MADAME DE STAËL

1766-1817.

According to the custom of the people of Geneva, which is to throw their

children on their own resources very early in life, the parents of

Necker sent him to Paris at the age of fifteen, as clerk in the

banking-house of Vernet. He quickly displayed talents for business, and,

becoming a partner in the house of Thellusson, laid the foundation of his

fortune. He quitted the bank, as better speculations opened, when he was

named resident for the republic of Geneva at the French court. The duke

de Choiseul liked and advanced him. He named him administrator of the

French East Indian company; and at this post, and by speculations in the

English funds, he made a large private fortune.

His early years were devoted to these pursuits, and he was so absorbed

by them that he enjoyed few of the pleasures of youth. He, meanwhile,

acquired both experience and knowledge in finance. Wishing to bring

himself into notice, he wrote the "Eloge de Colbert" in 1773, which

gained the prize in the French academy. His essay on the corn laws

increased his reputation. Maurepas consulted him when alarmed by the

disastrous state of the finances; and, by degrees, all eyes turned

towards him as the man who alone could save France from bankruptcy,

through his knowledge of business, and the great resources which his

plans opened in the regulation of the taxation and expenditure of the

country. As difficulty, distress, and alarm gathered thick and dark

round the government, and the expectation of a war rendered it necessary

to supply the requisite expenses, the hopes placed in Necker caused him,

in 1777, to be raised to the office of director-general.

Soon after his appointment as minister from the republic of Geneva, he

had married mademoiselle Churchod. The name of this lady is familiar to

the English reader as being that of the object of the first and only

love of the historian Gibbon. On the mother's side she was descended

from a high French protestant family of Provence, which had been driven

into exile by the edict of Nantes. Her father was a clergyman, and

exercised the function of minister in a Swiss village. He had spared no

pains in the education of his daughter. She was versed in several dead

and living languages; her understanding was sedulously cultivated, and

her beauty and amiable disposition combined to render her an

extraordinary woman. She was devotedly attached to her husband, and he

regarded her with a mixture of admiration, reverence, and love. The

object of her life was to make him happy. She gathered the beaux esprits

of Paris round their table to divert him after the fatigues of the day.

Their house became the resort of the best society. They were considered

exemplary and clever, yet dull and pedantic. The talents of Necker,

however, were respected; and madame Necker, though she was adorned by

none of the light and trifling, yet winning and elegant, manners and

conversation of a Parisian lady, yet pleased by her beauty, and a

certain ingenuousness and purity of mind, that gave sweetness to her

countenance and a native grace to her manners.

This exemplary pair had an only daughter. She was born in Paris on the

22d April, 1766. Her mother was desirous of bestowing on her a perfect

education. Madame Necker possessed great firmness of character, and a

strong understanding. She submitted every feeling and action of her life

to the control of reason. She carried her love of logical inference into

the smallest as well as the most important events of life; and fulfilled

to the letter every the slightest duty of daily and hourly occurrence.

Finding her young daughter apt and willing to learn, she thought she

could not teach her too much, nor store her mind with too many facts and

words. This was not done as an English mother would have practised in

the seclusion of the schoolroom, but in the midst of society, in which

the young lady soon learnt to shine by her eloquent sallies and

vivacious spirits. We have a sketch of what mademoiselle Necker was at

eleven years of age, which presents a singular picture of the diversity

of the objects and modes of education on the continent from our quiet

and reserved notions of what is becoming in childhood. Madame Necker was

desirous of establishing a friendship between her daughter and a

mademoiselle Huber, the child of an old friend of the family. The young

people were introduced to each other, and mademoiselle Necker showed

transports of delight at the idea of having a companion, and promised

her, on the instant, to love her for ever. "She spoke," mademoiselle

Huber writes, "with a warmth and facility which were already eloquence,

and which made a great impression on me. We did not play like children.

She immediately asked me what my lessons were, if I knew any foreign

languages, and if I went often to the play. When I said I had only been

three or four times, she exclaimed, and promised that we should often go

together, and when we came home write down an account of the piece. It

was her habit, she said; and, in short, we were to write to each other

every day.

"We entered the drawing-room. Near the arm-chair of madame Necker was

the stool of her daughter, who was obliged to sit very upright. As soon

as she had taken her accustomed place, three or four old gentlemen came

up and spoke to her with the utmost kindness. One of them, in a little

round wig, took her hands in his, held them a long time, and entered

into conversation with her as if she had been twenty. This was the abbé

Raynal; the others were Messrs. Thomas, Marmontel, the marquis de Pesay,

and the baron de Grimm. We sat down to table. It was a picture to see

how mademoiselle Necker listened. She did not speak herself; but so

animated was her face that she appeared to converse with all. Her eyes

followed the looks and movements of those who talked: it seemed as if

she guessed their ideas before they were expressed. She entered into

every subject; even politics, which at this epoch was one of the most

engrossing topics of conversation. After dinner, a good deal of company

arrived. Each guest, as he approached madame Necker, addressed her

daughter with some compliment or pleasantry: she replied to all with

ease and grace. They delighted to attack and embarrass her, and to

excite her childish imagination, which was already brilliant. The

cleverest men were those who took greatest pleasure in making her talk.

They asked her what she was reading, recommended new books, and gave her

a taste for study by conversing concerning what she knew, or on what she

was ignorant."

Thus this extraordinary woman imbibed, as it were with her mother's

milk, a taste for society and display. She learnt to take intense

pleasure in the communication of ideas with intelligent men, and in

sharing in the sparkling wit that gathered round her. She enjoyed the

excitement of spirits that results from the sense of expressing her

thoughts, and at the same time having the sphere enlarged by the instant

interchange with others. The sensations of success in society, of praise

and reputation, were familiar to her in childhood, and no wonder they

became as necessary as her daily bread in after years.

It was her mother's plan to tax her intellects to their height. She was

incited to study diligently, to listen to conversation on subjects

beyond her years, to frequent the theatre; her pleasures and occupations

alike were so many exertions of mind. She wrote a great deal. Her

writings were read in society, and applauded. The praises she received

developed also the feelings of her heart. She passionately loved her

parents and her friends; she read with an enthusiasm and interest that

made books a portion of her existence. She was accustomed to say, that

the fate of Clarissa Harlowe was one of the events of her youth.

Susceptible of impression, serious in the midst of her vivacity, she

rather loved what made her weep rather than laugh.

The species of perpetual excitement in which she lived, and the

excessive application and attention required of her by her mother, had

at length a bad effect on her health. At the age of fourteen it became

apparent that she was declining. The advice of Tronchin was asked; he

was alarmed by the symptoms, and ordered her to be removed into the

country, to spend her life in the open air, and to abandon all serious

study. Madame Necker was deeply mortified. She saw all the materials for

a prodigy of learning and knowledge in her daughter, and was almost

angry that her frame was injured by the work she required from her to

bring her to the perfection she meditated. Unable to continue to its

height her system of education, she abandoned it altogether. Henceforth

no longer looking on her as her own work, she ceased to take interest in

her talents, which she regarded as superficial and slight; when she

heard her praised, she replied, "Oh! it is nothing, absolutely nothing,

in comparison to what I intended to make her."

The young lady meanwhile enjoyed the leisure she obtained: no longer

called upon to store her mind with words and facts, she gave herself up

to her imagination. She and her friend passed the summer at St. Ouen, a

country-house of Necker, two leagues from Paris; they dressed themselves

like muses; they composed poetry, and declaimed it; they wrote and acted

plays. Giving the rein to her fancy, and impelled by natural vivacity,

she became poetess, tragedian, actress, thus, almost in childhood. The

carelessness that her mother showed, after her disappointment with

regard to her education, had the effect of developing in the young girl

the chief passion of her heart--filial affection towards her father: she

had now leisure to seek his society; and his great goodness, his

admiration of herself, and the perfect friendship and openness of

communication that subsisted between them, gave rise to the passionate

attachment towards him which she dwells upon in her writings with so

much fervour. She seized every opportunity of enjoying his society; and

he perceived and delighted in her talents, which displayed themselves

with peculiar advantage when with him. She saw that, overwhelmed as he

was by public cares and engrossing business, he needed to be amused in

his moments of leisure. He adored his wife, but no one was ever less

amusing; his daughter, on the other hand, exerted herself to divert him:

she tried a thousand ways and risked any sally or pleasantry so to win

him to smile, and smiles quickly came at her bidding. He was not

prodigal of his approbation; his eyes were more flattering than his

words; and he believed it to be more necessary and even more amusing to

rally her for her defects, than to praise her for her excellences. She

saw that his gay reproofs were just, and modelled herself by them. She

often said to her friends, "I owe to the inconceivable penetration of my

father the frankness of my character and the sincerity of my mind: he

unmasked every affectation or pretension, and when near him I got into

the habit of thinking that every feeling of my heart could be read."

Madame Necker grew a little jealous of the superior power her daughter

possessed of amusing her husband; besides, although she had ardently

wished her to shine in society, yet she had desired her to be remarkable

for her attainments and knowledge, not for her wit and imagination. She

looked coldly therefore on the admiration she excited, and even

protested against it. The young girl turned from her chilling and prim

rebuffs to the encouragement she found in her father's sympathy and

gladdening smiles. In the drawing-room she escaped from the side of

Madame Necker, who regarded the mistakes which her giddiness and

vivacity caused her to make with severe and correcting eyes. She

listened with respect when reproved, but gladly sheltered herself behind

her father's chair; at first silently, then throwing in a word, till at

last, one after the other, the cleverest men in the room gathered round

to listen to her sallies and to be charmed by her eloquence.

The position that her parents held was exceedingly calculated to enchain

the affections and raise the enthusiasm of the ardent girl. Her father

was looked up to as the man whose exertions and talents were saving

France. When named director-general of finances, he had refused the

salary appended to the situation, that he might feel more free to

diminish that of others, and benefit France by his economy with a

clearer reputation. Her mother used his power for the most admirable

purposes. She ameliorated the condition of the hospitals in the capital;

and established near Paris, at her own expense, a charitable

institution, so well directed that it became the model of every other.

The young are apt to think their parents superior to the rest of the

world. The claims which M. and Madame Necker possessed to real

superiority, from their virtues and talents, naturally added to the

warmth of their daughter's affection. The distinction in which they were

held made the path of her life bright; and even the first check that

occurred in her father's career tended to excite still more her

admiration for him, as opposition gives form and strength to every power

exerted to overcome it. Necker was too conscientious and too firm in his

schemes of reform not to have enemies: he was too vain also not to

desire to have his plans universally known and approved. Publicity is

indeed the proper aim of every honest public man; but it was in utter

variance with the policy of the old French government.

[Sidenote: 1781.

Ætat.

15.]

For the purpose of making his system known to the nation, Necker

published his "Compte Rendu," which was a statement of the past and

present condition of the finances, addressed to the king. It occasioned

a great clamour. His daughter read his pamphlet, and heard the

discussions concerning it. She addressed an anonymous letter to her

father on the subject: he recognised the style; and his affection was

increased by this testimony of her talents and filial affection. The

"Compte Rendu," however, increased the number and importance of his

enemies; the impropriety of the act was urged upon the king: Maurepas

had already become hostile to him. Necker was attacked and calumniated.

He, and his wife still more, were very susceptible to public blame: they

wished to silence the libellers, who grew the more bitter and active the

more they perceived that their stings were felt. Necker then demanded a

sign of favour from the king, necessary, he thought, for the support of

his influence: he asked for the _entrée au conseil_ (a seat in the

cabinet), which was refused on the score of his being a protestant. On

this he committed an act which he ever after regretted, an act that

showed that he preferred his own private feelings to the good of the

country which he had promised to save,--he resigned his office.

His daughter gathered pleasure rather than mortification from his

resignation. It was acknowledged that by so doing he had plunged the

royal family in distress. He had repaired, on the first moment of his

returning to a private station, to St. Ouen: all France, as she calls

it--that is, all the nobility and all the best society of the capital,

the magistrates, the clergy, the merchants and men of letters--came to

see him, to express their regrets, their fears for France, their hopes

that he would return to office. She heard that Paris was in commotion.

At the theatre, every verse in the play of the night ("Henri IV." was

acted, and the mention of Sully afforded wide scope) that could be

converted into an allusion to the favourite minister was applauded with

acclamations; the public walks, the _cafés_, every public place, were

filled by an eager yet silent crowd. Consternation was painted on every

face--ruin was anticipated for the country which Necker had abandoned.

From St. Ouen the ex-minister proceeded to Switzerland. He bought the

mansion and estate of Coppet; on the lake of Geneva, and varied his

residence between that place and visits to Paris. He was addressed by

various sovereigns--Catherine II., Joseph, emperor of Austria, and the

king of Naples, to undertake their affairs as minister of finance; but

he preferred literary leisure and domestic peace, with a wife whom he

adored, and a daughter who was becoming each day dearer and more

interesting.

In the retreat at Coppet he published a work on finance, of which 80,000

copies were sold in one day. Mdlle. Necker shared the triumph; she was

his companion, his friend. On her part she was not idle; and, even at an

early age, began the career of authorship in which in after life she

became so distinguished. It was the custom in French society to meet to

hear an author read his productions. In this country, such a style of

amusement would be considered very dull and tiresome; but it was

otherwise in Paris. The audience was easily pleased. The women wept at

the right moment--the men were ready to start from their chairs:

enthusiasm became contagious. If the subject were pathetic, the room

resounded with sobs and suppressed cries; if comic, with bursts of

laughter. Mediocre authors reaped easy but animating success; and many

works, like the "Saisons" of St. Lambert, were vaunted to the skies by

listening friends, which were acknowledged to be poor and wearisome when

published. In the same way, the plays and tales of Mdlle. Necker were

read by her in numerous companies. These productions were afterwards

printed, and possess slight merit. The plays are flat, and what in

common parlance is called maudlin; the tales inflated, and without

originality: when read in society, they were applauded with transport.

It cannot be doubted that this sort of encouragement must rouse to its

height the power of an author of real genius. In this country, writers

receive little praise except that which results from the number of

copies that are sold; and must rely entirely on the spirit of

inspiration to carry them through the toils of authorship. How seldom,

how very seldom, does an English author hear one word of real sympathy

or admiration! Over reserve, over fear of compromising our opinions, and

being laughed at for being in the wrong, holds us in. Madame de Staël,

animated by the fervour of her French friends, believed in her own

genius, even before it was developed; and self-confidence gave it a

strength of wing that enabled her to soar to the extreme height that her

abilities permitted.

The were stirring days in which she lived. Calonne succeeded to Necker

as minister, and, having thrown every thing into confusion, was obliged

to yield his place; he was succeeded by Fouquereux and Villedeuil, men

of nothing, who abandoned the state of finances as hopeless. Lomenie de

Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, replaced them; and he caused the king

to engage to assemble the states-general, and plunged the finances in a

worse state than ever. Necker looked on with anxiety, partly for France,

and partly for himself; for he felt sure that he would be summoned to

save the country at the last gasp, and trembled to lose his reputation

if called in too late. "Why have they not given me the archbishop's

fifteen months?" he exclaimed, when at the end of that time he was

called in to repair Brienne's faults. Calonne had attacked his "Compte

Rendu." He wrote a memoir, addressed and sent to the king, to defend

himself, which the king requested him not to publish. But Necker laid

great store by the public voice, and did not hesitate to act in

opposition to the king's wish, and, in consequence, was exiled by a

_lettre de cachet_ to forty leagues from Paris; but four months after he

was recalled and named minister.

[Sidenote: 1788.

Ætat.

22.]

We dwell upon these circumstances of Necker's life, as they were the

events that chiefly interested his daughter. She had been struck with

dismay at the moment of his exile. She was married at this time; but it

is a singular circumstance that in her life her marriage is a very

secondary event, and her husband's name seldom mentioned. As the only

daughter of a millionaire, Mdlle. Necker's hand had been asked by many

French nobles; but it was determined not to marry her to a Catholic, at

the same time that she and her parents were anxious to make a marriage

that should enable her to reside in France, and to appear at court. It

is told of the childhood of madame de Staël, that, at the age of

eleven, she offered to marry Gibbon. He being a favourite friend of her

parents, she hoped to please them by giving them a son-in-law of whom

they were fond, with little regard to his strange repulsive figure and

ugly face. And now she thought of station and convenience, and not at

all of finding a friend or companion--far less a lover--in her husband.

The baron de Staël Holstein, chamberlain to the queen of Sweden, had

resided in Paris for some years, first as counsellor to the Swedish

embassy, and afterwards as ambassador. He frequented the society of the

French liberals, was a friend of Necker, and entered the lists of his

daughter's admirers. He was a protestant and a noble, and he was also an

amiable honourable man. The only objection to the union was the

likelihood of his being recalled to his own country. The king of Sweden,

Gustavus III., with whom he was a favourite, favoured the match, and

promised that he should continue for several years to be ambassador at

the French court. In addition, M. de Staël promised never to take her

to Sweden without her own consent. On these considerations the marriage

took place in the year 1786, when she was just twenty. Madame de Staël

appeared at court. It is related that, desirous as she had been of

acquiring this privilege, yet Parisian society was ill-naturedly amused

by the numerous mistakes in etiquette which the young ambassadress had

made on her presentation. She gaily related them herself, so to disarm

her enemies. At this time, also, she appeared as an authoress in print,

publishing her letters on the writings of Rousseau. We find in this work

all the traits that distinguished madame de Staël's writings to the

end,--great enthusiasm and eloquence, a pleasure in divining the

mysteries of existence, and dwelling on the melancholy that attends

it,--considerable power of expressing her thoughts, and much beauty and

delicacy in the thoughts themselves, but an absence of strength and of

the highest elevation both of talent and moral feeling.

We have a "portrait" of madame de Staël at this epoch, such as it was

the fashion for friends to write of friends in Paris at that time. It is

a favourable description, yet marked by distinctive features and

characteristic touches. "Zulma advances; her large dark eyes sparkle

with genius; her hair, black as ebony, falls on her shoulders in waving

ringlets; her features are more marked than delicate, yet they express

something superior to the destiny of her sex. There she is! every one

cried, when she appeared, and all became breathless. When she sang, she

extemporised the words of her song; the celestial brightness of

composition animated her face, and held the audience in serious

attention; at once astonished and delighted, we knew not which most to

admire, her facility or perfection. When her music ceased, she talked of

the great truths of nature, the immortality of the soul,--love of

liberty--of the fascination and the danger of the passions; her features

meanwhile have an expression superior to beauty, her physiognomy is full

of play and variety, the accents of her voice have a thousand

modulations, and there is perfect harmony between her thoughts and their

expression. Without hearing her words, the inflections of her tones, her

gestures, her look, cause her meaning to be understood. When she ceased,

a murmur of approbation ran round the room; she looked down modestly,

her long eyelashes covered her flashing eyes, and the sun was clouded

over." There were many people in Paris, who, of course, were willing to

turn the pretensions of the young and brilliant improvisatrice into

ridicule; but though her want of beauty, her heedlessness, which often

led her into mistakes, her vivacity, which over-stept the mark of

feminine grace, opened a field for sarcasm, no one could listen to her

in public without admiration, no one could associate with her in private

without love. She stept, as on to a stage, in the first brilliancy of

youth, to be admired and to enjoy; but public events were swelling and

disturbing the stream of time, and it became a tempestuous flood, that

wrecked her dearest hopes, and consigned her at last to that domestic

retirement and peace, for which her outset in life had not formed her,

and which, instead of being a haven of rest and enjoyment, was as a dead

sea on which she weltered in misery and despair.

Necker was restored to the ministry in August, 1788; public credit

revived under favour of his name, and famine and alarm were exchanged

for plenty and security. He found the king pledged to assemble the

states-general, and he did not hesitate in advising him to redeem his

word; yet he met the questions and difficulties that arose with regard

to the details of the measure with an irresolution that showed that,

however clever he might be in matters of finance, he was ill fitted for

weightier questions of general politics.

The convocation of the states excited the national enthusiasm to its

height; and Necker, giving the weight of his influence to the liberal

party, augmented his own popularity. He admired greatly the English

constitution, and wished it to be imitated in France. Madame de Staël

coincided in his views, and viewed the assemblage of the different

orders with sentiments resembling rapture. According to her views, the

horrors of approaching famine and the perils of bankruptcy were to be

averted by this measure, and the future welfare of France, individual

liberty, and national prosperity, were to be placed on durable

foundations. The first struggles of the _tiers état_ with the king and

privileged orders excited her sympathy. Yet her father wished to act a

moderate part, while even his moderation seemed treason to the blinded

royalists. He thus incurred the distrust of both parties. Though

minister, he was not permitted to direct the counsels of the king; and,

at the same time, by only partially upholding the pretensions of the

commons, he began to excite the mixed contempt and aversion of the more

democratic leaders. During the struggle of the _tiers état_ to obtain a

voice in the direction of affairs, he advised the king to meet their

demands half way; but the court resolved to crush them altogether, and

so fell itself into the pit. Necker saw with terror the purpose of the

king in collecting troops round the capital to overawe both the

Parisians and the deputies, and his remonstrances showed that he would

be no party in the scenes of massacre that must ensue. He offered

several times to resign; but the court party felt that it risked too

much in the odium which his dismissal would excite. Driven on, however,

by evil counsellors, who saw no good to arise in the constitutional

liberty of their country, and weighed the blood of their countrymen as

nothing in the opposite scale to their power and privileges, the king

assembled troops, and the moment drew near when the people and their

representatives were to feel the power of the bayonet, and to be reduced

to obedience under the bolts of the artillery. The temporising spirit of

Necker was more hated by the royal than the popular party, since the

former saw injury, and the latter benefit, in any the least infraction

of the old state of things. But the king well knew that Necker would

never consent to the measures which he had in view, and that, before the

military were called on to destroy his subjects, it was necessary to

remove a minister round whom the popular party would rally with

confidence. Necker continued to attend the king each day, but no affair

of importance was discussed before him. This silence filled him with

disquiet; he expected to be arrested, and communicated his suspicion to

his wife and daughter. Madame de Staël wished him to go a step

further in enouncing his opinions, and so to confirm the popular favour;

but Necker considered his obligations as servant to the king as

paramount. On the 11th of July, as he was about to sit down to dinner,

he received a letter from Louis XVI., ordering him to send in his

resignation, and to quit France without exciting observation. _Sans

bruit_ were the words that signified the fears of the court that his

dismissal should become the signal of popular commotion. Necker obeyed

to the letter and the spirit of the command. No one person was informed.

He and his wife stept into the carriage prepared for their usual evening

airing, and, without change of dress or attendant, travelled day and

night till they reached Brussels. On the morning of the 12th of July

madame de Staël received a letter from her father, announcing his

departure, and bidding her retire into the country, lest the Parisians,

for his sake, should pay her public homage. She obeyed, and, a new

courier having brought her intelligence of his route, she set out on the

15th July to join him. "When I reached them," madame de Staël writes,

"three days after, they still wore the full dress which they had on

when, after a large dinner party, and while no one suspected the

agitating position in which they were placed, they silently quitted

France, their friends, their home, and the power which they enjoyed.

This dress, covered with dust, the name assumed by my father for the

sake of avoiding recognition in France, and so detention through the

favour in which he was still held,--all these circumstances filled me

with feelings of reverence that caused me to throw myself at his feet as

I entered the room of the inn where I found him." Necker had chosen

Brussels as his way to Switzerland, as not being the direct road, and so

less likely to betray him to the population. To this mark of obedience

to the king, he added a testimony of love for France, which, in the days

of mammon, was an act of heroism in a moneyed man. Necker had borrowed

two millions of livres for the royal treasury, for the purpose of

purchasing corn for starving Paris. He had secured this loan on his

private fortune. The transaction was not completed when he was

dismissed; and he feared that the news of his exile would retard the

supply. He wrote, therefore, to confirm his guarantee. These

circumstances find place in the biography of madame de Staël, because,

the ruling passion of her heart being love and veneration of her father,

we mark the acts that naturally, by their virtue, excited to their

height her filial feelings.

True to his resolve of avoiding his partizans in France, Necker

proceeded to Basle through Germany. He was accompanied by M. de Staël.

His wife and daughter followed more slowly by a different route. At

Frankfort, the latter were overtaken by the king's courier that recalled

Necker for the third time to the ministry. The commotions in Paris, the

destruction of the Bastille, frightened the court into submission to the

people. The recall of Necker was a necessary mark of acquiescence in the

wishes of the nation. At Basle the family met together, and Necker

resolved to return. He was not dazzled by his triumph; he felt the

perils he was about to encounter. He wished to serve France as a

constitutional minister, but he apprehended a further system of

innovation; and he felt he should lose the favour of the people by

opposing it, as he had lost the king's by refusing to support his

arbitrary measures. He felt, as Burke afterwards expressed it, that he

was recalled, like Pompey, for his misfortune; and, like Marius, that he

sat among ruins; but he thought that his return at the present crisis

would be serviceable to the sovereign and his adherents, and he resolved

on it at once. "What a moment of happiness, notwithstanding," Madame de

Staël writes, "was our journey from Basle to Paris, when my father

decided to return! I do not think that the like ever occurred to any man

who was not sovereign of the country. The French nation, ever so

animated in the demonstration of its sentiments, gave itself up, for the

first time, to hopes, the boundaries of which experience had not yet

taught them. Liberty was then only known to the enlightened classes by

the noble emotions with which it was associated; and, to the people, by

ideas analogous to their necessities and sufferings. Necker appeared as

the precursor of the expected good. The liveliest acclamations

accompanied every step: the women threw themselves on their knees afar

off in the fields when they saw his carriage pass: the first citizens of

the different places we traversed acted as postilions; and in the towns

the inhabitants took off the horses to drag the carriage themselves. It

was I that enjoyed for him--I was carried away by delight, and must not

feel ungrateful for those happy days, however sad were the ones that

followed." Various circumstances occurred to display to the returning

exiles the overthrow of the royalists and the triumph of the people.

Madame de Polignac had already arrived at Basle, on her way to

emigration. At ten leagues from Paris, they heard of the arrest of the

baron de Besenval, who was being led back prisoner to the capital, where

he would infallibly have been massacred in the streets. Necker

interfered to keep him where he was till further orders. He, as his

first act, went to Paris, to the Hôtel de Ville, to obtain the pardon

of M. de Besenval, and a universal amnesty. He was followed and welcomed

by joyful acclamations; delight at his restoration to power calmed, for

the moment, all party spirit, all political hatred; the assembled people

granted all he asked with transport. Madame de Staël and her mother

accompanied him. "Oh! nothing," she writes, "can equal the emotion that

a woman feels when she has the happiness of hearing the name of one

beloved repeated by a whole people. All those faces, which appear for

the time animated by the same sentiment as one's self; those innumerable

voices, which echo to the heart the name that rises in the air, and

which appears to return from heaven after having received the homage of

earth; the inconceivable electricity which men communicate to each other

when they share the same emotions; all those mysteries of nature and

social feeling are added to the greatest mystery of all--love--filial or

maternal, but still love; and the soul sinks under emotions stronger

than itself. When I came to myself, I felt that I had reached the

extreme boundary of happiness."

She had reached it, and the recoil soon came. The popular party, each

hour rising in power, disdained the half measures and weak concessions

of the minister:--from that hour, in spite of his feeble, though

virtuous, endeavours to restrain popular violence, and, at the same

time, to supply the wants of the people, and mitigate their sufferings

by great and unwearied exertions and personal sacrifices, the popularity

of Necker declined. His propositions were weak and inconsistent; the

king had no confidence in him; the people withdrew their favour. His

daughter could not perceive that his want of energy, and total

incapacity to cope with the necessities of the times, were the occasion

of this change; she saw only ingratitude, perversity, and ignorance. Her

father still continued, in her eyes, the first of men; when he triumphed

he was a hero, when he fell he was a martyr.

Madame de Staël witnessed nearly all the more deplorable events of the

revolution. On the 5th October, when she heard of the march of the

people to Versailles to bring the king and queen to Paris, she hastened

to join her parents, who were in attendance at court. When she arrived,

Necker hastened to the castle to join the council, and madame Necker and

her daughter repaired to the hall preceding the one where the king

remained, that they might share Necker's fate. The tumult, the

inquietude, the various projects, and the trembling expectation of the

hour agitated all, and augmented as night approached. A noble arrived

from Paris with the latest news. He appeared in the royal presence in a

common dress. It was the first time that any man had entered the king's

apartment, except in court dress. His recital of the furious armed

multitude, which was gathering and approaching, increased the general

terror. On the morrow the storm burst. Murder assailed the gates of the

palace, and the royal personages, for the first time, were attacked by

those outrages, at once sanguinary and insulting, which, thus beginning,

never stayed till their destruction was accomplished.

Madame de Staël was present during the whole scene. She stood near when

the crowd forced the queen to appear before them, and when at their

demand the royal family were carried to Paris. Such scenes could never

be forgotten. When the king and queen set off to the capital, the family

of Necker repaired by another route. "We crossed," madame de Staël

writes, "the Bois de Boulogne; the weather was beautiful, the breeze

scarcely stirred the trees, and the sun was bright enough to dispel alt

gloom from the scenery. No exterior object replied to our sadness." When

they arrived at the Tuileries, the Parisian palace of the kings of

France, which had not been inhabited for many years, they found that the

beds of the royal children were put up in the room where the queen

received them; Marie Antoinette apologised. "You know," she said, "that

I did not expect to come here." Her beautiful face expressed anger as

she spoke; and madame de Staël must have felt that her father, as

popular minister, and herself, as a lover of liberty, were included in

the sentiments of resentment which filled the queen's heart.

[Sidenote: 1790.

Sept.

8.]

The resignation and departure of Necker, some months after, was a

circumstance full of mortification for his daughter. He traversed the

France which had hailed him with such transport on his return from

Basle, and found himself surrounded by enemies. Execrations followed his

steps, and he was arrested at Arcis-sur-Aube, and obliged to wait for a

decree, of the national assembly before he was suffered to proceed; his

name was held in detestation--his acts reviled. He did not deserve

this; for, though weak as a politician, his acts were those of an

honourable and generous man. The immediate cause of his resignation of

office was the issue of the assignats, which he looked on as the ruin of

the public credit; yet he left 2,000,000 of francs, the half of his

fortune, in the funds, to run a risk of loss, which he himself deemed,

as indeed it proved, inevitable. He retired to Coppet, while his

daughter was detained in Paris by illness.

[Sidenote: 1791.

Ætat.

25.]

She continued to remain there, and, according to French manners, mingled

deeply in various political intrigues. Her friend M. de Narbonne was

named minister of war, and many of his projects were discussed in her

drawing-room. She shared in the project set afoot by Lafayette, of

facilitating the escape of the king to the army at Metz. Narbonne, at

the head of the royal guard, and several thousand national guards

belonging to the department of Jura, were to carry off Louis by force

from the Tuileries. Talleyrand was informed of the plan, and approved,

but the king rejected it; he was averse to any project that needed the

co-operation of Lafayette, whom he hated. Soon after Narbonne was

dismissed, and the nomination of Dumouriez and Roland placed the power

in the hands of the girondists.

[Sidenote: 1792.

Ætat.

26.]

Madame de Staël was in Paris during the fatal August that decided the

fate of the French monarchy. On the 9th of that month she stood at her

window with some friends, and heard the forty-eight tocsins of Paris

sound the alarm, which continued all night their monotonous, frequent,

and lugubrious tolling. The volunteer patrole sent her intelligence of

all that passed, but no one knew what the morrow would bring forth. The

attack on the Tuileries began early in the morning; madame de Staël was

told that three of her friends, who guarded the outside of the palace,

had been seized and massacred. She instantly, with all the intrepidity

of a French woman, hurried out to learn the truth. Her carriage was

stopped on the bridge. She was told that the work of slaughter was going

on the other side. Still she persisted, and, after a delay of two

hours, crossed the bridge, and learnt that her friends were alive, and

hiding from the enraged multitude. In the evening she went to see them

in the obscure houses in which they had taken refuge; drunken men were

lying about on the steps of doors, who roused themselves only to

vociferate oaths and execrations. Many women were in the same state;

their howlings were still more frightful. She fled when the patrole

approached; for they maintained order by protecting the assassins, and

assisting them in the work of murder. The interval between the 10th of

August and the 2d of September was one of horror; arrests were frequent,

and it became known that the massacre of the prisoners was meditated.

The outlawed friends of madame de Staël went from house to house as

danger menaced; she received two in her own, hoping that, though her

husband was absent, the name she bore, of Swedish ambassadress, would

protect her from a domiciliary visit. She was mistaken; the

commissioners of police, men named from among the lowest class,

accompanied by the soldiery, who guarded the outlets of the house to

prevent escape, demanded to search. She resolved to dispute their right,

as the only means of saving her friends. She talked to the men; told

them that the laws of nations declared an ambassador's house inviolable,

and assured them that Sweden was a country on the frontiers of France,

and that it would declare war at once if its ambassadress were insulted.

She perceived that her arguments made some impression; and, while her

heart sank within her, she roused herself to joke them on the folly of

their suspicions, and dismissed them with every appearance of politeness

and gaiety.

She had already prepared to leave France, and obtained passports. She

delayed a few days, anxious to be re-assured with regard to her friends,

before she placed herself in safety. During this interval she exerted

herself to save M. de Lally-Tollendal, and succeeded, by applying to

Manuel, a member of the commune of Paris: he who published Mirabeau's

letters, written in the prison of Vincennes, and who, six months

afterwards, during the reign of terror, died on the scaffold. On the 2d

of September, when the news of the taking of Longwy and Verdun had

roused the ferocity of the Parisians to the utmost, and those massacres

of helpless prisoners began which remain a perpetual sanguinary stain on

the French character, she prepared to set out. Her passports were all

regular; and, fancying that the title of wife of a foreign ambassador

would be her safeguard, she set out in her carriage, drawn by six

horses, and her servants in full livery. Her calculations failed;

scarcely had her carriage advanced a few steps when it was surrounded by

a crowd of furious women, who seized the horses, and, with ferocious

cries, ordered the postilions to drive to the assembly of the section of

St. Germain, to which she belonged. She entered the chamber of the

assembly, which was in full deliberation, and by it she was ordered to

proceed to the Hôtel de Ville. To reach this latter place she was

obliged to traverse Paris; and on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville

several men had been assassinated on the 10th of August. She trembled to

obey, and yet had no resource. She was three hours on her way, as she

was slowly drawn through a crowd who threatened death with hideous

shouts and unremitting cries. She addressed several gendarmes who passed

near, asking protection; they replied by disdainful and menacing

gestures. At length, one gendarme, who had been put in the carriage with

her, was touched by her situation (she was with child), and promised to

defend her at the peril of his life. She alighted from the carriage at

the Hôtel de Ville, in the midst of an armed multitude, and advanced

under an avenue of pikes. As she went up the steps a man pointed one

against her; the gendarme protected her with his sabre, and she reached

the chamber of the commune, where Robespierre presided. Collet d'Herbois

and Billaud Varennes acted as his secretaries. The hall was full of

people--men, women, and children, shouting _Vive la nation!_ She was

taken to the raised platform where the president sat, and told to sit

down. While she was representing her right, as ambassadress from Sweden,

to depart, Manuel, whom she had persuaded to liberate Lally-Tollendal,

entered: he was astonished to see her in such a miserable position, and,

answering for her, withdrew her from the dreadful hall, and shut her up

in his cabinet with her maid. They remained for six hours, oppressed by

hunger, thirst, and terror. The windows of the room looked on the Place

de Grève, and assassins passed from the prisons, their arms bare and

covered with blood, uttering horrible shouts. Her carriage remained in

the square. The crowd wished to pillage it: it was defended by Santerre.

He respected the daughter of Necker, whose exertions to victual Paris

during the scarcity he had witnessed; and besides he made this task his

pretext for not doing his duty in protecting the prisoners. He boasted

to Madame de Staël of the service he rendered her; but she could not

help reminding him of the manner in which he ought to have been

employed. Manuel exclaimed, as he entered, "Ah! how glad I am I set your

two friends at liberty yesterday!" When night came on he conveyed her

home in his carriage. The lamps were not lighted in the streets, but men

passed with torches, whose flare occasioned more terror than darkness

itself. The following day she was allowed to depart with her maid only,

and a gendarme to conduct her as far as the frontier, so to make sure

that she should take with her none of the unfortunate outlaws doomed to

death. Tallien conducted her to the barrier. After some difficulties it

was passed. "Leaving the capital," she writes, "the tempestuous waves

grew calmer, and the mountains of Jura gave no token of the frightful

tumults of which Paris was the theatre." And there she found calm refuge

beneath her father's roof. Such were the scenes that awaited the early

womanhood of madame de Staël:--the sight of every cruel and horrible

passion in action in others,--pity, fear, and generous self-devotion

excited to their height in her own heart,--harrowing grief, when those

whom she loved were butchered,--throbs of transport, when she felt that

she had secured their safety. Had she been of a concentrated

disposition, such scenes and emotions must have given sublimity to her

character. As it was, it confirmed the active generosity and warm

benevolence of her disposition; it gave animation to her expression of

every sad and heart-moving feeling; while to her credit it must be said,

that, even in the midst of such iniquitous and cruel scenes, she

gathered no misanthropy, no gall, no hatred, and no revenge.

She paid at this period a short visit to England, and then returning to

Geneva, found personal safety and peace with her parents at Coppet; but

the political events passing in France, and the horrors of the reign of

terror, spread darkness and dismay even to Switzerland. Her father

published a pamphlet, the object of which was to save Louis XVI.; and

she wrote an eloquent appeal in favour of Marie Antoinette. Soon even

the impression made by the fate of these illustrious victims was almost

lost in that of the death of added thousands immolated by Robespierre.

Madame de Staël by turns feared for the lives and deplored the death of

beloved friends, who day after day died under the axe of the guillotine.

She concealed in her house many of the friends of liberty outlawed by

the revolutionary tribunal. They assumed Swedish names, under the

sanction of M. de Staël. Scaffolds were erected for them on the

frontier by their countrymen, as enemies of freedom; foreign nations

held them in detestation, as accomplices of the butchers of Paris; but

Necker and his daughter, with sounder views and more humane hearts,

befriended and saved virtue, whatever might be the opinions which it

assumed as the guise in which to manifest its spirit to the world. "One

of the reflections that struck us most," madame de Staël writes, "in

our long walks on the shores of the lake of Geneva, was the contrast of

the beautiful nature by which we were surrounded with the desolation of

mankind." In these walks she conversed with her father: his benevolence;

the pain he expressed at the idea of being hated by the French, to serve

whom he had sacrificed so much; the interchange of intimate and virtuous

thought, filled her heart with still more ardent affection towards him,

and made him, in her eyes, the greatest as well as the best of men.

[Sidenote: 1794.

Ætat.

28.]

It was at this time of comparative retirement that she wrote

"Reflections on the Peace," which Fox quoted as full of sound political

views and just argument.

This period was checkered by the illness, and finally the death, of

madame Necker. She died of a lingering nervous disorder. Her husband was

unwearied in his attentions and watchful tenderness, and madame de

Staël shared his fatigues, and sympathised with and consoled him in his

grief. The warmer kindness testified by her father caused her to prefer

him; and madame Necker herself, looking on her daughter as a rival in

her husband's affections, had repelled her. But death obliterated these

passions, and madame de Staël acknowledged her mother's talents and

virtues; she lamented her death, and respected her memory.

It might be thought that madame de Staël, escaped from the sanguinary

scenes of the reign of terror, would have been averse to returning to

that Paris which had been the theatre of such harrowing tragedies. Far

from it. Accustomed to the society of the French, the pedantic, precise,

and presumptuous tone of the Genevese was particularly disagreeable to

her. While considering herself a French woman, she was eager to mix in

the busy scenes that followed the death of Robespierre--to be of use to

her friends, and even to influence the choice of a system of government

which was to be established in France. She had some remorse in quitting

her father; but he encouraged her to go. He felt for her struggle

between her dislike to leaving him and her tastes, her friends, her

hopes of glory, which called her to France; and, with the truest

feelings of sympathy, persuaded her to seek her own happiness, promising

to find his in her letters from the scene of action.

[Sidenote: 1795.

Ætat.

29.]

M. de Staël being sent by the king of Sweden as minister to Paris, she

repaired thither. Her arrival formed an epoch in society. She threw open

her drawing-rooms, and all foreigners of distinction, ambassadors, and

literary men were charmed to meet in them. It attracted universal

attention, and became the signal of the revival of refinement in the

capital. Her chief exertions tended to getting the names of various

friends erased from the list of emigrants, which, while party spirit ran

so high, and the name of monarch and Bourbon was still held in

detestation and terror, was matter at once of difficulty and odium.

Legendre, a man who had figured during the reign of terror, denounced

her in the tribune of the convention, while the newspapers complained of

the influence exercised by women in their _salons dorés_, as they were

vulgarly called, and by the society that gathered there. She succeeded

in benefiting several of her friends, and this happiness counterbalanced

the attacks made against her.

[Sidenote: 1797.

Ætat.

31.]

During the whole of the reign of the directory, the influence of madame

de Staël was great. The expectation of a civil war became more imminent

as the royalists rested their hopes on the armies of la Vendée, and the

victories of the republican troops on the eastern frontiers, supporting

the new state of things, gave energy to the men in power. Moderate and

enlightened lovers of freedom desired to reconcile the two parties, and

prevent a struggle. Madame de Staël attempted to effect this

reconciliation. She had no desire for the return of the Bourbons; for

such a change could only have been operated through the subjugation of

France by foreign troops, a circumstance to be looked upon as the lowest

fall in its political greatness. She was the centre of a brilliant

society, which, while it regarded the chiefs of the republic as vulgar,

was attached to a form of government full of promise of distinction and

power to able and daring men. In France the influence of women is one of

the engines used by the other sex for their advancement. Madame de

Staël had already placed one of her friends in an elevated post; she

exerted herself for others. She was generous and active. No gall--no bad

feelings of hatred, or love of mischief, mingled in her desire to be

influential. But passionately loving glory, and eager to take a part in

the busier scenes of life, she made her house the rendezvous of all

parties, and sought her own elevation in trying to reconcile them all,

and to diffuse abroad a spirit of moderation and mutual toleration, and

was often exposed to the danger of imprisonment and exile from the

preponderance of the more popular party. Her mind was active, her

imagination lively; but she was without prudence. Her father said of

her, that she was like the savages, who sell their cabin in the morning

and find themselves without shelter at night. Ardent but without

forethought, ambitious of distinction without selfishness, she looked on

danger as a crown of laurel, and, as far as she was personally

concerned, cared more for the excitement of the combat than the repose

of success. Thus, though she failed in her attempts to reconcile

contending factions, she felt neither despondency nor sorrow. Meanwhile,

the struggle of parties--the violence of each occasioning the weakness

of all--became the stepping-stone to the man who, raising himself by the

sword, and establishing and increasing his power by the same method,

fell, when his weapon failed to be able to deal with all the enemies

from the extremities of the earth whom he challenged to the contest.

Bonaparte and madame de Staël were neither impressed favourably by the

other when first they met. He saw in her a factitious but a not the less

powerful influence with which he could only cope by trampling it in the

dust; and she found in him a man unimpressible by words or sentiments,

aiming at one goal, and wholly indifferent to the thousands to be mowed

down or the one tortured by the methods he used for his success. In

their encounter she felt her existence strike against a rock which,

while it wrecked whole fleets, did not disdain to swamp a skiff which

had every right to expect shelter beneath its shadow. When, after the

treaty of Campo-Formio, Bonaparte arrived in Paris, he and madame de

Staël often met in society. She declared that a feeling of fear always

overcame her in his presence. She was struck by his superiority, but

repelled by a certain coldness that remained as a wall between them.

When, for the sake of amassing funds for his expedition to Egypt,

Bonaparte proposed the invasion of Switzerland to the directory, madame

de Staël regarded the cause of the independence of that country as so

sacred, that she sought a conference with the general for the purpose of

turning him from his design. Nothing can better show the difference of

French manners from ours than this circumstance; and Bonaparte, a child

of the army, little conversant with the spirit of French society,

regarded a woman's interference on such a subject as impertinent and out

of character with her sex; but, although he was not to be moved by her,

such was her acknowledged influence that he did not disdain to discuss

the question with her with an appearance of candour, till, having

pronounced certain words which he considered sufficient to refute her

arguments, declaring that men must have political rights, and advancing

the falsehood that the Swiss would have more as a portion of France than

as an independent insignificant state, he turned the conversation, and

talked of his love of retirement,--of the country and the fine

arts,--expressing himself as sharing many of the lady's own tastes.

Madame de Staël felt the influence of his power of pleasing, but was

mortified to be treated like a mere woman. He, on the other hand,

perceiving that she had talents sufficient to persuade and influence

men, and that she was likely to exert this power against himself,

conceived a dislike, which he afterwards showed in a series of

persecutions.

[Sidenote: 1798.

Ætat.

32.]

The invasion of Switzerland being resolved on, madame de Staël quitted

Paris to rejoin her father at Coppet. His name was still on the list of

emigrants, which, as he was a Genevese, was altogether unjust. His

daughter implored him not to risk the danger of being condemned to death

when the country he inhabited should be occupied by a French army; but

he refused to stir: he would not in his old age wander over the earth,

nor would he quit the neighbourhood of the tomb of his wife, which had

been erected under her own directions, with the fervent hope that her

husband's remains would repose near hers. When the day came, fixed for

the violation of the Swiss territory by the French armies, Necker and

his daughter, with her infant children, remained alone at Coppet. Their

servants assembled in the avenue to see the passage of the troops, while

they themselves stood in a balcony which commanded the high road. It was

mid winter, but the weather was clear: the alps were reflected in the

lake at their feet, while the sound of military music alone broke the

silence of the scene. Madame de Staël's heart beat with fear for her

father's sake. Her vivid imagination painted, her impetuous heart

anticipated, a thousand horrors which transported her with terror. She

perceived an officer quit a troop on its way, and direct his steps

towards the château,--it was Suchet. He came charged by the directory

to offer a safeguard to her father. Thus re-assured with regard to the

dearest interest of her life, she began to feel fresh anguish for the

Swiss, attacked thus against the law of nations. She heard at Coppet the

cannon of the battle between the Bernese and French;--her heart, for the

first time, was against the latter. As soon as the triumph of France

united Geneva to its own territory, it became necessary that Necker's

name should be erased from the list of emigrants. Madame de Staël

visited Paris, and presented a memorial from her father to the

directory. His request was accorded instantly and unanimously; and his

daughter, so much more easily moved to kindly than angry emotions, felt

grateful for this act of simple justice. She endeavoured also to treat

with the French government for the payment of the two millions of francs

which Necker had deposited in the public treasury. The directory

acknowledged the debt, and were ready to defray it from the property of

the church. Necker refused so to be repaid, from the noble motive of not

choosing to mingle his worldly interests in the great question of the

revolution, and so to forfeit the reputation for impartiality by which

he laid store.

[Sidenote: 1799.

Ætat.

33.]

Madame de Staël witnessed, in Paris, the 18th Brumaire, when Bonaparte

overthrew the power of the directory and established his own supremacy.

Her feelings were much divided: if the jacobins triumphed, sanguinary

scenes might be renewed; but she anticipated with prophetic grief the

result of Bonaparte's success. As she always lived in a numerous circle,

and openly discussed her opinions, the first consul soon heard of the

dissatisfaction that she expressed with regard to his rising power.

Joseph Bonaparte, to whom she was partial, came to her and said, "My

brother complains of you. 'Why,' he said yesterday, 'does not madame de

Staël attach herself to my government? What does she want? The payment

of her father's deposit? I will order it to be made. To remain in Paris?

I will permit it. In short, what does she want?'" "The question," she

replied, "is not what I want, but what I think."

A tribunate made a portion of the constitution instituted in the first

instance by Bonaparte. The tribunes were to have the right to speak. The

first consul was aware that he must please the French at first by a

shadow of freedom; but a few men were found among the tribunes who

wished to turn the shadow into substance, and then Bonaparte put forth

his power, and claimed the lion's share. Benjamin Constant, on the eve

of attacking a measure proposed by the first consul, consulted madame de

Staël. She encouraged him, through noble and conscientious motives,

while she felt in her heart the injury that might redound to herself.

The possibility of being forced to quit Paris filled her with alarm and

wretchedness: her love for its society, her horror of retirement, had

been implanted, as we have seen, in her breast from her earliest

infancy; her brilliant powers of conversation fostered the taste, and

she well knew also that Bonaparte was aware of her weakness, and would

wound her through it. "He joined," she writes, "to the power by which he

could threaten, and the wealth by which he could entice, the

dispensation of ennui, which is held in terror by the French." Her

drawing-room on this occasion was crowded by men ready to give in their

adherence to the new government. Benjamin Constant drew near, and said,

"your room is filled with persons whose society is pleasing to you: if I

speak, to-morrow it will be a desert. Think of this." "One must follow

one's conviction," she replied. In narrating this anecdote, she frankly

adds that she spoke on the impulse of the moment; but that, if she could

then have foreseen the sufferings in store, she should not have had

strength to refuse the offer Constant made to remain silent. He proved a

true prophet. On the following day she received multiplied excuses for a

party she gave. As they came she felt disturbed, and she began to find

fault with her courage of the preceding day. To add to her inquietude,

the minister of police, Fouché, sent for her to say, that the first

consul suspected that she had excited her friends to speak against him.

She replied that Constant was a man of too superior talents to need the

interference of a woman in his political conduct. The result was that

Fouché advised her to go into the country for a few days, saying that

all would be well on her return. Such is the account that she gives of

the commencement of Bonaparte's persecution. Other writers vary. The

flatterers of Napoleon insinuate that she wished to gain an interest in

his heart. Napoleon himself, when at St. Helena, says, that she became

his enemy because he would not become her pupil. It were, perhaps, a

fairer statement to assert, that he oppressed her because she refused to

be his tool. At the same time it must be remembered, in exculpation of

Bonaparte's arbitrary acts with regard to her, that he was then making

difficult way up the slippery path of power; that she opposed his

progress not only by epigrams and repartees, but by political intrigues.

It was necessary to reduce her to silence and inaction. But this does

not excuse his after persecution, which was wanton and unmanly.

Soon after, when Bonaparte passed through Switzerland on his way to

Italy, having expressed a wish to see Necker, the latter waited on him,

and spent two hours in conversation. The fallen and aged minister was

gratified by this mark of interest on the part of the first consul, and

pleased with his conversation. He did not mention, as a meaner minded

man would have done, the debt owed him by the French government; but he

alluded to his daughter's position, and spoke of her as one whose name

and talents would adorn the society of the capital. The first consul

replied with courtesy; and the result was that she was hereafter to be

permitted to reside in Paris.

Bonaparte felt that his present power needed the prop of opinion.

Perhaps he hoped to gain the daughter by his civility and apparent

respect for the father. But neither were to be bent from their

convictions. This became apparent when, towards the end of the same

year, she published her work on literature. Her talents had now reached

their full development, and this book is one of the most masterly that

has emanated from her pen. It is full of liberal opinions; it restored

her to popularity; her salons again became thronged. Her society was

chiefly composed of foreigners and the _corps diplomatique._ Fouché

granted various requests made by her with regard to emigrants, and she

had thus the pleasure of being useful to, and moreover became popular

among, a class distinguished for urbane manners and the various charms

that attend refinement. But her book added to the irritation nourished

against her by the first consul. He wished the world to be filled with

his name; and, in this point of view, the influence possessed by

literary persons was of value in his eyes. Madame de Staël had not

mentioned him, nor alluded to his achievements, in her work; and he

looked on the omission as a wilful and galling insult. She never

appeared at his court; he said of her that every one left her house less

attached to him than when they went in; the rebel tribunes were among

her friends; and all tended to nourish his discontent. One day she was

asked to dinner by general Berthier, in company with Bonaparte. As she

heard that he often expressed himself sarcastically with regard to her,

she conjectured that he might address her with some of those rude

speeches which were so much feared by the courtiers; and, afraid of

losing her presence of mind, she went prepared with various studied

repartees. But he scarcely spoke to her, and she had the comfort of

believing that he feared to sting a dangerous enemy.

She spent her summers at Coppet with her father. In 1799, M. de Staël

had been recalled to Sweden. His extravagance had occasioned a

separation from his wife, who feared that the fortunes of her children

might be injured.

[Sidenote: 1802.

Ætat.

36.]

A reconciliation was, however, set on foot, and it was agreed that the

whole family should take up their residence at Coppet. On their way

thither M. de Staël fell ill and died, his wife attending on his last

moments.

Her novel of "Delphine" appeared about this time. It was attacked by the

French critics as immoral. Madame de Staël was indignant. "They dared

blame a book approved by Necker!" she exclaims. "Delphine" affords

scope, however, for such criticism. She allows that it displays too

eager a desire for happiness, the result of young and ardent feelings;

but, worse than this, it inculcates no spirit of courage under disaster.

Balwer speaks of "fortitude, the virtue of the ancients, and

resignation, the duty of Christians," as the chief aim of a philosophic

or pious mind: madame de Staël--and in this she is the founder of the

Byronic school--made the chief feeling of her work impatience of life

under sorrow, suicide in despair. This at once blights existence. To

feel that adversity and prosperity are both lessons to teach us a higher

wisdom, the fruition of which we hope hereafter to inherit, and which at

the same time is the ornament and crown of good men during life, ought

to be the aim of every writer. Sorrow is rife with desperation; we fly

to the pages of the sage to learn to bear; and a writer fails in his

duty when he presents poison instead Of medicine. With all this,

"Delphine" is a beautiful book. The character of the heroine is full of

charm: the hero is delineated with a truth, a fervour, and a reality,

that reaches home. The characters of madame de Valmont and her daughter

are finely portrayed. "Delphine," it was said, was an ideal of the

authoress herself; and the false friend was drawn from Talleyrand. "They

tell me," he said to her, "that you have put us both in your novel in

the character of women." Madame de Staël could well bear this sarcasm:

she was truly feminine; her very faults belonged to her sex.

Her father published a book at this time which greatly irritated

Bonaparte, and added to his dislike of the daughter. In his "Last View

of Politics and Finance" Necker unveiled the progress which the first

consul of the republic was making towards a throne. This untimely

disclosure of his secret ways injured Bonaparte: he spoke bitterly of

Necker, and said of madame de Staël that she should not visit Paris

again, since she conveyed such false impressions to her father.

Love for this father was the master passion of madame de Staël's life.

She looked on him as the wisest and best of men; but, more than this,

his kindness and sympathy gifted him with something angelic in her eyes.

He was her dearest friend--the prop of her fortunes; her adviser, her

shelter, her teacher, her approver--the seal of her prosperity and her

glory. He was an old man, and this imparted unspeakable tenderness to

her attachment. Her very love of Paris, and her consequent absences from

him, added force to her feelings. While away she gathered anecdotes and

knowledge for his amusement. Their correspondence was regular and full.

It contained a thousand narrations and sallies, observations on events

and persons full of piquancy, a gaiety adopted for the purpose of

diverting him; and over all was spread a tone of tenderness and

reverence, which accompanied the very idea of her father. When she

returned to him, she checked a little the demonstrations of her delight,

but it overflowed in her conversation. Things, men, and politics, the

effect she had herself produced, were all related with an effusion of

joy, accompanied by caresses, by tears of gladness, and laughter full of

love. Necker listened with proud delight. He loved her fondly. Her very

faults, her want of forethought, which made his cares necessary; her

uncertainty and doubts with regard to all the minor affairs of life,

which she joyfully submitted to his direction; her exuberant yet

uncertain spirits; her imagination that often plunged her in gloom, were

so many ties to unite father and daughter in bonds of the fondest

affection.

Yet she could not contentedly remain with him long. She disliked

Genevese society; she was wrapt up in that of Paris. Her parents had

planted the seeds of this love of display and eager desire for the

arena, where wit and all that is the salt of life is to be met in

perfection, and it was but fair that her father should reap the fruits

of the education he had bestowed. He felt for her, and was deeply

grieved that his publication had augmented the annoyances of her

position.

[Sidenote: 1803.

Ætat.

37.]

When the peace of Amiens was broken, and Bonaparte and all France were

occupied by the meditated descent on England, she hoped to be forgotten.

She drew near Paris, and established herself at the distance of thirty

miles. The first consul was told that the road to her retreat was

crowded by people paying her visits. This was not true, but it alarmed

his jealousy; she heard that she should receive an order to depart.

Hoping to escape by leaving her home, she went from house to house of

her friends, but in vain. She was at that of madame Recamier when she

received the fatal order to leave France in twenty-four hours. She would

not at once yield; she asked for day after day of reprieve. Junot and

Joseph Bonaparte interceded with the first consul for her; she pleaded

as for life; but the petty resentment of the great man could not be

mollified. He has done worse deeds during his reign, but take the worst

said of madame de Staël, by his chief flatterers, and still no revenge

could be meaner, no act of tyranny more flagrant, than that which exiled

from his capital, and the country he ruled over, a woman, whatever

offence she had committed against him, who promised silence; who asked

but for the society of a few friends; whose crime was that she would not

celebrate the liberticide in her writings.

Forced to go, she could not persuade herself to appear disgraced and

driven away among the Genevese. She hoped, and her father hoped for her,

that new scenes, and the welcome afforded her among strangers, would

blunt the blow she had received, and revive her spirits. She determined

to visit Germany, with the intention of seeing its great writers,

studying their productions, and of afterwards presenting the French with

an account of the, to them, sealed book of German literature. Joseph

Bonaparte gave her letters of introduction for Berlin, and she set out.

Benjamin Constant accompanied her; yet this very kindness was the source

of pain, as he also was partial to a residence in Paris. "Every step of

the horses," she writes, "was a pang; and, when the postilions boasted

that they had driven fast, I could not help smiling at the sad service

they did me. I travelled forty leagues before I recovered possession of

myself. At length we stopt at Chalons, and Benjamin Constant rousing him

self, through his wonderful powers of conversation, lightened, at least

for a few moments, the burden that weighed me down."

Constant continued to accompany her. She was well received at Weimar and

Berlin. She was at Berlin at the time of the assassination of the duke

d'Enghien, and shared the horror that this unnecessary act of cruelty

excited. This circumstance added to her detestation of Napoleon.

Meanwhile she greatly enjoyed the kindness she found, and the vast field

of knowledge opened before her.

[Sidenote: 1804.

Ætat.

38.]

A fatal event put an end to her pleasure. She received tidings of the

dangerous illness of her father--the intelligence of his death quickly

followed. She left Germany. She returned to Coppet overwhelmed with

grief. Generally speaking, there is exaggeration and traces of false

sentiment in her writings. Her best work for style and simplicity of

narration is her "Dix Années d'Exil;" and the best portion of this book

describes her feelings during her journey from Weimar to Coppet. All who

have suffered the worst of sorrows--the death of one dearly loved--will

find the echo of their inmost thoughts in that passage.

The death of Necker changed the course of her existence, as far as

internal feelings operate on the exterior of life. Her father had looked

on her as incorrigibly thoughtless in all worldly and pecuniary

concerns; but she was no longer in the heyday of youth; experience

taught her prudence; and, being thrown entirely on herself, her

conscience bade her preserve the fortunes of her children. She was a

good mother. Having obeyed and reverenced her father--she exacted the

same towards herself from her offspring; nor did she ever regard them

with the exuberant trembling tenderness she had lavished on her beloved

parent. But was kind--ever ready to serve them, and eager for their

well-being. Her notions on education were sensible and just: she did not

give trust to extraordinary systems; she contented herself by inspiring

them with piety and generous sentiments; and was perfectly open and true

in her conduct. They sincerely loved, while they a little feared her.

The society of her children and her friends could not console her for

the loss of her father and exile from the country she loved. Her first

occupation was to publish the writings of Necker, accompanied by a

biographical memoir, in which she pours forth, with touching

earnestness, all the ardour of her filial affection. Her health sunk

beneath her sorrow.

[Sidenote: 1805.

Ætat.

39.]

To revive her spirits and change the scene she visited Italy. There, as

everywhere, her astonishing powers of conversation gathered an admiring

audience round her. She enjoyed, with all the warmth of her disposition,

the delights afforded by that enchanting country; and, impelled to

express on paper the overflowing of her thoughts, she embodied her

enthusiasm, her pleasure, and the knowledge she gained, in her novel of

"Corinne." There is a charm in that work that stamps it as coming from

the hand of genius. The personages live, breathe, and speak before you.

We hope or fear for, admire or censure them, as if they were our

friends. She speaks of love with heartfelt knowledge of the mighty

powers of passion, and of all those delicate, so to speak, fibres and

evanescent tints that foster and adorn it. The faults of such a book are

a very secondary consideration. The Italians will not allow that it is

by any means a true representation of society in their country; and any

one who has lived there can perceive that she had but a superficial

knowledge of Italy and the Italians; still she gives a true picture of

the surface such as she saw it. Her account of Corinne's life in England

is admirable. The English, with all their pride, are less vain than the

Italians, and readily acknowledge their faults. Every English person is

at once astonished and delighted with the wonderful truth of her sketch

of county society in England. In this novel, as in "Delphine," the

heroine dies broken-hearted. Her lover proving false, she lives

miserably a few years, and then closes her eyes on a world grown dark

and solitary. Madame de Staël was naturally led to portray death as the

result of sorrow; for when we are miserable, we are apt to dwell on such

as the dearest relief; yet we do not die. The authoress also might wish

to impress on men an idea of the misery which their falsehood produces.

That is a story as ancient as Dido, and told by Virgil more impressively

and beautifully than by any other writer. For the dignity of womanhood,

it were better to teach how one, as highly gifted as Corinne, could find

resignation or fortitude enough to endure a too common lot, and rise

wiser and better from the trial.

Madame de Staël was exiled to forty leagues from Paris; her love of

France caused her to approach so near to its capital. She established

herself first at Auxerre and afterwards at Rouen. Here she terminated

and brought out "Corinne." She exercised the utmost caution in her

conduct, saw but few friends, and observed that silence with regard to

politics which Napoleon rigorously exacted throughout his empire.

Fouché, who had no love of wanton mischief, allowed her to settle

herself within twelve leagues of Paris. But the publication of her novel

put an end to this indulgence, and redoubled the oppression in force

against her. She continued to refuse to advert to Napoleon's victories

and Napoleon's power; and the great man, than whom no hero was ever less

a hero in all magnanimous sentiments, ordered her to quit the country.

She returned to Coppet half broken-hearted.

[Sidenote: 1807.

Ætat.

41.]

The visits she received from her friends and illustrious foreigners

somewhat relieved the tedium of her life. She was occupied by her work

on Germany, and visited Vienna to gather additional materials for it. On

her return, she devoted two years to its completion. She tried to make

an existence for herself at Coppet, but did not succeed. Alas! for her.

Goldsmith's lines on French society are but too applicable to her state

of mind:--

"For praise too warmly loved, or dearly sought,

Enfeebles all internal strength of thought;

And the weak soul, within itself unblest,

Leans for all pleasure on another's breast."

She was, with all her vivacity, naturally melancholy. The _society of

nature_, as she termed it, nursed her darkest reveries, and she turned

from her own thoughts as from a spring of bitterness. As existence

became stagnant, _ennui_ generated a thousand imaginary monsters of

mind; she felt lost and miserable. Death and solitude were, in her mind,

closely allied. Take away the animation of conversation; the

intercommunication of ideas among the many; the struggle, the applause,

the stirring interest in events; the busy crowd that gave variety to

every impression; and the rest of life was, in her eyes, a fearful vigil

near the grave. It is beautifully said, that God tempers the wind to the

shorn lamb. Sometimes, however, the exact contrary has place, and our

weak and sore points are sought out to be roughly handled. Thus madame

de Staël, brought up to act a foremost part on the brilliant theatre of

the civilised world, was cast back on herself, and found there only

discontent and misery. To us sober English, indeed, her life at Coppet

seems busy enough. She assembled all travellers about her; her domestic

circle was large; she acted plays; she declaimed; but it would not do:

Paris was interdicted, and she was cut off from happiness.

[Sidenote: 1810.

Ætat.

44.]

Having finished her "Germany," she desired to overlook its progress

through the press at the permitted distance of forty leagues from Paris.

She established herself near Blois, in the old château of

Chammont-sur-Loire, erst inhabited by cardinal d'Amboise, Diane de

Poitiers, Catherine de Medicis, and Nostradamus. A few friends gathering

round her, she enjoyed the amusements and occupations she shared with

them. Madame Recamier was chief among them, and very dear to her. Her

plan was, as soon as her book was printed, to reach England by America,

that being the only path left open to our island by Napoleon. She had

submitted her work to the censor, and, having made all the alterations

exacted, she felt herself safe. But the storm gathered, and broke

unexpectedly. She had not praised Napoleon; she had not mentioned the

success of the French armies in Germany; she had tried even to enlarge

the sphere of French literature, by introducing a knowledge of and taste

for the German--an attempt anti-national in the emperor's eyes. He did

not hesitate to condemn such a work. The duke de Rovigo, minister of

police, sent to seize on the edition, to demand the manuscript, and to

order her to quit France in three days. She was proud of her book, and

had every right to be so; and she gladly anticipated the applause and

increased reputation that would follow it. The loss of this could be

borne, but the renewed sentence of exile struck her to the heart. She

was forced to obey. Her first idea was to embark for America; but her

purpose in so doing was to get on board an English ship, and reach

England. Her plans were disturbed by an intimation from Savary that she

must embark only at the ports of France furthest from her desired goal.

The minister wrote to her with flippancy, that her book was not French,

and that her exile was the consequence of the course she had followed

for years. The air of France evidently disagreed with her; but the

French were not reduced to seek for models in the countries which she

admired. Savary was still more frank when speaking on the subject. He

asked why she had made no mention of the emperor or his armies? He was

told that such allusions were out of place in a book that treated solely

of literature. "Do you think," he replied, "that we have carried on a

war in Germany for eighteen years for so well-known an author to omit

all mention of us? The book shall be destroyed, and we should do well to

send the writer to Vincennes."

Her plans disturbed, hope dead within her, she returned to Coppet,

almost resigned to pass her life in the château; but the hour had

passed away when she was allowed to enjoy the tribute of visits from

foreigners of distinction, and to gather round her such friends as she

best loved. A series of the most tormenting and cruel persecutions were

instituted, that acting on an imagination easily disquieted, and on a

temperament that needed the atmosphere of joy to feel at ease, drove her

into a state of intense and uninterrupted suffering. She gave up all

idea, which must always be agreeable to an author, of publishing; she

scarcely dared write. All her acquaintance as well as friends were

looked on with unfavourable eyes. She could not venture to ask a guest

to dinner; she was so afraid of compromising the whole family of any one

who came near her. The prefect of Geneva was changed as being too

favourably disposed. The new magistrate urged her to eulogise Napoleon

as the sure means of putting an end to all her annoyances: would she

only celebrate the birth of the king of Rome? She replied that she did

not know how to do so: she could only express her hopes that he would

have a good nurse. The prefect took his leave, and never came near her

again. Her children were forbidden to enter France. She went to Aix, in

Savoy, for the benefit of the health of her youngest son; she was

ordered to return; she was advised never to go further than two leagues

from Coppet. William Schlegel, whom she had engaged to live with her to

assist in the education of her children, was ordered to quit her

château. He had published a work, in which he showed a preference to

the Phædra of Euripides over that of Racine; he was judged

anti-Gallican; and she was told that his society was injurious to her. A

thousand terrors seized her. Confined within narrow precincts, deprived

of her friends, she began to fear a prison, where she would have been

left to perish, miserable and forgotten. She resolved to escape--it was

difficult to choose a route. She was told that she would be arrested on

her way through any country under the dominion of the French. She passed

her life, she says, in studying a map of Europe, to find how she could

escape beyond the wide-spread poison tree of Napoleon's power. She

traced a route through the Tyrol on her way to Russia and Sweden, and

thence to England. A thousand difficulties presented themselves for the

execution of this plan, but it was her best.

"There is physical pleasure," she writes, "in resisting unjust power;"

the act of resistance was animating, but when the hour of defeat came

all was stagnant, fearful, and oppressive. The worst blow dealt her was

when she found that any friend who visited her was involved in the same

oppression. An old friend, M. de Montmorency, visited Coppet; the

delight of seeing him made her blind to danger. She made a tour through

Switzerland with him in spite of the advice given her not to go further

than two leagues from Coppet. They afterwards returned to her château,

where M. de Montmorency speedily received an order of exile. This news

plunged her in agony--that her friends should be wounded through her was

worse than her own misfortunes. While still suffering from this

disaster, she received a letter from madame Recamier, saying that she

was on her road to Aix, in Savoy, and announcing her intention of

visiting Coppet in her way. Madame de Staël implored her not to come;

but her generous friend could not pass so near without spending a few

hours with her;--a few hours only, but they sufficed to call down

banishment on her head: henceforth she was driven from her home and

friends, and forced to take up her residence at Lyons in solitude and

exile. All this was done to drive her to dishonour herself by praising

him whose tyranny made him every day more odious, as the persecutor of

herself and the oppressor of France. The prefect of Geneva was ordered

to annul her, and he took pains to impress every one with the dangers

that would accrue from any intercourse with her. He waylaid every

stranger, and turned them aside from the path to her house; her

correspondents in Paris were exiled; she felt that she ought to refrain

from seeing any one. By a natural struggle of feeling she was disquieted

when her friends generously sought, and still more miserable when they

selfishly abandoned her.

She never saw the day return, she says, that she did not repine at being

obliged to live to its end. She was married again at this time. This

event, which was kept secret till after her death, is one of the most

singular of her history.

In the year 1810 there came to Geneva a young Spaniard of the name of

Rocca. He was an officer in the French army, and had been wounded

dangerously in Spain. He inspired great interest through the reputation

he enjoyed for brilliant courage and for talent. He was young and very

handsome; but his wounds had reduced him to a state of great weakness

and suffering; and the contrast was striking and interesting between his

youth and noble physiognomy, and his extreme pallor and attenuated

figure. He heard madame de Staël talk, and was seized with enthusiastic

admiration. Necker said of his daughter that her conversation imparted

an idea of the beautiful; and thus, though twenty years older than

himself, and, except for her eyes, with no beauty of face, the young

Rocca was attracted by that of her mind, and said, "I shall love her so

much that at last she will marry me." These words were soon fulfilled.

But she refused to acknowledge a marriage which, from disparity of age,

might have excited ridicule; and in all things of that sort madame de

Staël was singularly timid. She was averse also to change her name.

"Mon nom est à l'Europe," she replied to Rocca, when they were in

England, and he jestingly asked her to marry him. She does not in her

narratives advert to this marriage; but the fear must have haunted her

that Napoleon would exile Rocca from Coppet; while, on the other hand,

she found it difficult to leave an infant child, the offspring of their

union, uncertain when again she could rejoin it.

These terrors and doubts threw her into a nervous state of the most

painful kind. Now, she thought it wrong and foolish to leave her house,

where she enjoyed every bodily comfort and the society of her

children,--again, the fear of prison, the terror of who next among her

friends would be the tyrant's victim, distracted her. At length she

resolved to depart, and ultimately to reach England; whether by Russia

and Sweden, or Greece and Constantinople, was to be decided by

circumstances that might occur during her progress.

Her account of her journey is full of interest. An abridgment can give

little idea of its difficulties,--the petty yet stinging annoyances by

which she was beset,--the delays, the terror, the disappointments. Now

she feared for her daughter's health,--and then still more for the

safety of M. Rocca. The order for his arrest as a French officer had

been forwarded through Germany. It is true he had sent in his

resignation, his wounds preventing him from active service; but, if he

had been taken, there is no doubt that he would have been treated with

the utmost rigour. They were often obliged to separate, and he rejoined

her once or twice in moments full of peril to himself. She traversed

Germany and Poland in this way; and even in Russia she was not sure of

escape from Napoleon. His armies had entered that vast empire, and were

close behind her.

It was matter of joy to her when at last, after passing through Moscow,

she arrived at St. Petersburg, to find the emperor Alexander full of

resolution and ardour to resist the despot. He treated her with great

distinction; and she proceeded on her way to her old friend Bernadotte,

at that time crown prince of Sweden. She remained eight months at

Stockholm. She had begun a portion of her "Dix Années d'Exil" at

Coppet, it being copied as fast as written by her friends, feigned

English names and old dates being substituted for the real; since under

Napoleon's police regulations it was not safe to preserve a page of

manuscript in which he was blamed.

From Sweden she passed over to England, where she occupied herself in

publishing her "Germany." She was courted as a _lion_ in English

fashionable society; and, though her style of life and conversation were

very opposite to our manners, still she impressed every one with high

ideas of her talents and genius. The Whig party were a little surprised

at her tone in politics. They were not yet accustomed to regard Napoleon

as the tyrant and oppressor, and they thought that madame de Staël had

changed her principles when she warmly advocated war against the

emperor. She was intimate with all the English of distinction. Her

compliments seemed a little _outré_ to us, and she made a few mistakes

that excited smiles; still she was liked. Lord Byron was among her

favourites,--his genius possessed fascination for her. There was a

notion at one time that he would marry her daughter, whom he admired;

but Albertine was reserved for a better fate.

All her patriotism as a Frenchwoman was painfully roused when the allies

entered France; still she hailed the overthrow of Napoleon, and the

restoration of the Bourbons, with delight, hoping that the latter would

deserve well of their country. She was liked by Louis XVIII., who repaid

her the two millions which Necker had lent the state. The return of

Napoleon from Elba filled her with terror, and she instantly left Paris

for Coppet. He, who now appeared with a professed attachment to

constitutional liberty, invited her to return and assist him in

modelling a constitution. She replied, "He did without me or a

constitution for twelve years, and has no liking for either of us." The

occupation of France by the allies filled her with grief; that her

"belle France" should be held in these degrading chains seemed

desecration, and she retreated to Coppet not to witness the humiliating

spectacle.

[Sidenote: 1816.

Ætat.

50.]

She was there when lord Byron resided at Diodati in 1816. He visited

her, and she gave him a good deal of advice to which he listened, and

was induced to make an attempt to be reconciled to his wife. When she

preached lessons of worldly wisdom, he quoted the motto to

"Delphine"--"Un homme doit savoir braver l'opinion, une femme s'y

soummettre." But she replied that she feared that both sexes would reap

evil only from resistance.

The marriage of her daughter to the duke de Broglie, and the admirable

character of this lady, formed the chief happiness of her latter life.

Her children were all dutiful and affectionate. Her chief sorrow

resulted from the ill health of M. Rocca, who tottered on the brink of

the grave. He deserved the affection he inspired. His tenderness towards

her was extreme, and his admiration never waned. His chivalrous

sentiments, his wit, and his poetic imagination, varied and filled her

life. His ill state of health, while it disquieted her, yet annihilated

their difference of age. At one time she visited Pisa, that he might be

benefited by a milder climate. He was there at the point of death: she

compared herself to marshal Ney, who was then expecting at each moment

to receive his sentence. Endowed by an imagination which never blunted

any sorrow, but which exaggerated all, she said afterwards that she had

composed a book, with the title, "The only Misfortune of Life, the Loss

of a Person beloved."

Her character softened as she advanced in life, and she appreciated its

real blessings and disasters more rationally, at the same time that she

acquired greater truth and energy in her writings. This may often be

observed with women. When young, they are open to such cruel attacks,

every step they take in public may bring with it irreparable injury to

their private affections, to their delicacy, to their dearest prospects.

As years are added they gather courage; they feel the earth grow

steadier under their steps; they depend less on others, and their moral

worth increases. She was an affectionate and constant friend, and the

sentiments of her heart replaced the appetite she formerly had for the

display of talent: she placed a true value on courage and resignation,

when before she had reserved her esteem for sensibility. She grew

calmer, and ceased to fabricate imaginary woes for herself, happy when

she escaped real ones. She grew pious. From her earliest years she had

strong feelings of religion, resulting from dependence on Providence,

from adoration for the Supreme Being, and hope of a future life. The

Christian principles mingled more entirely with these sentiments in her

latter years. As her health declined, her sleepless hours were spent in

prayer, and existence lost, as it often does to those about to leave it,

its gay and deceptive colours. "Life," she said, "resembles Gobelin

tapestry: you do not see the canvass on the right side; but when you

turn it the threads are visible. The mystery of existence is the

connection between our faults and our misfortunes. I never committed an

error that was not the cause of a disaster." And thus, while the idea of

death was infinitely painful, the hope of another life sustained her.

"My father waits for me on the other side," she said, and indulged the

hope of hereafter being rejoined by her daughter.

She perished gradually: the use of opium, from which she could not wean

herself, increased her danger; nor could medicine aid her. She died in

Paris on the 14th July, 1817, in her fifty-second year. Rocca survived

her but a few months.

She possessed too much merit not to have many enemies during her life,

and these were increased by her passion for display, and the jealous

spirit with which she competed with those whom she looked on as rivals.

The eagerness with which during the days of the republic she mingled in

politics, and her attempts to acquire influence over Napoleon, were arms

that she put into the hands of her enemies to injure her. They accused

her of an intriguing meddling disposition, saying of her, that to make a

revolution she would throw all her friends into the river, content with

fishing them out the next day, and so showing the kindness of her heart.

But her faults were more than compensated among her friends by the truth

and constancy of her attachment. Her temper was equable, though her mind

was often tempest-tost, clouded by dark imaginations, torn by unreal but

deeply felt anxieties and sorrows. "I am now," she said, in her last

days, "what I have ever been,--sad, yet vivacious." To repair wrong, to

impress on the minds of princes benevolence and justice, were in her

latter years the scope of, so to speak, her public life. She loved

France with passion. Lord Brougham records the alarm and indignation

which caused her to pant for breath, as she exclaimed, "Quoi donc, cette

belle France!" when lord Dudley, half in jest half seriously, wished the

Cossacks, in revenge for Moscow burnt, to nail a horse-shoe on the gates

of the Tuileries.

Our memoir has extended to so great a length that we can only advert

cursorily to her writings. M. Anneé, a French critic, observes of her,

that her understanding had more brilliance than profundity; and yet that

no writer of her epoch had left such luminous ideas on her route.

Chateaubriand, while he deplores the party spirit which gave irritation

to her sentiments and bitterness to her style, pronounces her to be a

woman of rare merit, and who would add another name to the list of those

destined to become immortal. She wrote on a vast variety of subjects,

and threw light on all. Yet she gathered her knowledge, not by profound

study, but by rapid dipping into books and by conversation with learned

men; thus her opinions are often wrongly grounded, and her learning is

superficial. Still her conclusions are often admirable, granting that

the ground on which she founds them is true. She has great felicity of

illustration, and her style is varied and eloquent, the fault being that

it sometimes abounds in words, and wants the merit of concentration and

conciseness; often, too, she is satisfied with a sentiment for a reason.

Her wit is not pleasantry, but it is pointed and happy. She neither

understood nor liked humour; but she enjoyed repartee: many are recorded

as falling from her, and they are distinguished by their point and

delicacy. Her "Dix Années d'Exil" is the most simple and interesting of

her works; but her "Germany," perhaps, deserves the highest rank, from

its research, and the great beauty of its concluding chapters. Of her

novels we have already spoken. They do not teach the most needful

lesson--moral courage; but they are admirable as pictures of life and

vivid representations of character, for subtle remark and vivid detail

of what in youth forms our joys and sorrows. She puts much of herself in

all; and thus adds to the charm and truth of her sentiments and ideas.

Her "Considerations on the French Revolution" is valuable, from its

affording us a personal picture of the impressions made by that epoch;

but the great preponderance of praise which she gives to Necker renders

it a work of prejudice. Like him, she had no strong republican

sentiments. She desired an English constitution; she disliked the

girondists as well as the mountain, and attempted the impossible task of

reconciling the interests of the nation as established by the revolution

with that of the _ancienne régime._ Her feelings are praiseworthy, but

her views are narrow.

Such is the defect of human nature that we have no right to demand

perfection from any individual of the species. We may sum up by saying

that, though the character and writings of madame de Staël, in some

respects, display weaknesses, and though she committed errors, her

virtues and genius raise her high; and the country that gave her birth,

and which she truly loved, may, with honest pride, rank her among its

most illustrious names.