Germaine de Staël

A WOMAN NEEDS A LOVER

THERE were two reasons why Germaine became unhappy at Versailles.  In the first place the people there did not show that eagerness to be made aware of her opinions which the urgency of these opinions seemed to warrant.  She liked to strip her soul and stand spiritually naked, but they had a way, when she did that, of throwing rugs over her.  She could never get going as she used to get going on the “Fridays,” among the philosophers.  Again she had an uneasy feeling that there was something about this great Palace and its life which she did not understand, something, perhaps, which it had pleased God to reveal to babes like Madame de Polignac.  That ravishing woman awoke a vague terror in Germaine’s heart.  It seemed impossible that flesh and blood should be able to put on so much loveliness or lips and eyes be able to express such delight.  But the red lips, the eyes of such excellent gentleness, held moments of laughter that scattered the Swiss girl’s wits.  It was like being kept out of a secret, and yet what secret could there be ?  The whole world knew of the extravagance and frivolity of the Court, its stupidity, its moral emptiness.  How she longed to testify !  Gabrielle de Polignac, she shuddered to think, knew what was in her heart.  If only she could know what was in Gabrielle’s heart !  At rare intervals she saw the King and marked his kind, apathetic face.  Did he, too, know what was hidden from her ?  Did the Queen know ?  But her thoughts returned to Gabrielle.

Her pregnancy began in the September following her marriage.  Her writing began about the same time and consisted of two plays in verse, Sophie and Jane Grey, and three novels, L’Histoire de Pauline, Mirza and Adélaïde et Théodore.  The theme of all is the same, love in distress for one reason or another but nevertheless making for perfection in those privileged to experience it.  Rousseau had said it, every word of it, in Julie;  but whereas Julie was human, Germaine’s heroines existed only to prove a case—namely, that a woman needs a lover as the indispensable means of her spiritual growth and therefore has the right in all and any circumstances to seek and possess him.  The obverse of this claim is displayed in Adélaïde et Théodore when Adélaïde, an old man’s bride, writes to her aunt on the day following her wedding :

“ They have done for my future ;  the ecstacy of love is for ever denied me ;  henceforward, because I can know neither joy nor sorrow, I must remain indifferent to everything.”

In other words, the price of fidelity to Eric Magnus, in Germaine’s opinion, was spiritual death ;  she did not accept the child she was going to bear as a possible substitute for a lover.  The child, a girl, was born in June 1787.  It survived only a short time.  Madame Necker de Saussure, the wife of Louis Necker’s son, and therefore Germaine’s cousin by marriage, visited Paris at this time and observed with uneasiness how little interest the young mother showed in her baby.

Germaine had other things to think about.  The expedients of M. de Calonne had not rescued Versailles from its financial distresses, and a fresh crisis was at hand.  It was no longer a question of waging war but of living.  The wolf was at the King’s door.  Poor Calonne, who understood the handling of women better than the handling of money, was in despair.  He had advised the King to spend freely, “so as to encourage trade”;  the bills were falling in a snowstorm about his ears.  The need for a tax on land presented itself to him as it had already presented itself to his master, to Turgot, to every man possessed of political sense.  That need was now the central fact of the situation.  Versailles had doubtless spent a great deal of money, but Versailles was the seat of government ;  its expenses were not out of proportion to its importance.  On the contrary, both Louis and Marie Antoinette were thrifty people among French Kings and Queens.  The truth was that the basis of taxation had not been broadened to meet modern needs because the monarchy, after its loss of prestige in the Seven Years’ War, had not dared to challenge the Church and the nobility, the owners of the land.  As Louis had told Turgot, absolute monarchy is based on prestige even more than on legitimacy.  Without prestige an absolute sovereign can only temporise or abdicate.

The monarchy in France had served, during two centuries, as a substitute for England’s island position.  It had effected and guaranteed unity.  Its weakness, as Louis clearly saw, was therefore a danger not to itself alone but to the nation.  The King had exhausted every resource to maintain his absolute power because he foresaw what the ruin of that power must bring about, namely, civil war and dismemberment at the hands of greedy neighbours.  Louis has had but little credit for the faithfulness with which he discharged his duty.  This honest, devout, virtuous man, whose kindness was felt by all, must have been well aware that he seemed to have failed and that both Church and nobility were advertising his failure and his faults everywhere.  But he knew also that the dangers from which her Kings had rescued France and against which, even in his weakness, he was still protecting her, remained not the less formidable because they were unseen.  Men beheld Versailles but not the disruption which Versailles had cured and was preventing.  In accordance with the policy of opportunism, which was his only resort, he allowed Calonne to approach the Parlement of Paris with a view to obtaining its sanction of a tax on land.  The task was anything but an agreeable one ;  during centuries the monarchy had disputed the right of the Parlement to meddle with taxation.  The Parlement returned a curt refusal, a clear indication that it meant to help the King’s opponents.  Louis turned to another ancient body, the Assembly of Notables.  Calonne addressed the Notables in a speech which, had they possessed any political wisdom, must have won them.  He stated frankly that the expenses of government exceeded income by more than £2,000,000 a year, and claimed—truthfully—that this deficit was occasioned not by extravagance but by the growing cost of administration in a modern state.  To prove his case he disclosed the fact that even the thrifty Necker had not been able to make ends meet during the period of his ministry, though the banker, in his Compte Rendu, had claimed a balance on the credit side.

The Notables, like the Parlement of Paris, refused to help the King, whom they advised to summon the States-General.  Their joy at finding him in so sorry a plight was ill-concealed, for they were heart and soul for Church and nobles.  Some of them even showed resentment at the disclosures about Necker, who had now become their man and was eager to see absolute monarchy replaced by a constitutional government modelled on that of England.  Necker himself was not less resentful than his friends.  The fact that Calonne had called him a liar upset him so much that he was unable to rest until he had justified himself.  He composed a lengthy memorandum, Mémoire Justicatif, in which he tried to prove that the King’s income was large enough, if carefully used, to meet the King’s expenses—which he knew very well it was not.  He sent this memorandum to Versailles.  Louis, remembering Compte Rendu and taking thought, no doubt of his own desperate plight, forbade him to have it printed.  Necker disobeyed.

“ One evening,” Germaine recounts,* “in the winter of 1787, two days after the reply to M. de Calonne had appeared, a message came for my father.  We were entertaining some friends in the drawing-room.  He left the room.  A moment later he sent first for my mother and then for me.  The Lieutenant of Police, M. de Noir, had just delivered a lettre de cachet in which my father was ordered to leave Paris and not again approach nearer to it than 120 miles.  I can’t describe the effect which this news produced upon me.  My father’s exile seemed to me an unexampled act of despotism ;  I felt for him the more acutely because I knew so well how noble and disinterested were all his feelings.”

Necker left Paris twenty-four hours later.  Germaine rushed off to Versailles to the Queen and poured out the story of the monstrous treatment to which her father had been subjected.  Because she was an Ambassadress it was necessary to listen to her, but Marie Antoinette was not encouraging.  When asked directly if she would try to influence the King in Necker’s favour, she refused.  Germaine returned to Paris to Eric Magnus.  She declared that she had been insulted, and urged that, if he cared for her, her husband would show his resentment.  Eric Magnus obeyed.  Like most other people, he found it easier to yield to Germaine than to argue with her.

Calonne’s failure made it necessary to try a new advocate.  After a brief period Louis—with misgivings—appointed as his Minister Etienne Charles de Lomenie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, and later Cardinal Archbishop of Sens.  This most dissolute man, more philosopher than ecclesiastic, more rogue than either, was possessed of a persuasive tongue and felt that he could succeed where so many others had failed.  He shared—so he said—the King’s view that absolute monarchy was necessary to the safety of France and that, if the States-General was summoned and the English Constitution introduced, the nation would speedily fall to pieces.  He was ready, therefore, to adopt any means which offered even the slenderest hope of an increased revenue for the Crown.

He began where Calonne had left off and exhausted his eloquence first on the Parlement of Paris and then on the Assembly of Notables.  Both these bodies remained unmoved.  The nobles, having at last got the King at their mercy, were determined to reduce him to the position of a constitutional monarch and, as they hoped, to govern the country themselves like their English brethren with the help of the bankers.  It would be time enough when the Royal power was broken to think about a new basis of taxation.  A campaign of calumny against the King and the Queen and the Queen’s friends, notably Gabrielle de Polignac and her husband, was launched in Paris and carried on with such enthusiasm that its echoes have not yet died away.  Louis was depicted as a fool, the victim of a vicious and designing woman whose favourites were devouring the substance of the nation.  Necker, in his Compte Rendu, had struck the first note of this chorus of hate ;  Germaine, aflame with indignation at the punishment of her father and the Queen’s coldness to herself, swelled the chorus by every means at her disposal.  Her salon at the Swedish Embassy was crowded with nobles professing liberal principles, financiers, lawyers, philosophers, journalists.  She went to and fro in this crowd, stimulating its ambition and sharpening its rancour.  She spoke to the nobles about the free institutions which it would soon be their privilege to bestow on France, to the rich about the opportunity which liberty must afford them, to the philosophers about the realisation of their dreams.  There were blades for the knights, money-bags for the usurers ;  there was gall for the writer’s ink.  Should a worthy but dull young man and his spendthrift, foreign wife be allowed to stand between France and her destiny ?†

Louis marked the rising tide of hate and saw that his policy of delay had been forestalled.  He must act at once with such wretched resources of power as were left to him or await tamely the pleasure of his conquerors.  He dismissed the Notables, arrested several members of the Parlement of Paris, and exiled the Parlement itself to Troyes.  This resolute gesture was followed up on November 9, 1787, by a resounding declaration of the absolute power of the Crown.  Paris, inflamed by orators and pamphleteers, bared its teeth.  Nobles and priests joined their defiances to those of the citizens.  Let the King come and collect his taxes.  Versailles, remote among its woods, knew itself defeated by a combination of forces singular even in political history.

Unable to collect his land tax, Louis was forced to yield.  The Parlement, recalled from exile, was welcomed by the Parisians with transports of joy, as if the rescue of the nobility and clergy from the power of the tax-gatherer had been matter of sincere congratulation among those who remained in the tax-gatherer’s clutches.  Germaine was in ecstasies.  The King’s defeat was the opportunity of those young and noble friends in whose spirits she had kindled the ambition to regenerate France.  More important than that a thousandfold, it was her father’s opportunity to become the King’s master.  Louis was compelled to promise that he would summon the States-General for the following year.  He was compelled to dismiss Brienne and send once more for Necker.

* Considerations, Part I, p. 115 .

† For an account of Madame de Stael’s salon at this time, see Madame Necker de Saussure’s introduction to the complete works, and nearly all the memoirs of the period.  It was by far the most famous salon in Paris.