Germaine de Staël

“ A MOST EMBARRASSING PERSON ”

SO Madame Necker’s dream had come true !  For years she had been urging her beloved Jacques that the counting-house was far too small to hold his transcendent intellect.  Suzanne of the Swiss pastor’s house had developed without changing.  She remained the woman who had seen her chance when Necker came to visit his fiancée, the widow Vermenoux, her mistress.  It was she who had secured for Jacques the directorship of the East India Company ;  her “Fridays” had been the means of harnessing all the liveliest tongues and pens in Paris to his interests.  Philosophers and wits, journalists and pamphleteers, dined and wined at regular intervals, could make a prodigious stir.  All these had now for some time been imploring his Majesty, as he loved his people, to clasp Necker to his bosom.  Back from London and seeing how affairs were shaping, this excellent wife persuaded her husband to get rid of his shares in the bank to brother Louis.  For he ought, she argued, to be found ready, when the call should come.  She herself was in the same state of preparedness.  Very well she knew why Jacques, Swiss, republican, Protestant and friend of England, had been summoned to the King’s closet.  But let Versailles beware !  Her husband was coming to Court with all the wagging tongues of Paris for his bodyguard.  Necker left the King in no doubt about his terms.  Each loan, said the banker, must be based on an economy drastic enough to provide both income and sinking fund.  Louis’ hopes grew faint.  Economy meant a struggle with the permanent officials at Versailles, who knew too well how to make trouble.  And it meant, a smaller matter, trouble with the Queen and Madame de Polignac, with his brothers, and his and their pensioners.  But needs must when the devil drives.  The economies were made, the money was found and the war began.

Immediately, Madame Necker’s corps of tongues and pens was ordered into action.  Louis and Vergennes grew aware that their American policy was being viewed in a new light in the capital.  Paris talked no longer about the humiliation of England, but about the successful resistance offered by the American rebels to the English King.  Was not good M. Necker at Versailles fighting the same sort of battle against unjust and oppressive taxation levied on the poor for the benefit of the profligate friends of royalty ?  As his popularity grew in Paris Necker’s position at Court became increasingly difficult.  He countered by publishing his Compte Rendu, an insolent and inaccurate statement of the King’s accounts, designed obviously to show what the Queen and her friends were spending.  Louis dismissed him.  But the mischief was done.  On the day following Necker’s fall thousands of Parisians wore a green cockade—green was the colour of the banker’s livery—and huge crowds demonstrated outside his house.  The King’s war against England was charged, miraculously, into Paris’ war against the King.  Louis had no illusions.  Unless he could hold France against his capital, he must reign in future by the grace of money-lenders and merchants, which, after all, is a less agreeable title than the grace of God.  He set his face with Vergennes to pursue the struggle against England, pledging with calculated recklessness such credit as he still possessed.

Madame Necker, most indefatigable of advance agents, had kept the faithful informed on many Fridays about the preparation of Compte Rendu.  The salon in the Rue de Cléry was become a court (the rival, as she hoped, of the other at Versailles) where flattery trod on the heels of wit and the three estates, influence, affluence and obsequiousness, agreed together that it is money which makes the mare go.  The philosophers were not as young as they had been, but their disciples, cadets of great houses, rich tradesmen’s sons, journalists, pamphleteers, artists, actors, made up for that.  Here was the new world which should replace the old.  Here was reason for superstition, red blood for blue, credit for insolvency.  And the whole garnished with revelry.  Necker beamed while Suzanne glowed.  The banker never spoke, never listened, except perhaps to the music which ebbed and flowed in the great drawing-room, but the smile on his face and his raised eyebrows delivered their message.  His wife would touch the hand of Diderot or Marmontel or Guibert.  “You see ;  he’s thinking.”  Her eyes, lingering on his gold-embroidered coat, grew gentle.  That was everybody’s cue.  Madame Necker had put her trust in Rousseau to the extent of believing that her Jacques was the Messiah hinted at in Du Contrat Social.  For herself, Rousseau taught that woman is made perfect through love, and she loved Jacques.  All, in these days, were for “perfectability.”  Madame Necker glanced at her daughter, aged fifteen now.  Germaine was big for her age.  The woman’s eyes clouded.*

The truth was that mother and daughter were already getting in each other’s way.  Thanks to Suzanne’s views about education, Germaine had been admitted to the “Fridays.”  A small stool, near her mother, had been allotted her, a listeningpost in the battlefield of wits ;  Madame Necker believed that children should be seen and not heard.  But some of her guests had not failed to notice that homage paid to his daughter pleased Necker even more than homage paid to his wife.  Germaine’s stool became the centre of a circle in which the subject of discussion was neither Compte Rendu nor Madame Necker but Germaine herself.  Marmontel, aged but gallant, reconditioned the verses he had made for the mother to fit the daughter, while Guibert wrote :†

“ ‘ There she is, there she is ! ’ we cry when she appears, and our breath comes short and stifled.  I gaze, I listen in transports.  She has that which is more than beauty.  What variety and play of expression in her face, what delicate modulations in her voice.  What perfect harmony between mind and lips.  She speaks, and if I do not catch her words, her inflexions, her gestures and her eyes convey all her meaning to me.  She pauses, and her last words echo in my heart and I read in her eyes those words which are unspoken yet.  She ceases and the temple rings with applause.  She bows her head in modesty ;  the long lashes creep down over those eyes of fire and thus the sun is veiled.” . . . He added, “Her great, dark eyes were alight with genius.  Her hair, black as ebony, fell round her shoulders in waving locks.  Her features were marked rather than delicate.”

Germaine liked it ;  Madame Necker didn’t.  During ten years excellent Suzanne, with the memory of her own childhood in her heart, had been occupied in snubbing her daughter.  Thus :

“ No one came specially to see you. . . . (They) finished up with you to see the garden. . . . You must make a habit of passing several days in solitude, well occupied.  You know that I do not oppose your innocent pleasures but encourage them.  But I’m sure that people who can’t do without pleasure are slaves.” (June 10, 1779.)

“ You’re very clever at twisting all the silly things you’ve said to me so that they don’t seem to be absurd.  But a loving mother can see through all that and would much prefer frankness to the tricks of egoism. . . . If you want me to believe in your exaggerated expressions of love you have a simpler means at your disposal than the French language.  Do in my absence all that my fondness has tried to teach you for your moral and bodily welfare.” (June 11, 1779.)

Germaine rebelled and gushed by turns.

“Yes, Mamma,” she wrote, “if I were to spend a thousand years gazing at you, I should be jealous of one single moment when you turned away from me.”

Necker, in addition to losing his post at Versailles, had to retire from Paris to his country house, Saint Ouen, some six miles from the capital.  There were no more “ Fridays,” and after a time rather less incense, because pagans like to worship the rising sun.  Would Necker come back ?  Perhaps not, since the King’s American policy was popular everywhere except in Paris, and not unpopular there.  Suzanne fell into depression.  She had already written to Maurepas protesting Jacques’ good intentions, to Jacques’ no small embarrassment ;  now she bustled about trying to set the silent tongues wagging again.  She visited Madame de Genlis among others, and took Germaine with her.  The Duc de Chartres’ mistress edified them by reading passages from her works.

“Germaine,” Madame de Genlis reported afterwards, “astonished me and did not please me.  She wept a great deal, uttered loud exclamations as I read, incessantly kissed my hands and is altogether a most embarrassing person.”

* See d’Haussonville :  Le Salon de Madame Necker.

† Guibert is sometimes credited with having been Germaine’s first lover.  There is no evidence whatever in support of this view.  She admired him greatly, however, and wrote an appreciation (see text) after his death.