MADAME DE STAËL AND AUGUSTE SCHLEGEL AT ROME.
Madame de Staël sought to solace her grief for her father’s death by
writing “The Private Life of Necker,” a short sketch intended to serve
as preface to a volume of his fragmentary writings. Constant spoke very
feelingly of this sketch, and pronounced it to be a revelation of all
that was best in the writer’s head and heart. He said that all her gifts
of mind and feeling were here devoted to express and adorn a single
sentiment, one for which she claimed the sympathy of the world.
This is all quite true, but it is natural that the sketch should affect
us less than it did Madame de Staël’s contemporaries. Necker was a
good and intelligent man. He had varied talents of no common order,
and an incorruptibility of character which would be rare—given the
circumstances—in any age, and, by his admirers, was supposed to be
especially so in his. But joined to all these qualities in him were
just the foibles which spoil an image for posterity. He had a profound
compassion for what he considered the hardships of his lot. It is
touching to read the way—so simple, loving, and yet ingenuous—in which
Madame de Staël records such facts as the following:—“It was painful to
him to be old. His figure, which had grown very stout and made movement
irksome to him, gave him a feeling of shyness that prevented his going
into society. He hardly ever got into a carriage when anybody was looking
at him, and he did not walk where he could be seen. In a word, his
imagination loved grace and youth, and he would say to me sometimes, ‘I
do not know why I am humiliated by the infirmities of age, but I feel
that it is so.’ And it was thanks to this sentiment that he was loved
like a young man.”
For the rest, the sketch is one long impassioned elegy in prose. One
is astonished at the sudden creative force of expression in it. It is
graphic by mere power of words without any help from metaphor.
It was not in Madame de Staël’s nature to mourn in solitude, and we have
Bonstetten’s authority for the fact that the summer of 1804 was one of
the most delightful which he had ever passed at the Château. Schlegel,
Constant, Sismondi, were all there, as well as Bonstetten, himself, and
Madame Necker de Saussure, now more than ever devoted to her cousin.
Madame de Staël had also a new visitor, Müller, the historian, whose
learning was stupendous, and who wrangled from morning till night on
subjects of amazing erudition with Schlegel. The mistress of the house,
although far from being the equal of the two combatants in learning,
sometimes rushed between them with her fiery eloquence, like an angel
with a flaming sword; but most of the society were reduced to silence.
Sismondi felt a perfect ignoramus, and talked plaintively to Bonstetten
of going to Germany, there to drink in facts and theories at the source
of the new intellect. In short, the German “Revival” was beginning, and
Madame de Staël in bringing Auguste Schlegel to Switzerland had broken a
large piece off the mountain of learning, like somebody in the fairy tale
who carried away a slice from the Island of Jewels.
In October, 1804, Madame de Staël started with Schlegel and her three
children for Italy, and it is to this journey that the world owes
_Corinne_. It is said that Schlegel first taught Madame de Staël to
appreciate art—that is, painting, sculpture, and architecture. For
music she had always had a passion, and both sang and played agreeably.
But plastic beauty had as yet been a sealed book to her, and she had
not even any great appreciation of scenery. A spontaneous feeling for
all these she perhaps never acquired. Ste. Beuve, indeed, complains
that the spot on Misenum where she places Corinne on one occasion, was
the least picturesque of many beautiful points of view. Nevertheless,
Italy revived her. She found hope and thought and voice anew beneath
that magic sky. There was nothing but the still-abiding sense of loss
to mar the pleasure of her visit. The diplomatic agents of Napoleon
abstained from interference with her, and Joseph had given her letters
introducing her to all the best society in Rome. Unlike her own Corinne,
however, she found it very uninteresting, and wrote complainingly to
Bonstetten that Humboldt was her most congenial companion. The Roman
princes she found extremely dull, and preferred the cardinals, as being
more cultivated, or more probably more men of the world. For the rest,
she was received with the liveliest respect, and even enthusiasm; was
made a member of the Arcadian Academy, and had endless sonnets written
upon her. Unfortunately, her _Dix Années d’Exil_ does not speak of this
Italian journey, and so, for the impression she received, one has to
turn to _Corinne_, where, of course, everything reappears more or less
transfigured. One would have liked to know the genesis of that work,
on what occasion it took root, and how it grew, in Madame de Staël’s
mind. How much did she really know of that poor, lampooned, insulted,
and squint-eyed Corilla who was the origin of her enchanting Sibyl? How
far below the surface did she really see of that strange Roman world,
so cosmopolitan, so chaotic after the French invasion, so thrilled
with fugitive novel ideas, so steeped in time-worn apathy? It would be
delightful to know what was the impression which Madame de Staël herself
produced in the few salons where a little culture prevailed, and what
was the true notion concerning her in that motley and decaying society
of belated Arcadians, exhausted _cicisbei_ and _abatini_ lapsed forever
from the genial circles where their youth had passed in gossiping and
sonneteering.
Hers must have seemed a curious and forcible figure among all those
frivolous “survivals”; and great and strange, mad and merry as were the
many foreigners who found their way at various times to Rome, probably no
more striking couple ever appeared there than Madame de Staël and Auguste
Schlegel.
As soon as she returned to Switzerland she began _Corinne_. At Coppet
some of her old circle immediately gathered round her again: Madame
Necker de Saussure, of course, and Madame Rilliet-Hüber, Schlegel,
Constant, and Sismondi, assembled to enjoy her society once more. The
private theatricals in which she delighted were again resumed, and such
tragedies as _Zaire_ and _Phèdre_ performed, as well as slight comedies
composed by the châtelaine herself. Madame de Staël was fond of acting;
and although she had no special talent, her imposing presence, and the
earnestness with which she played, made her performance a pleasing one—at
any rate, to her admirers.
When _Corinne_ was drawing to an end, its authoress could no longer
resist her old and recurring temptation to return to France. She went
first to Auxerre; then, profiting by the indulgence of Fouché, who,
when it was possible (and politic), always shut one eye, she accepted
an invitation to Acosta, a property near Meulon belonging to Madame de
Castellane. Some of her old friends ventured there to visit her, and
in peace and reviving hope she completed _Corinne_. It was no sooner
published than it was hailed with universal applause.
All this success annoyed Napoleon, possibly because it revealed in his
enemy greater powers than he had hitherto suspected, hence a greater
influence with all enlightened minds. According to some, an article
which appeared in the _Moniteur_ attacking _Corinne_ was written by the
Imperial hand. And this first sign of ire was followed by a new decree
of banishment, which sent Madame de Staël back to Coppet. There a few
new figures came to join the usual set, among them Prince Auguste of
Prussia, who straightway fell a victim to Madame Récamier. For a few
weeks this love affair introduced a new element of romantic, yet very
human, interest into the intensely intellectual life of Coppet. The
Prince wished Madame Récamier to marry him; and for a short time, either
dazzled by the prospect of such splendor, or really attracted by her
royal wooer, she hesitated. But such a step would have involved a divorce
from M. Récamier. He was old; he had lately lost his fortune; he had
always been good to her; and Juliette made up her mind that it would be
too unkind to leave him.
Some other scenes not altogether literary were passing just then in the
Château. The relations between Madame de Staël and Constant, of late
much strained, had now become constantly stormy. Sismondi, some years
later, in writing to the Countess of Albany, referred to them as really
distressing, and apparently Madame Récamier was in the flattering but
uncomfortable position of having to listen to and, as well as she could,
soothe both parties.
Constant would have married Madame de Staël, but she desired a secret
marriage, and he would only hear of an open one. It was only in 1808
he finally put an end to his perplexities by marrying Charlotte von
Hardenberg. He carefully avoided telling Madame de Staël of his
intention beforehand, being still too much under her influence to bear
her criticisms and possible reproaches with equanimity.
About November, 1807, Madame de Staël had returned again to Germany,
accompanied by two of her children, by Constant, Sismondi, and Schlegel.
From Munich she wrote one of her characteristic letters to Madame
Récamier:—
“I have spent five days here, and I leave for Vienna in an hour. There
I shall be thirty leagues farther from you and from all who are dear to
me. All society here has received me in a charming manner, and has spoken
of my beautiful friend with admiration. You have an aerial reputation
which nothing common can touch. The bracelet you gave me [this bracelet
contained Madame Récamier’s portrait] has caused my hand to be kissed
rather oftener, and I send you all the homage which I receive.”
In another she significantly remarks:—
“The Prince de Ligne is really amiable and good above all things. He has
the manners of M. de Narbonne, and a heart. It is a pity he is old, but
all that generation fill me with an invincible tenderness.”
This is one of her touching allusions to her father, of whom all “good
gray heads” reminded her. But the Prince de Ligne and Necker were two
very different people. The former was the ideal of a _grand seigneur_,
clever, brave, handsome, all in a supreme degree; the descendant of a
chivalrous race, and as gallant and noble himself as any of them. He
was extremely witty, and quickly achieved the conquest of the Empress
Catherine when he was sent on a mission to Russia in 1782. He followed in
her suite through the Crimea on the occasion of her famous journey there
with Joseph II., and his amusing account of this expedition is one of his
claims to literary reputation. The last years of his brilliant life were
embittered by the loss of his property, consequent on the French invasion
of Belgium, and by the death in battle of his eldest and best-beloved son.
Madame de Staël probably enjoyed his society all the more that the
Viennese gentlemen appeared to her singularly uninteresting. She
complained of them in her letters to the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and
also to Madame Récamier, and declared that she felt the need of a summer
at Coppet to indemnify her for the frivolous monotony of the Austrian
capital. She seems to have been in an unusually depressed state of mind,
and recurred perpetually to the hardships of exile.
In April, 1808, shortly before starting again for Weimar, she addressed a
letter to her former friend, the ungrateful Talleyrand, begging him to
interest himself for the payment of the two millions left by her father
in the French Treasury. She alluded sadly, and at some length, to all her
sufferings again in this letter, and reminded him that he wrote thirteen
years previously to her from America, “If I must remain even one year
longer here I shall die.”
One is not much surprised to divine from subsequent circumstances that
this appeal produced no effect. Amiable, and even pathetic as it was,
Talleyrand was not the man to be moved by it. Like Napoleon, to whom he
perhaps showed it, he would be likely to think that Madame de Staël’s
“exile” was singularly mitigated. It is one thing to be proscribed and
banished, not only from one’s own country but from friends and fortune;
to wander, as so many illustrious refugees have done, a lonely stranger
in a foreign land, not daring to invoke the protection of any authority,
and constantly eking out a miserable existence by teaching or worse. It
is another thing to be wealthy, influential, admired; to be the guest of
sovereigns, and the honored friend of the greatest minds in Europe; to be
surrounded with sympathy, and followed at every step by the homage of a
brilliant and cultured crowd. Such was the existence of Madame de Staël.
Her sorrows were great because her fiery temperament rebelled against
her grief, at the same time that her great intellect fed it with lofty
and lyric thoughts. But her sorrows were of the affections exclusively.
She never felt the sting of the world’s scorn, nor knew the bitter days
and sleepless nights of poverty. If she ever “ate her bread with tears,”
they were not those saltest tears of all which are wrung from burning
eyes by unachieved hopes and frustrated endeavor. Every field of social
and intellectual activity was open to her except the salons of Paris, and
those were very different under the blight of Napoleonic bureaucracy from
what they had been even during the mingled vulgarity and ferment of the
Directory.
She returned to Weimar, and had a touching meeting with the Grand
Duchess, whose recent troubles, and the courage she displayed under them,
had not only endeared her to her subjects and her friends, but had won
the applause of the world. On her way thither she presumably delayed a
short while in Berlin, and it must have been to that period that Ticknor
refers when relating a very amusing anecdote in his _Life and Letters_.
She asked Fichte to give her in a quarter of an hour a summarized idea of
his famous _Ego_, professing to be, as she doubtless was, entirely in the
dark about it. Fichte’s consternation may be imagined, for he had been
all his life developing his system, and intended it to comprehend the
universe. Moreover he spoke very bad French, and even if Madame de Staël
were momentarily silent in speech, we may fancy how voluble she _looked_,
and how nervous the prescience of her imminent rapid speech must have
made the philosopher. However, he made up his mind to the attempt, and
began. In a very few moments Madame de Staël burst out:
“Ah! that is enough. I understand perfectly. Your system is illustrated
by a story in Munchausen’s travels.” Fichte’s expression at this
announcement was a study; but the lady went on: “He arrived once on the
banks of a wide river, where there was neither bridge nor ferry, neither
boat nor raft; and at first he was in despair. But an idea struck him,
and taking hold of his own sleeve, he jumped himself over to the other
side. Now, Monsieur Fichte, is not this exactly what you have done with
your _Ego_?”
This speech charmed everybody except Fichte himself, who never forgave
Madame de Staël, or at least so Ticknor’s informant said, and it is easy
to believe him.
During the remainder of 1808, and the whole of 1809 and 1810, Madame de
Staël remained alternately at Coppet and Geneva, working steadily at the
_Allemagne_. It was only about this time that she acquired habits of
sustained occupation. Her father had entertained so strong and singular
an objection to seeing her engaged in writing, that, rather than pain
him, she used to scribble at odd hours and in casual positions—sometimes,
for instance, standing by the chimney-piece. In this way she was able to
hide her work as soon as he appeared, and thus spare him the annoyance
of supposing that he had interrupted her. She talked so continually that
it was a marvel how she ever wrote at all; and her friends used often
to wonder where and how she planned her works. But the truth seems to
have been that they sprang full grown from her brain, after having been
unconsciously developed there by perpetual discussion.
During the years above mentioned society at Coppet, although normally
composed as of old by Schlegel, Sismondi, Constant (for a time), Madame
Récamier, and Bonstetten, was varied once more by new and interesting
visitors. Among these was Madame Le Brun, who not only painted a portrait
of Madame de Staël, but noted many things which now afford pleasant
glimpses of the life at the Château. Of course, like everybody else who
sojourned as a guest at Coppet, she fell under the spell of the hostess.
Byron himself some years later recorded how much more charming Madame
de Staël was in her own house than out of it; and she seems to have
possessed the art of dispensing her hospitality, which was royal, with
as much grace as cordiality.
Among the new figures in these years at Coppet were Werner and
Oehlenschläger. Both were poets and cursed with the irritability of the
genus, so that their mutual exasperation was great, and Madame de Staël
had some trouble to keep the peace between them. Sismondi in one of
his letters described Werner as a man of many intellectual gifts, who
considered himself the apostle of Love and bound to preach it in his
wanderings through the world. Occasionally his utterances were a little
puzzling to sober-minded people, who were too much taken aback by his
mystical mixtures of passion, sentiment, and piety to be always ready
with an answer.
Werner had had a _Sturm und Drang_ period of extreme dissipation, had
taken to Freemasonry, and imbibed, apparently, some of the ideas of the
Illuminati; and, besides his mysticism in religion, inclined to socialism
in politics. After all this vagueness of thought, joined to a highly
impressionable and very vivid temperament, it is not surprising to learn
that he eventually became a Roman Catholic priest and rose to great
renown as a preacher.
Oehlenschläger has left a spiteful picture of Werner, with his nose full
of snuff, discussing his esoteric doctrines in an execrable patois which
was intended for French. Both poets, however, united in admiring and
praising, almost worshipping, Madame de Staël, and she on her side seems
to have cared little for any peculiarity in their habits as long as there
was originality in their characters.
It was during this visit of the two poets at Coppet that Karl Ritter
appeared for a short time on the scene. He enjoyed a great reputation in
Germany, being considered as the inventor of the Science of Comparative
Geography. He was also a gentle, earnest man, and became extremely
religious in his old age. He records an animated, indeed perfervid and
amazingly eloquent, speech pronounced before him by Madame de Staël in
favor of the metaphysical origin of religion, and in answer to Sismondi
who maintained that its basis should be reasoned morality. Madame de
Staël declared that religion was the condition of virtue; and that
without it there could be no higher life, by which she meant no communion
with God. In support of this thesis she displayed the most surprising
power both of analysis and illustration, while her logic appearing to
Ritter unanswerable, caused the discussion, as he avers, to be an epoch
in his intellectual life. This new interest of Madame de Staël in such
questions was largely due to the ever-growing influence of Madame de
Krüdener, now irrevocably “regenerate” and rapidly rising to fame as a
priestess and prophetess, while leading a life of the utmost asceticism.
She had been in Coppet again, and had left there the trail of her
sacerdotal tendencies. Poor Bonstetten, daily growing younger in mind
and heart, was comically disgusted at the change which was coming over
the intellectual life at the Château. The confusion of dogmas prevailing
could not console him for the fact of there being any dogmas at all.
Between Catholics, Boehmists, Martinists and Mystics, he appeared at
times to be quite worn out, and attributed the whole revolution to
the influence of his pet aversion Schlegel. How he made this out is
not very clear, for the theological spirit was as cosmopolitan in its
representatives as varied in its forms. Mathieu de Montmorency was
a Catholic, somebody else a Quietist, a third an Illuminist, while
Rationalism was left to the doubtful prowess of Baron Voght, who was
reported by Bonstetten to be as gyratory in his opinions as a weathercock.
We now approach an event in Madame de Staël’s life so well known and so
often recounted, that it will not be necessary to relate it again in
detail. This was the suppression of her _Allemagne_, Napoleon’s crowning
act of meanness, and a deed which obtained for Madame de Staël the
entire and unquestioning sympathy of every enlightened mind and generous
heart.
Madame de Staël determined, after some hesitation, to publish the work
in Paris, after submitting it in the first instance to the approval of
the Imperial Censors. Why she took this unfortunate resolution it is
difficult to conceive; for she had been plentifully illuminated with
regard to Napoleon’s spite, and even if all her penetration did not
enable her to foresee the full lengths to which this would carry him,
she might, one would think, have guessed that the censors in Paris would
judge her work with the utmost severity.
However this may be, she took up her abode near Blois for the sake of
correcting the proofs as they issued from the press. She had, before
leaving Coppet, caused her passports to be made out for America, in which
country she had property, and whither, for the sake of her children she
said, she was gradually making up her mind to go. One cannot imagine
Madame de Staël in the New World such as it was in those days; and as she
entertained the project for a long while, put it off from month to month,
and finally abandoned it altogether, it is more than probable that she
never liked it sufficiently to have resolved upon it seriously.
At Blois she established herself first in the famous Château of
Chaumont-sur-Loire, haunted by such various memories as the Cardinal
d’Amboise, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and Nostradamus. But
the owner of the house shortly returning, she removed to another mansion
at Fossé, the home of a M. de Salaberry. She had addressed a letter
to Napoleon in which she presented her work to his notice, craved an
interview in very respectful terms, and urged on his notice the advantage
which it would be for her sons’ career and her daughter’s eventual
marriage (Albertine was then thirteen) if she were allowed to reside
again in the neighborhood of Paris.
While awaiting the answer to this, she gathered round her a group of
her usual friends, among them Madame Récamier, Adrien and Mathieu de
Montmorency, Prosper de Barante, and Benjamin Constant. This society
amused itself with music (an Italian musician, Albertine’s master, who
played the guitar, being of the company), and with a quaint invention
named _La petite poste_. This consisted in abolishing conversation and
substituting for it little notes, which were passed from one to the
other. A very innocent amusement; but either it, or the guitar-playing,
or “Corinne’s” famous name made some noise in the neighborhood.
Finally, one evening Madame de Staël went to the theatre at Blois,
and, on leaving it, was surrounded by a curious crowd. Some officious
person communicated this fact, probably with various others, some true,
some false, to the Minister of Police, who wrote to the Prefect of the
department to complain that his master’s celebrated foe was the centre
of a little court. In a short time the blow fell. No answer came from
Napoleon, but, instead of it, the announcement that her book had been
seized, that all copies of it were destroyed, and that the authoress was
to leave France within three days either for America or Coppet. At the
same time, the Prefect of Loir and Cher demanded the surrender of the MS.
of the work. Fortunately Madame de Staël possessed a rough copy, which
she gave him, while her son saved the real one.
She wrote to Savary, Duke of Rovigo (“permitted,” she says bitingly
“to hide his name under a title”), and represented to him that the
interval allowed her for her departure was insufficient. She received a
reply which has become classic for its baseness, its insolence, and its
ludicrous arrogance. All the littleness and none of the force of Napoleon
was reflected from the mind of his underling. He told her that she need
not seek for the cause of her exile in the silence regarding the Emperor
which she had observed in her work, for that no place in it could have
been found worthy of him! For the rest, the air of France did not suit
her, and as for its inhabitants, they were not yet reduced to taking as
models the nations whom she admired. Her last work was not French, and it
was he (this worthy official) who had forbidden it to be printed.
Savary thus claimed for himself, and not for his master, the glory of
this precious proceeding; but as nobody suspected him of acting except
under orders, he blew this trumpet to the desert air.
The blow to Madame de Staël was a terrible one. Her first impulse was to
go to America; but fearing the long sea-voyage for her daughter at that
season of the year (it was October), she once again set her face most
reluctantly towards Coppet. This place, which she henceforward describes
as a “prison,” was shortly afterwards made further distasteful to her by
a change of Prefect. Monsieur de Barante, who was a friend of hers, was
removed, and the successor appointed to him, M. Capelle, was one of the
functionaries now turned out by the gross from the Imperial mould. He
regarded Napoleon as a deity and himself as a prophet, and conceived the
brilliant idea of distinguishing himself by persuading Madame de Staël to
write something flattering of the Emperor. Naturally he failed; the mind
of a bureaucrat prostrate before the fetich of his own alarmed idolatry
alone could have conceived the possibility of success. And naturally,
again, his failure rankled, and caused him to visit his disappointment on
the creator of it by numerous small vexations.