CLOSING SCENES.
After Waterloo, Madame de Staël did not return to France. The thought of
the second occupation by foreign troops was odious to her, and, besides
this, she feared the outbreak of reactionary feelings, and foresaw a
political condition in which her pure and ideal liberalism would be
equally unwelcome to all parties.
Rocca’s state of health finally induced her to go to Italy. From Milan
she sent a letter to Madame Récamier, which is interesting as showing how
little her fine mind and noble heart were in harmony just then with the
condition of affairs in France.
“You are kind enough to say to me,” she wrote, “that I should do better
to be in Paris. But no, indeed, I should not care to see some forms of
liberty (_franchises_) ‘accorded’ to the people, for it is my creed that
nations are born free. I should say unfashionable things and make enemies
unnecessarily. When all is arranged for Albertine’s marriage, I shall
lead a solitary life in Paris; but at present I do well, believe me, to
have myself represented by Auguste. Like you, I think well, and better
than ever, of Victor de Broglie, and I shall be very glad of the marriage
if nothing goes against it. I am also of your way of thinking in regard
to Madame de Krüdener. She is the herald of a great oncoming religious
epoch. Speak of me to her, I beg, as of a person quite devoted to her.…
M. Rocca’s health still gives me anxiety. I have never recovered any
happiness since Bonaparte disembarked.”
Madame de Staël had been very happy in her marriage with Rocca, and
the tenderness with which she regarded him was manifest to all her
acquaintances. Under such circumstances, it does seem strange that she
should to the last have kept her marriage with him a secret.
The most plausible reason for such a course, fear of Napoleon’s spite,
existed no longer after Waterloo. Why, then, have gratuitously incurred
the reproach of an illicit connection? Why, above all, separate herself
for five years from her own and Rocca’s child? Such conduct does not on
the face of it seem quite consistent with the lofty ideal of duty which
Madame de Staël professed.
Albertine’s wedding took place in civil form at Leghorn on February 15th,
1815; and five days later in Pisa a double religious ceremony, one
Catholic, the other Protestant, was performed.
All Madame de Staël’s friends gave a charming picture of Albertine.
Guizot, Lamartine, and Bonstetten were most enthusiastic about her. Their
praises were also echoed by Byron, who, needless to say, was no mean
judge; and Ticknor seeing her in Paris about a year after her marriage,
never mentioned her except in terms of admiration. She was both beautiful
and clever, and, after her mother’s death, became, in her turn, the queen
of a cosmopolitan salon.
Accompanied by the bride and bridegroom, by Rocca, by Schlegel and
Sismondi, Madame de Staël presently betook herself to Florence, and while
there renewed her acquaintance with the Countess of Albany. Alfieri was
dead now, and Fabre reigned in his stead. Madame de Staël appears to
have adopted him with the mingled enthusiasm and indulgence which she
exhibited towards all the tastes of her friends.
The summer of 1816 was spent in Coppet. The newest and most interesting
figure there on this occasion was Byron. He had shaken the dust of
England from his feet, and was nursing his lyrical cynicism at Cologny
near Geneva. Unfortunately, his reputation was so bad that the virtuous
society of the place would not know him. Madame de Staël alone not only
received but welcomed him. He was grateful; and so far yielded to the
influence which this gratitude enabled her to exercise over him as
actually to make an imperfect attempt at reconciliation with his wife, in
order to please his eloquent and magnanimous hostess.
It is amusing to note the different impressions which Byron—the charming,
reprehensible Byron—made upon the various guests at the Château.
Bonstetten, as might be expected, was quite fascinated by him, and
wrote to Malthasson of his musical voice and beautiful head; and of the
“half-honest little demon” that darted in a lambent way through the
sarcasm of his speech. Sismondi—the correct and censorious—dwells more
especially on Byron’s cynical contempt for appearances, and the conduct
and companionship which had brought him into disrepute with the worthy
Genevese.
Coppet had never been quite as brilliant, probably, as in this last
summer that Madame de Staël was to reign there. The society was more
varied in nationality than in the days when a brilliant but small
band of intellects had gathered round to console her in her exile.
Brougham, Bell, Lady Hamilton, Lord Breadalbane, Romilly, Stendahl,
Schlegel, passed in rapid succession over the scene—talked, sparkled—and
disappeared. They flashed like meteors, but Madame de Staël shone among
them with a steady splendor. Wherever and with whomsoever she was,
her powers remained always unquenchable. Nevertheless a great sadness
possessed her. This was partly due to her anxiety concerning Rocca—partly
to the disappointment inevitable in a spirit which broke impatiently
against the limitations of life, the pettiness of human nature. “Ah
happiness!” she exclaimed yearningly. Then added, “But at my age no trust
is possible but in the goodness of God.”
Bonstetten, parting with her, was struck with the profound melancholy of
the glance which she gave him. He had been gay and content, as usual, yet
the memory of her look dwelt with him; and unable to explain it, he at
last, the dear, genial old man, arrived at the touching conclusion that
she had been thinking how old _he_ was, and that she would never see him
again. The adieu was, indeed, a lasting one; but it was over Madame de
Staël’s radiant path that the shadows of death were to gather first.
Nevertheless, during the winter of 1816-17, and when she returned to
Paris, her spirit showed no sign of failing. In her salon gathered
Châteaubriand, Talleyrand, Wellington, Humboldt, Blucher, Lafayette,
Schlegel and his brother, Canova, and crowds of English. Bonstetten
averred that to her influence over Wellington alone was due the fact
that the Army of Occupation was about this time diminished by 30,000 men.
Just before her death she removed from the Rue Royale to the Rue Neuve
des Mathurins; and it was here that Châteaubriand again, after so many
years, saw Madame Récamier, and commenced the romantic friendship which
was to end only with his death. He had been invited to dine at Madame
de Staël’s; but, when he arrived there, found that she was too ill to
entertain the guests. The dinner took place all the same—for Madame de
Staël invariably insisted on this, and made her daughter do the honors.
They must have been melancholy banquets; the little Duchess de Broglie
presiding with a heavy heart, and all the guests being vividly conscious
of the noble life slowly and painfully ebbing away in another room. It is
with a certain relief, therefore, in the midst of so much sadness that
one reads Châteaubriand’s record of his meeting with Juliette. He was
selfish and self-conscious and weak no doubt—his fretful uneasy vanity,
indeed, pierces through the affected melancholy of the _Mémoires d’Outre
Tombe_. They are sickly with a kind of faded perfume; and yet in the
great void which is coming, one is glad to think that the blind Madame
Récamier, the aged and feeble Châteaubriand, must often have remembered,
perchance often talked of, that dinner where they met in the house of
their dying friend.
Her interest in life remained undiminished to the last. Not only
Châteaubriand, but Constant, Mathieu de Montmorency, Sismondi, all her
old friends, were daily with her. She was even glad to welcome strangers,
although frequently so ill that her physicians forbade such visits for
several days at a time. It was after one of these intervals that Ticknor
saw her. She received him in bed, and her weakness was already so great
that she could hardly stretch out her hand to touch his. She alluded to
her approaching end with a calmness infinitely pathetic and admirable
in one who suffered none of that slow extinction of the faculties which
blunts the anguish of the end for so many departing souls. Seeing that
her words pained her daughter, she changed the subject to America, and
spoke of the great future of that country with characteristic enthusiasm
of belief. Of Europe, Ticknor said, “she despaired.” She might well do
so, for the era then beginning was one with which she could not have
sympathised. Whatever its virtues, its force, its promise, the oracles by
which it was inspired must have sounded strange in her ears. Herself, she
had been a kind of priestess; through her some unknown God had spoken,
and amid the thunder of great events her faith, for all its ideal
grandeur, had hardly seemed too mighty. But that age had passed, and it
was fit she should pass with it.
All witnesses except the captious Sismondi bear testimony to the devotion
with which Rocca nursed his wife in her last illness. Silent, pallid,
sad as a phantom itself, he sat day by day beside her bed. According to
Madame d’Abrantes, she never looked long at him without feeling that
she might still live. The sense that her existence was necessary to him
seemed to inspire her for a moment with the courage to take up anew the
increasing burden of her days. But at other times her thoughts turned
with a grateful sense of coming rest to the great change, and to the
thought of her father “waiting for her,” as she said, “on the other
shore.” Constant passed the last night of her life by her bedside. She
had seemed so much better that at eleven o’clock Mathieu de Montmorency
left, convinced that in the morning he would find her revived. She
suffered no pain during the concluding hours, and the brightness of her
intellect was not even momentarily dimmed. Sleep visited her as usual;
then at 5 o’clock she opened her eyes again, for the last time on the
world. A few moments later she passed away, so quietly that her watchers
did not note the precise moment in which her great soul was exhaled. The
date of her death was 14th July, 1817.
The news of it was the signal for, perhaps, the most widely-spread and
most genuine outburst of grief ever known. Joubert, indeed, asserts the
contrary, and not only declares that she was not regretted, but adds that
Constant, meeting him casually the very day after the event, did not even
allude to it. It never seems to have occurred to Joubert that Constant
might have had some other and deeper cause for silence than indifference.
From such a nature reserve was perhaps the only tribute that could be
more eloquently expressive than the loud lamentations of other friends.
These abounded, and even Châteaubriand, who, after all, had not been
bound to the dead woman by such ties of constant friendship as attached
Schlegel, Sismondi, and others—even he records with a sort of jealous
care that in the last letter she ever wrote to Madame de Duras, a letter
penned in “large, irregular characters like a child’s,” there was an
affectionate allusion to “Francis.”
Bonstetten and Sismondi have both left records of their grief at her
funeral. The latter, writing immediately after it to his mother, said:
“My life is painfully changed. I owe more to her than to any other
person.” Bonstetten’s sorrow finds a more energetic expression: “I miss
her as though she were a part of myself. I am maimed henceforward in
thought.”
She was buried at Coppet, and they laid her coffin at the foot of her
father’s. A crowd of friends, of humble mourners, and of official
functionaries, assembled to do her homage; but Rocca was too ill to be
present. He died, indeed, only seven months later, and the son whom
Madame de Staël had borne him hardly reached early manhood before he
also passed away. Auguste de Staël had preceded him along the road to
eternity, and the Duchess de Broglie did not live to be old.
Twenty years had hardly elapsed before, with the sole exception of her
faithful friend and cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, no near relative
of Madame de Staël was still alive; but those who had known her did
not need to be reminded of her. She was constantly present to them, a
radiant, imperishable vision. “I wish I could see you asleep,” Bonstetten
had said one day to her. “I would like to feel sure that you sometimes
close your eyes, and are not always thinking.” She had remained so bright
and full of life to the last, that even Death’s inexorable hand could not
for many long years efface the recollection of her vivid personality.
In a page of the _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_, Châteaubriand has left a
description of a visit paid by himself and Madame Récamier to the grave
at Coppet. It was fifteen years after Madame de Staël’s death. The
Château was closed, the apartments deserted. Juliette, wandering through
them, recognised one after another the spots where Madame de Staël had
played the piano, had talked to those gathered round her, or had written.
The two friends went into the park where the autumn leaves already were
reddening and falling. The wind subsided by degrees, and the sound of a
millstream alone broke the stillness. Madame Récamier entered the wood
into whose depths the grave is hidden, while Châteaubriand remained
looking at the snowy line of the Alps, and at the glittering lake. Above
the sombre heights of Jura the sky was covered with golden clouds “like
a glory spreading above a bier.” Suddenly Madame Récamier, pale and
tearful, phantom-like among phantoms, emerged from the wood. And on her
companion’s melancholy spirit fell a sense of all the emptiness of glory,
of all the sad reality of life. “_Qu’est-ce que la gloire?_” asked Madame
de Staël. “_Ce n’est qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur._” We could wish
that the most famous of women might have held a less hopeless creed.