BOOK TWO
ECERIA

“ She is a woman of wonderful wit and above vulgar prejudices of every kind.  Her house is a kind of Temple of Appollo. ”

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS writing to GEORGE WASHINGTON about MADAME DE STAËL :  January 1790.

Germaine de Staël

A WOMAN NEEDS A HUSBAND

ERIC MAGNUS had not considered his marriage in its relationship to eternity.  He was deeply in debt and needed money.  He came to the altar prepared to bury his bachelor days and give his wife such love as he knew, a good fellow, ready to settle down and found a family, fond enough of nineteen-year-old Germaine already to relish the thought of making a pet of her—in short, a usable husband with no humbug about him.

That was exactly what Germaine wanted, though she did not know that it was what she wanted.  In the background of her mind were mysterious and beautiful young men, a Saint-Preux, a Mylord Edouard, noble as these heroes of Rousseau, like them the prey of a melancholy scarcely to be conceived, removed eternally from the understanding of the vulgar.  Somewhere, in the uncharted heights of the soul, they were destined to meet, these Galahads and she, to drain together the chalice of ineffable sorrow and, moving swiftly upon the flower-clad hills, to perfect one another in love.  Eric Magnus was necessary to this transfiguration as the hangman is necessary to the martyr, since in this love of exalted spirits there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage and a girl ought to have a husband.

It took the excellent man only a very little time to learn his part.  Germaine was presented to the Queen within a fortnight of her wedding.  While making her third curtsey, she put her foot through her skirt.¹  Marie Antoinette’s amusement did not make her forgetful to be kind, and she sent the careless girl to refit in her own rooms.  “What a contrast to her mother !”  At Versailles they had called Suzanne “the governess.”  Pinned up and smiling, Germaine hurried off to the banquet which was being given in the palace in her honour.  How shabby the “Fridays” and the philosophers seemed now.  There were only twenty-four guests at the banquet, and the Princesse de Chimay, one of the ladies-in-waiting, did the honours.

A few days later Vergennes gave a dinner at which he offered one arm to the Spanish Ambassadress and the other to the Swedish.  Eric Magnus’ women friends were equally kind.  They gave her hints about her clothes.  When Germaine tried to discuss serious matters with them they told her that the best way to attract men was to avoid bright colours if you were dark and pale ones if you were fair.  This was a little upsetting, seeing that she loved bright colours, greens and blues and golds, the very brightest that money could buy.  The men understood her better.  They bent their powdered heads over her hand ;  some of them whispered suggestions that made her blush.  On February 13, a month after her marriage, she went to a reception at the Academy, given in honour of her old friend Guibert, and the audience clapped their hands when she entered.  After that came the Queen’s balls in the winter garden at Versailles.  Marie Antoinette was thirty-one.  Her girlish beauty, chiefly dependent on the exquisite freshness of her skin, had passed, but she remained a handsome woman who expected to be admired.  Eric Magnus knew how to satisfy that expectation ;  his wife did not.  The Queen, five months pregnant with her fourth and last child, was doubtless more irritable and exacting than at ordinary times ;  she began to dislike Germaine, finding her noisy, aggressive and wanting in respect.  There were no blacker faults in a world which wore the hard polish of a diamond.  Versailles had achieved so rigid a discipline of manners that a false step was apt to be construed as a challenge.

Nevertheless, Necker’s daughter experienced at first in the palace an ecstacy of enjoyment such as no other surroundings had ever afforded.  She could scarcely believe that this man and woman, who condescended to her, were real King and Queen, these gay boys, flushed with meats and mirth, real nobles of the great houses of France.  How delicious to listen to compliments from lips that could laugh at Time !  To make one at intimate little dinners where there were pet names for Princes, and no secrets.  To chatter about the King’s supping with his old aunts or the Queen’s new friendship for Madame d’Ossun and what Madame de Polignac thought about it.  When the Court went to Fontainebleau Germaine supped three times a week with Madame de Polignac, three times a week with Madame de Lamballe, and once a week in the Royal apartments.  And in addition she had her own entertaining in Paris, at home in the rue Bergère or at the Swedish Embassy in the rue du Bac.  Versailles was less prodigal than she of victuals and drink.  One day Marie Antoinette dropped a hint that lavishness is apt to be misinterpreted even in the case of an Ambassadress.  Far from feeling resentful, Germaine thought that she had been singled out for the Royal favour.

“I live,” she wrote to Meister,² her father’s old friend, “in a whirlwind of pleasures and duties which fill up all my time whether I like it or not.”

Suddenly she was bored.  In this world, as she told herself, though everything counted, nothing mattered.  The hive of Versailles with its endless rotations and obeisances, its diligence, its flutter of wings, began to frighten her.  How vast and inhuman were its calculated movements !  One might admire the Queen en grand costume staggering under the weight of Mademoiselle Bertin’s latest mode, with its terrific mingling of fur, fin and feather.  But how to endure the ceaseless talk about tailors and barbers, milliners, perfume-makers, manicurists, beauty doctors, the greedy and scandalous regiment of regeneration ?  Enough of a world in which the pouf au sentiment had set every tongue wagging, in which one duchess had worn a negro, a parrot, and a wet nurse and infant all together as ornaments in her hair, and another a lake, ducks, a mill, the miller’s wife being courted by a priest and the miller himself leading home his donkey.

“Society in Paris,” she wrote to the King of Sweden,³ “gets more and more insipid.  One loses the wish to shine, and if one hadn’t the hope of winning at the tables, what would there be left to live for ?”

In fact, it was Eric Magnus who from day to day cherished this hope.  Germaine was pregnant and had taken to writing plays and stories.

¹ See d’Haussonville :  Le Salon de Madame Necker.  Geffroy :  Gustave III et la Cour de France (Appendix).

² Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 77.

³ Letters of Madame de Staël, in the University Library at Upsala, to Gustavus III.  Geffroy :  Gustave III et la Cour de France (Appendix).