News has just reached us from Paris of the death of Madame Sophie Gay.
She was a writer of the half-historical, half-sentimental school of
French fiction, of which Madame de Genlis, the Duchess d'Abrantes, and
Madame de Souza were specimens more or less worthy; but in ease and
grace, Madame Gay was superior to all we have mentioned. It is, in our
minds, very affecting to witness the last lights of the ancient salons
of Paris dropping out one by one. Mme Gay has herself, in a single
volume published in 1837, entitled _Salons Célèbres_, left us a very
beautiful picture of them as they were in their prime. We have
translated--abridging, however, as we went--the opening chapters of
this work, and may add a notice of more modern salons, as given by the
lively pen of Mme Emile de Girardin--_née_ Delphine Gay--daughter of
Mme Sophie. The reader will judge whether the fashionable Frenchmen
and Frenchwomen have really profited much by the storms and tempests
that have gone over their heads. To be sure, Mme de Girardin's
pictures were given twelve years ago; but we believe they would
require little change, at least up to the conclusion of the Orleans
reign in 1848. The volume from which these last extracts are made, is
entitled _Lettres Parisiennes_. It has all the wit and talent of the
cleverest of fashionable Frenchwomen. The tone is sometimes extremely
good--better than we were led to expect; but the picture it presents
is about as mournful a one as pictures of French frivolity usually
are. We will, however, leave them to make their own impression. First,
then, for Mme Sophie Gay and the ancient _salons_.
Now that the empire of the salons, she observes, has passed away with
that of women, it would be difficult to convey to our youthful France
an idea of the influence which certain of these were wont to exercise,
in state affairs and in the choice of men in power. To have a salon is
far from an easy thing; a crowd of people may, and do every day, give
concerts and balls in their gilded apartments, and yet they may never
have salons. Essential conditions are required which can rarely be
found in conjunction. The most important of all is the talent and
character of the lady who does the honours. Without being old, she
must have passed the age in which a woman is chiefly spoken of for her
prettiness or her dress, and be at that point of time when a woman's
mind may rule over the self-love of a man more than her youthful
attractions enabled her to rule over his heart.
Rank and fortune were important items, not quite indispensable,
however; for Mme du Deffand was poor, and Mme Geoffrin was the wife of
a manufacturer. In the salons of these two women edicts were framed,
and academicians reared; but the questions discussed there were not
nearly of the importance of those to which Mme de Staël's salon gave
rise. It was essential that the mistress of the house should have a
decided and superior taste in a variety of ways; also a total absence
of those little, envious feelings which might have tended to exclude
the fashionable woman or successful author. She must know how to bear
enemies in her presence, to place talents according to their worth, to
shew the tiresome the way to the door--things which require address
and courage.
The salon of Mme de Staël, during three different periods of her life,
took considerable modification from the changes of the time; but it
was always the same in power, if not in brilliancy.
Under the first Revolution, it was the scene of most momentous
deliberations. Barnave, Talleyrand, Lameth, Dupont, Boissy d'Anglas,
Portalis, Chénier, Roederer, and Benjamin Constant, discussed at the
place of familiar meeting many a half-formed decree, and many
important state nominations. The only member of the Directory who
visited there was Barras; and it was a common saying, that every visit
cost him a good deed; for Mme de Staël never slackened in her
intercessions for the victims of the tribunals. She infused courage
into the hearts of those who were pleaders for them. Through her
means, Talleyrand was recalled, and even named minister of foreign
affairs. 'He wanted some help,' she said, 'in order to arrive at
power, but none to enable him to keep it when gained.' Her sagacity
was at fault, if she persuaded herself that the returned
emigrant-priest would bring harmony into public counsels. On these
evenings, pregnant with deeds both evil and good, it was said that
some very foul conspiracies were concocted, and some of these were
directly imputed to Mme de Staël; but she earnestly denied the truth
of such surmises. Her salon, not herself, was guilty. Most generously
did she exert herself in behalf of those who suffered after such
conspiracies; but some one was heard to say: 'She is a good woman, but
would push any of her friends into the water for the delight of
fishing them up again with her own tackle.'
When the Consulate was established, Mme de Staël's salon empire was
watched by the rising influence of the day with a jealous eye. It was
certainly a turbulent scene. Very bitter were the complaints of the
men of the Revolution. They had risked so much; they had fought so
courageously for liberty! They saw the disorders of the time, but they
could not bear to lose all the fruits of their toil; and Garat and
Andrieux, Daunon and Benjamin Constant, urged on by the eloquence of
Mme de Staël, framed powerful appeals on these occasions for the
morrow. Bonaparte could not tolerate this. His power was too recently
gained--his projects too unripe. In vain did the friends of Mme de
Staël say, that a _salon_ could never be dangerous to a rule like his.
'It is not a salon,' said he; 'it is a club.' It was, in fact, the
antagonism between mind and physical force. The First Consul had said
before, of the orators of the Tribune: 'I have no time to answer these
refractory speechifiers: they _do_ nothing but perplex all things;
they must be silenced.' And one great point of attack was Mme de
Staël's salon. It was necessary she should abdicate her throne. A
sentence of banishment condemned the brilliant lady to lay down the
sceptre. Exiled to Geneva, surrounded by friends, sharing her father's
lot, occupied with her daughter's education, she had, it may be
thought, plenty of objects: she was unquestionably the first literary
woman in Europe, too, and as such, Geneva was as her salon, where she
received the homage of royalty and talent. Yet, a true Frenchwoman,
unable to bear separation from the peculiar atmosphere in which she
had been reared, she pined after it--pined still more for the friends
who visited her only to be partakers of her exile; and so she passed
the whole period of the Napoleon dynasty.
Meanwhile, in the interval between the banishment of Mme de Staël and
her return, the most captivating mistress of a Paris salon appears to
have been Mme de Beaumont. She was the daughter of M. de Montmorin,
the minister of foreign affairs, who had immediately followed Necker.
She married early, and not happily. She lived with her father,
separated from her husband, and was intrusted to transcribe some of
the very important correspondence between Mirabeau and the court. In
the Reign of Terror, her father, and it is thought others of her
family, fell by the guillotine; but she herself was spared, even
against her will. She retired for awhile into the country, visiting
among her friends, who did all they could to console her. She was the
object of the strongest attachment on the part of Châteaubriand,
Joubert, Fontanes, Molé, and many others; and when, once more, quiet
and order were restored, even at the sacrifice of much of liberty, she
came to Paris again. Her old friends rallied about her, her spirits
seemed to revive for awhile, and her salon was for a year or two a
scene of remarkable enjoyment. One who truly appreciated her, and who
was worthy to be himself the centre of a social circle--M. Joubert,
the author of some beautiful thoughts on literature and divers other
subjects--thus tenderly commemorates the evenings to which we have
alluded: 'Peaceful society! where none of those disuniting pretensions
which spoil enjoyment could come; where acknowledged talent was not
divorced from good temper; where praise was given to whatever was
praiseworthy; where nothing was thought of but what was really
attractive. Peaceful society! whose scattered members can never unite
again without speaking of her who was the connecting link that brought
them all together.'
To our minds, there seems something unique and infinitely touching in
this bursting out, though but for a short time, of the slumbering
fires of an older society, from underneath the heaps of hard and alien
material which had gone far to extinguish every spark of gentleness
and refinement. The relics of families--their hearts still bleeding
from their wounds--came to forget, if possible, the terrible past, and
indulge their quiet hopes for the future. Very soon, indeed, the dream
was dispelled; the tyranny proved to some unbearable; and some it
vanquished in their highest part--their inward conscience--making them
subservient when they might have shunned the danger altogether. But
while the quiet interval lasted, it was like an Indian summer,
prolonging the intellectual and tasteful beauty which was soon to be
overwhelmed by the vulgar splendours of the Empire.
The greatest loss this circle could have had was the first. Mme de
Beaumont died at Rome in 1804--attended only by Châteaubriand--who has
given an account of the closing scene in his memoirs, and thenceforth
it does not appear that the same society reassembled.
But another and third edition of the salon, under Mme de Staël, was
witnessed at the Restoration. Hitherto we have sketched from Mme
Sophie Gay's pictures. At this period, she declares herself unable to
bear the mortification of mingling with the public of Paris: she could
not see the Cossacks without shuddering. She shut herself up in her
house, and knew what passed only through the kindness of friends, who
wrote narratives for her amusement of any remarkable incidents they
might note. Among these communications, Mme Sophie Gay has preserved
one from the Marquis de Custine, and she has given it as a faithful
picture of one of the last of Mme de Staël's soirées in Paris.
'I am just returned, and will not go to bed without telling you what
has most amused me--not that _amused_ is the right word, for Mme de
Staël's salon is more than a scene of amusement: it is a glass in
which is reflected the history of the time. What we see and hear there
is more instructive than books, more exciting than many comedies....
'You know that the Duke of Wellington was to visit her this evening
for the first time. I went in good time; she was not yet in the room:
several others were also waiting--such as the Abbé de Pradt, Benjamin
Constant, La Fayette. They were conversing; I remained in one corner,
as if listening to them.... At length Mme de Staël came in. "I am
late," she said; "but it is not my fault. I was invited to dine
at----, and was obliged to go." A great many of the guests were come:
all were looking for the hero of the evening--we had seen him only as
part of a show, now we wanted to hear him converse. At length he
entered. The nobleness of his figure and simplicity of his manners
produced a most agreeable impression on us. His pride, as it ought,
has nearly the grace of timidity. Mme de Staël, impressed by a style
and manner so little like that of our countrymen, said: "He carries
his glory as if it were a nothing." Then, by a quick recall of
patriotism, she whispered in my ear: "One must admit, however, that
nature never made a great man at less expense." It seemed to me that
the whole man was portrayed in these brief remarks.
'You would suppose, after this _début_, that we had a very pleasant
evening: you shall judge. The Duke had not reached the end of the
salon, when the Abbé de Pradt fastened on him, and actually forced him
to listen for at least three-quarters of an hour, while he expressed
his ideas--the ideas of the Abbé de Pradt!--upon military tactics.
Conceive the wrath of Mme de Staël, and the annoyance of everybody
there! M. Schlegel said, that he could fancy he was listening to that
rhetorician who pronounced a discourse on the art of war to Hannibal.
'This remark did not make amends for the nuisance of hearing in good
French what we all knew before, when what we wanted was to listen to
new things, in a foreign accent. Among the very few words which the
English general was allowed to put in, I caught one sentence which
struck me. While the abbé took breath, or coughed, the warrior had
just time to tell us, that the most awful day in the life of a
commander is that in which he has gained a battle; because, before
having passed a night on the ground, and being assured on the morrow
of the departure of the enemy, the conqueror cannot even know whether
he is not conquered.
'Everything has its cost in this world, and if every man told us his
secret, we should see that the most dazzling triumphs are paid for at
their full price. However that may be, I thought there was sense and
good taste in the Duke's remark. It seemed as if he tried to make us
forgive him for exciting our curiosity so much.
'Many people went away discouraged by the bad manners of M. de Pradt.
The hero himself was thinking of a retreat, when Mme de Staël came to
release him from the ambuscade into which he had fallen. She retained
him near the door, and there was a grave conversation on the English
constitution. Mme de Staël could not reconcile the idea of political
liberty, with the prevalence of servile forms remaining in the
individual relationships of a society so jealous of that liberty as
England.
'"Language and aristocratic customs do not annoy people living in a
country that is really free," said the Duke. "We use these unimportant
formulæ in compliment to the past, and preserve our ceremonies as we
keep a memorial, even when it has lost its primitive destination."
'"But is it true," asked Mme de Staël, "that your lord chancellor
speaks to the king on his bended knee during the opening address or
sitting of parliament?"
'"Yes; quite true."
'"How _does_ he do it?"
'"He speaks to him kneeling, as I have told you."
'"But how?"
'"Must I shew you? You _will_ have it!" answered the Duke; and he
threw himself at the feet of our Corinna.
'"I wish everybody could see him," cried Mme de Staël.
'And everybody there did applaud with one accord. I would not answer
for the same unanimity of approbation among the same people after they
had reached the foot of the staircase.
'Everybody went away, only I stayed two hours with the mistress of the
house and M. Schlegel, whose anger against the abbé did not wear out.
These two hours Mme de Staël's conversation enchanted me, proving how
much there is to attach us in one who can live at one and the same
time so near and yet so far above the world.... I might pass many
evenings in recounting in detail the conversation of this evening.
There is more than matter for a book in a two hours' talk with Mme de
Staël. I had better go to bed, that I may be able to tell you
to-morrow all I can only leave you to guess at now.'[3]
And now we come to a later period, and Mme Sophie Gay shall give place
to her lively and clever daughter Delphine, Mme Emile Girardin.
'Parisian society,' she writes, 'now, in 1839, offers the strangest
aspect that ever was seen--a mixture of luxury and rudeness, English
propriety and French negligence, political absurdities and
revolutionary terrors, of which it is hard to form a just conception.
The luxury of the salons is truly Eastern, not only the salons,
indeed, but the anterooms: an anteroom in a handsome hotel is more
richly adorned than the most beautiful drawing-room of the provincial
prefecture. There, footmen more or less powdered--for there are rebels
who choose to wear so little powder, that you would rather take them
for millers, in livery, than for servants of the anteroom--these
self-styled powdered lackeys offer you a great book, bound in velvet,
with the corners bronzed and gilt, in which you are asked to write
your name. If the lady of the house is visible, you are pompously
ushered into the sanctuary--that is to say, into the second salon or
parlour, or closet, or _atelier_, whichever best assorts with the
pretensions of the lady. A dog darts upon you, barks, makes a show of
biting you; he is quieted, submits, and regains his purple cushion,
growling. Dogs are very much in fashion: together with the fire,
flowers, an old aunt, and two toadies, they make up part of the living
accompaniments of a genteel salon. As you are an elegant person, of
course you are ill-dressed: your coat is dusty, your boots speckled
with mud, your hair uncombed, you exhale a strong odour of tobacco. At
first glance, such things seem rather disagreeable, common, and
inelegant. No such thing: this is exactly the most fashionable style
we have; it seems to say: "I have just dismounted from the finest
horse in Paris. I am a man of fashion, of that distinguished position
in society, that I can go in a morning to call on a duchess, _dressed
like a highwayman_."
'On the other hand, the mistress of the house is charming. One must do
women the justice to say, that they never take a pride in ugliness;
that they never make elegance to consist in appearing to the greatest
possible disadvantage. The woman whom you are visiting, then, is
dressed in the best taste. A beautiful lace cap covers her light hair;
she wears a soft figured Gros do Naples; her stockings are of
exquisite fineness; her shoes irreproachable (we doubt not they bear
the mark of either Gros or Müller); her Valenciennes cuffs are
irresistible: everything betokens care and fastidious nicety. The
freshness of her appearance is a satire on the negligence of yours.
One cannot comprehend why this elegant woman should have prepared
herself in so costly a manner to receive this man; and in the evening,
really the contrast is greater still. Young men no longer wear
stockings when they go into a party; yet they dare not just yet
present themselves in boots; and therefore they come in _brodequins_,
like students. We are in the age of the _juste-milieu_; and this is
appropriate enough. The _brodequin_ is in its right place half-way
between shoes and boots. These ill-dressed men are surrounded by women
blazing in jewels and diamonds, coronets and diadems. It is impossible
to believe that such differently dressed beings can be of the same
country and station in society; and yet they are all talking and
chirping together: and what conversation! what a conflict of subjects!
what an inexplicable picture of forethought and thoughtlessness! or
rather of apathy!
'"And do you also believe in a revolution, M. de P----?" inquires a
charming princess, spreading out her fan.
'"Certainly, madame; and I hope we shall have one sooner than some may
think."
'"What! monsieur--you make me tremble."
'"Can you, then, be afraid of a revolution which will bring about what
you wish for?"
'"No; but we shall have some cruel moments to pass through."
'"Some may; but not everybody."
'"Bah! revolutions make no selection; and then, when once the scaffold
is set up"----
'"How fast you travel, madame: in our day we shall never bear with
scaffolds. The days of Terror will never return!"
'"I think with M. de P----," chimes in a young dandy, playing with a
Chinese ape on the table: "I rather look for civil war."
'"I do not expect it; we have not energy enough for a civil war." ...
'"But you will have household assassinations, probably, if that will
be any comfort."
'"And then, the pillage of Paris!"
'"Pillage!"
'"Certainly." And every one cries:
'"Oh, well, if there is pillage, I will be in it."
'"I shall come to your house, madame," says one. "I shall carry away
this beautiful vase."
'"And I, the plate."
'"And I, the charming portrait."
'"I have no fixed idea yet. I shall come to your house to-morrow,
madame, to choose," &c.
'"All this will be very amusing; and yet, when the day comes, I shall
not be sorry to be in Italy."
'"Well, let us set out, then."
'"Not yet, but soon. I will warn you when it is best to go." And so
they talk on of all these horrible things, half buried under canopies
of _lampas_, surrounded by flowers, by the light of thousands of
wax-candles burning in golden lustres; and these women, who foresee
such great catastrophes--tragical events, which may divide them from
all they love, from parents, from friends--have beautiful dresses,
with trimmings from England, and make the prettiest little gestures
while speaking. It is because in France vanity is so deeply rooted
that it leads to indifference. Presumption stands in lieu of courage.
They believe in disasters, but only for others: they never seem to
expect them for themselves.'
So much for national character. If all this be a truthful picture, and
really we see no reason for doubt, it does but add another to the many
proofs of the springing elasticity of that element of light-hearted
short-sightedness which is so proverbially characteristic of the
French. But we will say no more, for our paper has already exceeded
the limits we had assigned to it; and the things that _are_ must ever
prevail in our pages over those that have been.