every generous
heart in Europe.
The Neckers during this period seem to have seen very little society.
Gibbon was almost their only friend; and in 1794 he went to England,
and a few months later died. The next to go was Madame Necker herself.
She had long been ill, and her last few months of life were embittered
by cruel pain. She had prepared for her end with the minute and morbid
care that might have been expected from her. The tomb at Coppet in
which she rests, together with her husband and daughter, was built in
conformity with her wishes, and in great part under her eyes. She died
on 6th May, 1794. M. Necker felt her death acutely, and for months not
even his daughter’s sympathy could console him. Madame Necker had one of
those self-tormenting natures which poison the existence of others in
embittering their own. Too noble to be slighted, and too exacting to be
appeased, they work out the doom of unachieved desires; and when they
go to be wrapt in eternal mystery, their parting gift to their loved
ones is a vague remorse and doubting. Silent themselves when they might
have spoken, they leave an unanswered question in the hearts of their
survivors. Monsieur Necker, with his exaggerated consciousness, must
have asked himself repeatedly if he had cared for his strange and loving
wife enough. Madame de Staël mourned her mother sincerely, but it is
clear that the keenest edge of her grief came from contemplation of her
father’s.
Three months had not elapsed after Madame Necker’s death when the 9th
Thermidor dawned, and at its close, all sanguinary as that appalling
termination was, France drew one long sigh of inconceivable relief,
for Robespierre had fallen. The Directory followed, and Baron de Staël
having been re-nominated to his post, his wife lost no time in hurrying
back to Paris. There, true to her indefatigable self, she immediately
set about obtaining the eradication of her friends’ names from the list
of the proscribed _émigrés_. From this moment her opinions, and with
them her character, underwent a certain change. She had been a moderate
royalist; she became avowedly a republican. But her republicanism was of
a strangely abstract and eclectic sort, and it was dashed with so many
personal leanings towards monarchists that it resulted in nothing better
than a spirit of intrigue.
She could not understand that the law, whatever it may be, which governs
circumstances, makes no account of individuals. She believed that, by
causing Mathieu de Montmorency and Talleyrand to be recalled from exile,
and inspiring Benjamin Constant with the loftiest ideals, she could
obliterate the blood-stained past and reverse the logic of events. When
everybody (everybody, that is, whom she cared about) should have been
restored to peace, prosperity, and the air of France, she conceived that
the study of metaphysical systems and the cultivation of the affections
would alone be needed to re-model and perfect humanity.
With this in view she toiled and plotted unceasingly, clasping the hands
of regicides like Barras, rubbing skirts with such women as Tallien, and
sacrificing her own pet ideal of womanly duty, which consisted, as she
repeatedly proclaimed, in loving and being loved, and leaving the jarring
strife of politics to men.
Had she remained in France, she must inevitably have been betrayed
into greater inconsistencies still. But, fortunately for her fame,
her intellect, and her character, the period was approaching in which
Bonaparte’s aversion was to condemn her to a decade of illustrious exile.