Germaine de Staël

THE KING WAS IN HIS COUNTING-HOUSE

GABRIELLE had a sorry tale to tell.  The terrific outburst in Paris had shattered Louis’ power.  King and Queen were in such great danger that Marie Antoinette herself had begged her friend to go.

Necker got no rest that night.  There were couriers every hour with messages from the King, from the Assembly, from the people, beseeching him to come back.  Each new message sounded a louder note of urgency.  He, he alone, could save the Fatherland.  Germaine had joined her parents at Brussels.  She had Eric Magnus with her and was in ecstasies.  Babylon was fallen.  It remained only to enter and take possession.  The Swiss family drove out, across the frontier, with eyes blinded by tears.  As the big berline lurched upon the French highway, their hearts overflowed.  So the lad o’ pairts was to be King !  There were deputations at every hamlet.

“ Respect property, my friends, honour your priests and nobles, love your King,” counselled worthy Jacques.

“ Vive M. Necker !  Vive Madame Necker !  Vive Madame de Staël !”¹

Again and again the horses were taken from the carriage, that it might be drawn by loving arms.  Men and women fell on their knees when the banker bowed to them.  His word was good enough to save the life of one of the commanders of the foreign mercenaries who had been arrested thirty miles from Paris and was about to be sent back there.  They drove direct to Versailles.  Next day Necker made his triumphal entry into the Capital, to receive the homage of the newly formed “Commune” of Paris.

“ Let me pause again at this day,” wrote Germaine, “the last lucky day of my young life.  The whole population of Paris was crowded in the streets at the windows, on the roofs, shouting :  ‘ Vive M. Necker.’  When he approached the Hotel de Ville the cheering became terrific.  The place was filled by a vast multitude which flung itself at the feet of this one man.  This man, my father—!  He ascended to the council chamber. . . .”

There he explained his reasons for preventing the sending back to Paris of the King’s officer and demanded a general pardon for the misdeeds of the past.  That granted :

“ M. Necker came out on the balcony and proclaimed in a loud voice holy words of peace between Frenchmen of all parties.  The entire multitude was transported.  From that moment I saw no more.  I fainted with joy.”²

A few days before, the King had come to this same Hotel de Ville in deep humiliation to sanction acts which he had no power to prevent ;  Lafayette had helped to pin the tricolour cockade (the red and blue of Paris with the Bourbon white) on his hat.  Louis had ceased to reign.  It was Jacques and Germaine who sat on the throne.  Gouverneur Morris, newly arrived from America and most perspicacious of observers, saw the illustrious pair about this time.  He says :³

“ He (Necker) has the look and manner of the counting-house, and, being dressed in embroidered velvet, he contrasts strongly with his habiliments.  His bow, his address say :  ‘ I am the man.’  If he is really a very great man I am deceived. . . . In the salon we find Madame de Staël.  She seems to be a woman of sense and somewhat masculine in her character, but has very much the appearance of a chambermaid.”

Nevertheless he paid tribute to her wit :

“ I feel very stupid in this group . . . A conversation too brilliant for me. . . The few observations I make have more of justice than splendour and therefore cannot amuse. . . . She is a woman of wonderful wit and above vulgar prejudices of every kind.  Her house is a kind of Temple of Apollo. . . .”

The letters on Rousseau had been published during some months and were being hailed as miracles of wisdom.  A second edition was now called for.  The cup of her happiness was so full that Germaine scarcely dared to lift it.  But amid these distractions she was not unmindful of the duty of striving towards higher planes of perfection.  A lover had been vouchsafed to her.

Louis Marie Jacques Almeric, Comte de Narbonne-Lara, thirty-four years of age, reputed bastard of King Louis XV, was an elder son of Versailles.  He had been fed on the Royal nectar, tutored with princes, and was of an excellent distinction of mind and body.  Beardless, he had made himself master of all the tongues of Europe, its systems of law, its diplomacy, its politics.  The years bore richer gifts, wit, laughter, good looks, the love of women.  No woman had been found to resist Narbonne ;  none could penetrate his mask of grand seigneur nor match the agility of his thought.  But the fellow was ambitious.  There was the link with Germaine, Necker’s gipsy-queen, who would promise luck for a love-song.  Madame de Montmorency-Laval, his mistress, was abandoned ;  Narbonne addressed himself to the charms of the Swiss.  She, for her part, must cry her conquest to the winds of heaven.  A King’s son in her bed, beautiful as Apollo !  Here was loving as the gods love, vintage cellared dustily through the splendid years, to be spilled in Liberty’s sunlight, noble enough for a queen’s lips.  Paris gaped, Versailles too.  King Louis and Louis de Narbonne had learned their alphabets together, played together, grown up together.  Germaine’s black eyes flashed their triumph across the drawing-room of the rue du Bac.  Her broad, blotched features glowed with new joy as her arid lips discoursed of the soul’s mounting to virtue.  What if her complexion was muddy, hair coarse as a horse’s mane, figure stout and stocky ;  beauty is cheap when wits are joined.  The woman of the century had found her mate and would know how to keep him.

The drawing-room was full of her courtiers :  Lafayette, Mathieu de Montmorency-Laval, newly-wed but devoured by his love of his cousin ;  Monseigneur the Bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, lover of Madame de Flahaut ;  Stanislas, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre ;  Trophine Gerard, Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, whose father’s death on the scaffold for failing to defend India when Madame de Pompadour had made defence impossible lay still, a shadow, on his face ;  Alexandre, Comte de Lameth ;  his brother Charles ;  François Jaucourt ;  Anne, Marquis de Montesquieu-Fézensac, fifty years of age, the oldest of the group.  These were her selections for the House of Lords (English style) which Necker meant to set up as a means of keeping the King and the Commons apart and himself in the saddle.  All were pledged to the banker, suspicious of Versailles, filled with implacable loathing of Mirabeau “the unclean.”  All burned incense day and night before the face of Germaine.  Besides these chosen, the unregenerate had been bidden—deputies of the extreme Right, of the Left, opponents of Necker who might yet be won for him ;  the children of hope—writers and journalists with the tribune in their mind’s eye, business men scenting honours or carrion ;  the diplomatic corps—out of regard for Eric Magnus.  Words were wasps in this hive, every one with a sting in its tail for the King or Mirabeau, but most for Mirabeau.

That man had played Necker’s game till now (on June 23 at the Royal sitting ;  in July, before the banker’s dismissal).  But Jacques was under no illusions.  Mirabeau despised him as he hated Mirabeau.  It was pride against vanity, and there is no truce between these two.  But more, it was wisdom against a doctrine.  Mirabeau, seeing the Neckers’ glory, was choked with rage.  Had Frenchmen then no sense, no instinct ?  What a monstrous farce !  The King shorn of authority ;  the Assembly drunk with talk.  And this Swiss for the cement of France.  No wonder men could hear France breaking up as the ice breaks under the thaws of Spring.

“ We are not savages,” he shouted, “landing on the banks of the Orinoco to form a society ;  we have ancient prejudices, a Government and a King which have already been in existence a long time.  As far as possible all these things must be grafted on to the Revolution and the suddenness of the change avoided.”  He demanded to talk with the King.  For, “I feel deeply how great is our need to kill ministerial tyranny and to raise up the authority of the throne once more. . . . Make it known at the Chateau (the palace) that I am more on their side than against them.”⁴  Louis shrank from his violence as did the Queen from his uncleanness ;  Necker even seemed better than this rebellious son, faithless husband, fickle lover, this gambler, debtor, drunkard, seducer, companion of rogues and harlots.  The two men whose coming together must have ruined Necker did not meet.  Mirabeau had to fight, single-handed, the battle for a strong hand to pull France together, the battle, that is to say, against Necker’s plan to establish the English Constitution, with its government and opposition, its upper and lower House.  Would this alien harness, he asked, give control of the runaway ?  Why not introduce the English language as well ?  Mad with the horror of what he saw approaching, he bellowed his warnings in the Assembly’s ears, gibing, sneering, cursing by turns.  He painted for them the “hideous bankruptcy” that was at hand till they sweated with fear.  He showed them the wounds, gaping ever wider, in the breast of France, and made them see, as well, England’s strength and the envious foes, reinforced now by the emigrant nobles, who stood on the frontiers.  To no purpose.  “ This man,” they said, “is a wild beast, a madman.  He has a tiger’s face.  He can’t speak without convulsions.”  But when he spoke they listened.

Necker at Versailles, Germaine in the rue du Bac, watched with growing anxiety and began to understand something of what King Louis and his Queen had endured.  His crown seemed heavy now to the banker, and he looked about anxiously for support.  Germaine called on her young lords to set about the work of introducing the English Constitution.  But when they showed themselves Mirabeau savaged them.

“ I cannot imagine anything more terrible,” he shouted, “than the rule of six hundred noblemen.”

So thought the majority of the Assembly.  Necker saw the plans of his new world torn up before his eyes.  Worse still, he had much ado to lay his hands on the money needful for government.  The Assembly was not interested in money.  Its members used the backs of his appeals to them for writing notes about the march of the soul towards virtue.  The name of Liberty was on every lip.  One night, August 4, 1789, the salle dujeu de paume, where the oath to give a constitution to the Fatherland had been taken, became the scene of an emotional outburst without a parallel in history.  Weeping, and hugging one another, while the bishops who were present sang the Te Deum, nobles of France flung their lands, their revenues, their names even, at the nation’s feet.  In an hour or two the feudal system was broken up like a derelict wind-jammer that will make fuel for poor hearths.

Away they all ran to tell the King what they had done and ask him to agree with them.  Louis, scarcely awake and weary of the sight of these black coats about his palace, as one grows weary of the sight of workmen about a dwelling, chided them gently on a haste that had not marred any other of their deliberations.  They conferred on him the title of “Renewer of French Liberty.”  Mirabeau, who had been abed during the “charity subscription,” roared his rage.  “Fools, madmen, jackasses !”  Who was going to pay a penny of taxes now that the basis of taxation had been swept away ?

That, too, was Necker’s first thought.  It was destined to abide with him.  The flow of money which had been diminishing from week to week stopped abruptly.  The banker turned out his pockets and proposed a loan, carrying interest at 5 per cent.  But this rate being reduced to 4½ per cent. by the Assembly, the loan failed, though Jacques himself subscribed £56,000.  Mirabeau let it be known that he thought it quite a good thing to keep “the dictator” a bit short of cash, a suggestion which Germaine repaid with interest.

“Mirabeau,” she wrote, “was banned from decent society and his fondest wish was to get back there.  He was ready to burn down civilisation to open the doors of Paris.  Like all immoral men, he saw his own interest first ;  his foresight was limited by his egoism.  ‘ Small scruples kill big ones’ (La petite morale tue la grande), he used to say ;  but the big ones, on his showing, are seldom encountered even in the course of a life.”⁵

Having got his hand on the purse-strings, for the Assembly alone could levy taxes, Mirabeau began to make Necker squeal.  The bad man derived an exquisite pleasure from this punishment of the good.

“ He had a damnable way,” Germaine wrote, “of praising M. Necker.  ‘ I don’t approve of his plans,’ he would say, ‘ but since the nation in its wisdom has hailed him as our dictator, we must accept with faith.’  M. Necker’s friends realised with what cunning Mirabeau sought to snatch his popularity away from him, in thus exaggerating it.  For nations are like men ;  they love less when they are told too often that they love.  . . . I was quite near Mirabeau one day when he brought down the house, and although I had no illusions about his aims, he captivated me for two whole hours.  Nothing could be more impressive than his voice ;  and, if the gestures and the biting words he used did not spring straight from his heart, they held at least a living force the effect of which was tremendous.”

Necker called now for a voluntary subscription and flung in another £4,000 of his own money.  A few of the faithful brought their family plate (one of them his shoe-buckles), but the till remained empty.  Investors, it seemed, had lost their confidence in Jacques.  That was the more distressing because there was a bread famine in Paris, about which ugly charges were being made by Dr. Marat in his news-sheet L’ami du Peuple.  Was the people’s hunger the work of the speculators in wheat ?  Everybody knew that M. Necker had grown rich by financing these scoundrels.  The banker tasted fear and sent more appeals to the Assembly.  Paris heard that M. Necker was fighting its battle for bread against Royal apathy on the one hand and parliamentary eloquence on the other.  Though his heart was bleeding, his hands were tied.

Germaine, in love, was grown more formidable as a politician.  Her salon, in this duel with Mirabeau, was losing its character of cadets’ kindergarten.  Swordsmen have need of their breath.  She had courage to match the Tribune’s, vigour too ;  above all, the lively conviction of virtue.  Her sex was a cordial for faint hearts ;  her wit their counsellor.  She could plan, plot, foresee.  The most agile spirits, the most subtle, rejoiced in her, among these, becoming more attentive daily, the Bishop of Autun.  Talleyrand was thirty-five, a thin, slight man with a game leg and an expressionless face.  Ordained priest at twenty-five, he had been, successively, Secretary of the Assembly of the Clergy and Agent-General.  In 1788 the “little Abbe de Périgord,” as he was called, received his mitre.  This was in keeping, if not with the tradition of his family, which was military, at least with his family’s distinction.  Soon, as he believed, he would exchange the mitre for a Cardinal’s hat ;  and that nearly happened, would have happened had not King Louis harboured old-fashioned prejudices against priests who slept in other men’s beds.  Talleyrand bore the King no ill-will.  He liked old-fashioned prejudices, as one likes old pewter.  But his faith in Louis sickened after he saw Necker being carried shoulder-high out of the palace of Versailles.  A few days later he went to sit among the Commons and took the road to Paris, to hobble into Germaine’s drawingroom with Madame de Flahaut in attendance.

Germaine loved Talleyrand’s wit, hotly, as she loved Narbonne’s person.  Dauntless empiricist, she must needs go to bed with the one as with the other, though the bishop was not disposed to be so accommodating about Madame de Flahaut as Narbonne had been about Madame de Montmorency-Laval.  What sauce for jaded appetites this liaison of priest and little presbyter in such excellent tolerance of one another as made politics among the pillows a new spice of love.  The girl’s soul, mounting ever higher, perceived that Mirabeau’s weakness and Necker’s strength dwelt in the same place, here, in Paris.  Very soon her friend M. de Lafayette, Gilbert, Marquis de Lafayette (called “The General”) was talking vaguely about the need which might arise of marching his Parisian Civic Guard to Versailles and stimulating there the energies of the Assembly and the monarch.  This young man of thirty-two had taken Liberty to wife and was living with her like an honest bourgeoise.  Or at least he was trying to live with her, for the lady was inclined to lightness, a gadabout, a scold, with a shrew’s temper and harlot’s lips.  One might read the pain of secret woe on Lafayette’s long, uneventful face with its crown of red hair.  He had so wished that his dear Liberty might be respectable.  But she held him under thumb, none the less.

That had not been apparent in the days when he was fighting her battles by Washington’s side—“my friend Washington”—in far-off America.  All was kisses and rapture then, as becomes a honeymoon.  But men had discovered doubts at the fall of the Bastille, while Necker was posting back to Paris.  Lafayette knew very well that the mob which took the Bastille had murdered two men.  Nevertheless he it was who sent the mob back, with a bow and a flourish, to the old fortress to raze the walls.  The mob murdered two more men.  When, during these bloody days, the City of Paris set up its own government, the Commune in the Hotel de Ville, and made Bailly, the astronomer, Mayor and master, Lafayette was there to give the rebel act his countenance.  It was he who urged the King to make an honest body of the Commune by coming to Paris and blessing it, he who escorted the Royal carriage on that occasion, he who invented the Tricolour cockade, he who pinned it upon the King’s breast, he, finally, who became General-in-Chief of the National Guard which anxious citizens formed in these July days to protect themselves against both throne and gutter.  The wench Liberty, it seemed, could do what she liked with this spouse.

“ His faith in the triumph of Liberty,” wrote Germaine, “is of the same kind as that of a godly man in the life everlasting.”⁶

There was the secret of his usefulness to Necker’s daughter.  Whisper to him that Liberty was in danger, he would be abroad, uniformed, on his white horse to defend the damsel with his life.  Say even she had gone whoring, he would woo her over again, with untempered rapture.  “Little great man,” Mirabeau called him, and pelted him with the scorns and mockeries flung already at Necker.  These be your gods, O Israel !  Lafayette came sometimes to Germaine’s drawing-room, route-marching through it without a word spared to woman’s weakness, but with his ears wide open.  She knew how to speak to him, about the King and Queen, about Mirabeau, about her father.  If only the King could be quit of his obsession that France had need of a chef de famille ;  if Mirabeau could be purged of his lust of power !  “Where may wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding ?”  Surely in the city which delighted to honour Lafayette and Necker.  The General turned it over in his mind ;  Paris always contrived to know what Lafayette was thinking.

The King and Queen, in these autumn days, had their own thoughts, simple like their natures.  On June 4, before the Swiss family had begun to trouble their relations with the Commons, they had bent together over the death-bed of their eldest son, Louis Joseph Xavier François, a boy eleven years of age.  That blow had left its mark on both father and mother, mocking with its new pain the frenzy of the liberators.  But they had hidden sorrow from the world’s eyes.  Now it seemed that, perhaps, the boy’s death had happily released him.  Marie Antoinette feared for her children, for her husband.  In the faces of the deputies who came and went morning and night, like the tide, were looks she had not seen before on any man’s face.  Where was safety in this France ?  “ The King and Queen will perish,” Mirabeau cried in horror one day, “and the people will batter their dead bodies.”  That thought had begun to quicken in her heart also.  If only they could escape from it all !  The longing to escape grew till it filled her mind ;  and the golden heads of her children, each time she glanced at them, deepened it.  Since Necker and Germaine reigned, why stay to uphold their power ?  Better be gone, that France might awaken out of her dream.  Here, in Versailles, they were props of the banker’s power ;  but there, on the frontiers, they would hold him at their mercy.  Could they reign alone, this Swiss and his daughter ?  Marie Antoinette knew her Jacques as no other except Mirabeau knew him.  “ The King has only one man on his side,” cried the Tribune, in a burst of admiration, “and that is his wife.”

“ Take care,” whispered the tongues of Paris, “that the King and Queen do not slip through your fingers.  Will they stay, do you suppose, to endure the short rations you are enduring ?  Bring the King to his capital and the price of bread will fall ?”

On October 3 the officers of the bodyguard held a dinner-party in the palace.  After the tables had been cleared, the doors of the room were thrown open and the Queen entered, followed by her women.  She distributed the white cockades of the Bourbons, bidding the young men swear to protect her husband and her children.  She was flushed, beautiful, as in the old days.  They sprang on chairs, with swords drawn, and took the oath she gave.  Then they tore Lafayette’s cockade, which the King had bade them wear, from their hearts and put the Queen’s cockade in its place.  The song of Royalty

“ O Richard, O anon roi. . . ”

burst defiantly from their lips.  Before the candles on the table had been extinguished, the news of this defiance was abroad in the Paris streets.

¹ Considerations, Part I, p. 254•

² Considerations, Part I, p. 255.

³ The Life of Gouverneur Morris, by Jared Sparks, Vol. I, p. 298 and Index.

⁴ Mirabeau’s letters to La Merck.

⁵ Considerations, Part II, pp. 26o et seq.

⁶ Considerations, Part II, p. 272.