THE TRANSFORMED CAPITAL.
In all its varied story, the world probably never offered a stranger
spectacle than that presented by Paris when Madame de Staël returned to
it in 1795. The mixture of classes was only equalled by the confusion
of opinions, and these, in their turn, were proclaimed by the oddest
contrasts in costumes. _Muscadins_ in gray coats and green cravats
twirled their canes insolently in the faces of wearers of greasy
_carmagnoles_; while the powdered pigtails of reactionaries announced the
aristocratic contempt of their wearers for the close-cropped heads of the
Jacobins.
To the squalid orgies in the streets, illuminated by stinking oil-lamps,
and varied by the rumble of the tumbrils, had succeeded the salons where
Josephine Beauharnais displayed her Creole grace, and _Notre Dame de
Thermidor_ sought to wield the social sceptre of decapitated princesses.
Already royalism had revived, although furtively, and fans on which the
name of the coming King could be read but by initiated eyes, were passed
from hand to hand in the cafés of “Coblentz.” A strange light-hearted
nervous gayety—intoxicating as champagne—had dissipated the lurid gloom
of the Terror; the dumbness of horror had given way to a reckless
contempt for tyranny. A sordid, demented mania for speculation had
invaded all classes, and refined and delicate women trafficked in pounds
of sugar or yards of cloth.
An enormous sensation was produced by Ducancel’s _Nouveaux Aristides, ou
l’Intérieur des Comités Révolutionnaires_, a comedy in which its author
distilled into every line the hoarded bitterness of his soul against the
Jacobins.
Barras flaunted his cynical sensuality and shameless waste in the face
of a bankrupt society; and austere revolutionaries, beguiled into the
enervating atmosphere of the gilded salons, sold their principles with a
stroke of the same pen that restored some illustrious proscribed one to
his family. “Every one of us was soliciting the return of some _émigré_
among his friends,” writes Madame de Staël. “I obtained several recalls
at this period; and in consequence the deputy Legendre, almost a man
of the people, denounced me from the tribune of the Convention. The
influence of women and the power of good society seemed very dangerous
to those who were excluded, but whose colleagues were invited to be
seduced. One saw on _decadis_, for Sundays existed no longer, all the
elements of the old and new _régime_ united, but not reconciled.”
Into this seething world Madame de Staël threw herself with
characteristic activity. Legendre’s attack upon her, foiled by Barras,
could not deter her from interference. Her mind being fixed upon
some ideal Republic, she was anxious to blot out all record of past
intolerance. The prospect of restoring an aristocrat to his home, or of
shielding him from fresh dangers, invariably proved irresistible to her.
Nevertheless she was quick to perceive and to signalize the folly of
the reactionaries; and she felt but scant sympathy with the mad attempt
at a monarchical restoration known in history as the 13th Vendémiaire.
She uttered no word of palliation for the massacres committed by the
Royalists in Lyons and Marseilles, and she was more than willing to
admit the benefits conferred on France by the first six months of the
Government of the Directory.
But she could not be happy at the continued exclusion of the nobles and
clericals, and any appeal from one of them touched her with all the
force of old association. Talleyrand had not returned from America when
her eloquence induced Chénier to address the Convention in favor of his
recall. Montesquion next claimed her attention, and in consequence of
all this she became an object of suspicion and was accused of exciting
revolt. The Government, indeed, thought her so dangerous that, at one
moment, when she was at Coppet, they ordered her to be arrested and
brought to Paris, there to be imprisoned. Barras, however, defended her,
as she relates, “with warmth and generosity,” and, thanks to him, she was
enabled to return, a free agent, to France.
Throughout the events preceding the _coup d’État_ of the 18th Fructidor,
Madame de Staël was keenly alive to the danger which threatened and
eventually overtook her friends among the Moderates. To act, in these
circumstances, was with her a second nature. Her relations with Barras
had naturally become very friendly; and she used her influence to obtain
the nomination of Talleyrand to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “His
nomination was the only part that I took in the crisis preceding the 18th
Fructidor, and which I hoped by such means to avert,” she wrote. “One was
justified in hoping that the intelligence of M. de Talleyrand would bring
about a reconciliation between the two parties. Since then I have not had
the least share in the different phases of his political career.”
There is a ring of disappointment in these words; but how could Madame de
Staël, with her supposed infallible insight, ever have believed in such
a nature?
“It is necessary to serve someone,” was the answer of a noble when
reproached for accepting the office of chamberlain to one of Napoleon’s
sisters. Madame de Staël records the reply with scorn; but she should,
one thinks, have recognized the fibre of just such a man in the Bishop of
Autun. The proscription extending on all sides after the 18th Fructidor,
Madame de Staël’s intervention became unceasing. She learnt the danger
incurred by Dupont de Nemours, according to her “the most chivalrous
champion of liberty” France possessed, and straightway she betook
herself to Chénier, who, two years previously, had made the speech to
which Talleyrand owed his recall. Her eloquence soon fired the nervous,
violent-natured, but imaginative author, and, hurrying to the tribune,
he succeeded in saving Dupont de Nemours, by representing him as a man
of eighty, whereas he was barely sixty. This device displeased the very
person in whose favor it was adopted; but Madame de Staël saved her
friends in spite of themselves.
So much energy could not be displayed with impunity, and the Committee of
Public Safety caused a hint to be conveyed to the Baron de Staël, which
induced his wife to retire for a short time to the country. According
to Thibaudeau, indeed, the hint was in the first instance a distinct
order to quit France, and M. de Staël cut a somewhat sorry figure when
appearing before the Committee to protest against it. In spite of his
“embarrassed air” and “want of dignity,” he managed to convey to his
hearers that to expel the wife of an ambassador would be a violation of
rights; and after some discussion the decree was withdrawn. Nevertheless,
probably yielding to the prudent representations of her husband, Madame
de Staël did retire for a while, and took refuge with a friend. We may
suppose that she felt greatly aggrieved and ill-used, and yet it cannot
be denied that her qualities—rare and noble though they might be—were not
of a nature to recommend her to a Revolutionary Government. One can even
affirm that they were not of a sort to recommend her to any Government.
Her talents, her wealth and her position gave her immense social power.
When she used this, as she repeatedly did, to inspire officials with
disobedience to orders, and to save the lives of reactionary prisoners at
the risk of ruining radical functionaries, it is not to be wondered at if
the selfish majority regarded her interference as exceedingly pernicious.
It may even be questioned whether her influence at this time was
intrinsically valuable. Her state of excited feeling kept her floating
between sympathy with principles and sympathy with individuals. The
result was an eclecticism of feeling, which reflected itself in the
composition of her salon. Had she been able to declare herself frankly
either Monarchical or Republican she might have left some lasting impress
on the destinies of her land. As it was, she was kept in a condition of
restless activity which, while sterile of intellectual results, brought
her into disrepute as a conspirator.
The time was now rapidly approaching when Bonaparte was to cross her
path, and, as she chose to conceive it, to spoil her existence. The
instrument of destiny in this instance was Benjamin Constant. Immediately
after the fall of Robespierre he arrived—a young old man, world-weary,
full of unsteady force, and warmed by an inner flame of passion that
sometimes smouldered but never died down.
A Bernese noble, he had been reared in aristocratic prejudices, but his
life was early embittered by domestic circumstances and the political
conditions of his country. After being educated at Oxford, Edinburgh,
and in Germany, he was forced by his father to accept the post of
Chamberlain at the Court of Brunswick. Ariel in the cloven pine was not
more heart-sick, with the difference that Constant’s “delicate” spirit
was dashed by a vein of mephistophelian mockery. Some malignant fairy
seemed to have linked to his flashing and unerring insight a disposition
the most cynical of which man ever carried the burden through sixty-three
years of life. Being utterly unwarped by illusion, he could place
himself on the side of opposition with telling effect, for he could
neither deceive himself nor be deceived by others; and if not rigidly
conscientious, he was inexorably logical.
At war with the authorities of his native land, too familiarized with
order to be further charmed by it, and tired of the solemn absurdities of
Court functions, he turned his thoughts towards revolutionary Paris as
being, perhaps, the one city in the world which could still afford him a
fresh sensation. Moreover, every element of originality and audacity in
his brilliant mind was attracted by the amazing spectacle then presented
by the Convention. A government which, deprived of organized armies,
money, or traditions, confronted with a European coalition, and weighted
with the responsibility of crime, had conquered its enemies in the field,
and made its will respected from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, was exactly
of a kind to fascinate a born combatant like Constant. He arrived, eager
to be initiated into that strange world; longing to find himself in the
salons of Madame Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais and Madame de Staël.
Hitherto his Egeria had been Madame de Charrière, a charming middle-aged
monitress, Dutch by birth, but French by right of intellect and choice of
language. Her delicate penetration and subtle sympathy with minor moods
had doubtless for years responded precisely to his ideal; for if she
might not excite neither could she bore him; and she must have understood
his fastidious notions even before he could express them. She was, in
fact, perfection, as long as he was still too young to mind feeling old;
but there necessarily came a moment when that unconscious comedy was
played out. The fitful energy of his nature had gradually vanquished his
early lassitude, and he needed to renew his utterances at the founts of
some Sybilline inspiration.
Madame de Staël appears simply to have overwhelmed him; and the effect
which he produced on her was not less startling. Her salon was the
rallying-ground of contradictory individualities. She believed in
those days that she could reconcile Irreconcilables, and she welcomed
Conventionnels like Chénier and Roederer, stranded “survivals” of a
vanished epoch like Suard, Morellet and Laharpe; and aristocrats, some
of them altogether soured and worn out, like Castellane, Choiseul and
Narbonne. Into this political menagerie Constant fell like a spirit
from another world. Applauding the Revolution, yet having played no
part in it, he was its virgin knight. There was something strange and
attractive also in his appearance; a certain awkwardness in figure and
gesture joined to a handsome, clever, young face and long, fair hair.
Just at that moment (1795) the predominant tendency in Madame de Staël’s
salon was hostile to the Government. She professed herself already to
be converted to Republicanism, and probably was so in theory, but she
had not yet overcome her aversion to the real revolutionaries. Either
directly through her influence or with her tacit consent, Constant was
induced to publish three letters protesting against the admission of two
thirds of the old Convention into the new body of Representatives. The
success which followed was prodigious. All the women of the Royalist
party flattered and caressed him, and all the journalists extolled him
to the skies. Constant, however, was not the man to bear that kind of
petting long, he required excitement with some keener edge to it, and
was, moreover, too logical, too naturally enlightened and liberal to
endorse reactionary platitudes. He hastened to disavow the letters,
and although he did not find it easy to disabuse the public mind of
its first impression, he was careful not to deepen this by any further
mistakes. During the following four years his intimacy with Madame de
Staël flourished and grew apace. They acted and reacted upon one another
by the law of their opposing natures. His ardor was as uncertain as hers
was steady; but whenever he caught fresh fire, it came from her. On the
other hand, the tormenting kind of cruelty which belonged to his cynical
caprice seems to have cast a spell over Madame de Staël’s own warm and
frank simplicity which she found it difficult to break.
To Constant, at this time, belongs the merit of having appreciated her
thoroughly and defended her warmly—if not invariably, at any rate in
his truer moments. On his very first meeting with her, which was in
Switzerland, she enthralled him instantaneously; perhaps all the more so
that, like most people, he had been prejudiced against her by hearsay. He
wrote to Madame de Charrière, who seems to have felt and expressed some
bitterness regarding his new acquaintance, that she should get rid of the
idea that Madame de Staël was nothing more than a “talking machine.”
He praised her lively interest in everyone who suffered, and her courage
in scheming for the escape of her friends and enemies. He admitted that
she might be active partly because she could not help it; but silenced
further carping by the remark that her activity was well employed. In
about a month more his admiration had risen to enthusiasm, and he
could hardly find words in which to praise the brilliancy and accuracy
of mind, the exquisite goodness, the generosity and social politeness,
the simplicity and charm of his latest friend. He declared that she
knew just as well how to listen as to talk (a point on which many both
before and after Madame de Charrière differed from him), and that she
enjoyed the talents of other people quite as much as her own. This was
perfectly true. No woman ever breathed who was less envious than Madame
de Staël; but, on the other hand, what woman’s intellect was ever so
unapproachable? At the time, however, of her first acquaintance with
Constant, her literary reputation was still to make, and it is not to be
wondered at, consequently, if Madame de Charrière felt more inclined to
question than agree when informed that this restless female politician
was a being of so superior a sort that her like could not be met with
once in a century.
About 1796 Madame de Staël took a new departure. Perhaps thanks to
Constant’s enlightened views, perhaps thanks merely to her own common
sense, she felt the full futility of reactionary effort, and ranged
herself frankly on the side of the Directory. The royalist Club de Clichy
was by this time an accomplished fact; and to neutralize its mischievous
influence the Cercle Constitutionnel had been formed at the Hôtel de
Salm. For some time Madame de Staël was the soul of these meetings,
and Constant was their orator. Finally, when a fresh division in the
Convention declared itself, and a large number of deputies deserted the
Directory, Madame de Staël and Constant exerted themselves to prove
that such dissensions could profit only the two extremes of Royalists
or Terrorists, but never the Moderates. Naturally, the latter were deaf
(when have Moderates eyes to see or ears to hear in moments of vital
significance?), and Madame de Staël’s worst previsions were justified
by the events of the 18th Fructidor. The establishment, two years
later, of the Consulate, while filling Madame de Staël’s noble soul
with dismay, offered Constant the opportunity assigned to him by his
talents. He entered then upon the course of opposition from which he did
not again deviate until sixteen years later, when he yielded either to
Napoleon’s personal charm, the fascination of his deeds, and the hope of
his repentance, or to the profound disgust of a world-worn man with the
imbecility of the Restoration.
This is how Constant, in 1800, described the state of the public mind in
France:—
“The predominating idea was: Liberty has done us harm, and we wish for
it no longer; and those who modestly pointed out to these candidates
for slavery that the evils of the Revolution came precisely from the
fact that the Revolution had suspended liberty, were hounded through the
salons under the names of Jacobins and Anarchists. A nation which begged
for slavery from a military chieftain of thirty, who had covered himself
with glory, might count upon its wishes being gratified; and they were.”
These few lines are a good example of Constant’s incisive intellect and
biting style. Another man with such gifts would have retired disgusted
from all opposition; but Constant loved fighting for its own sake.
Perhaps he loved the combat better than the cause; but that is one of
the secrets which it is given to no one to fathom. Whatever the central
motive, the final fact of his complex and interesting nature, he proved
himself the ideal leader of a forlorn hope.
By the contemporaries of Constant and Madame de Staël the connection
between these two brilliant minds was, as might be expected, variously
judged. Later critics have asserted that he was completely under her
influence, but it is more likely that his native cynicism and spurious
passion alternately irritated and dominated her. She may have inspired,
but she could not mould, a nature so original and perverse.
Chênedollé said of Madame de Staël about this time that she had more
intelligence than she could manage, and in this there was probably some
truth. She had hardly begun to write as yet, having published (besides
some pamphlets) only the _Letters on Rousseau_, and her work on the
_Passions_. Her turbulence of ideas, scarcely then reduced to any system,
must necessarily have been crystallized at moments by contact with a more
definite mind.