Germaine de Staël

THE CROWS COME HOME

GERMAINE, in her child-bed, tasted the dregs of humiliation and dismay.  Nothing was spared her, for the politically dead have no friends.  But when she heard that her father and mother had been arrested at Arcis-sur-­Aube and were being held there as prisoners, an access of rage lifted her out of her depression.  From her bed, in a trembling hand, she wrote to the President of the Assembly demanding an immediate reconsideration of the reasons which had led to this step and declaring that the state of her father’s health admitted of no delay.

“ That,” her letter ended, “is the only consideration that I put forward.”

She was still Swedish Ambassadress.  The Assembly, which seems to have thought Necker’s haste to be off rather uncere­monious, granted her wish.  Jacques and his invalid wife con­tinued their journey in lively fear which was far from being without justification.  They were mobbed, hustled, hooted, at the last howled out of France.  Safely back at Geneva, Suzanne wrote to Meister :¹

“ La Fontaine made use of tigers and lions so as not to shock men and women ;  now we shall have to use men and women so as not to shock tigers and lions.  Forgive me, the barbarous treatment we suffered at Aix haunts me day and night. . . . My health is completely broken.”

Germaine’s anger was quenched by the rising flood of her despair.  Eric Magnus spent all his time now at the tables, and it had been necessary to pay his debts.  Both Narbonne and Talleyrand remained, but only, her fears whispered, as the swallows linger sometimes into autumn days.  She looked about her wistfully for the balm her spirit craved, and found a soul as desolate and empty as her own.  Mathieu Jean Félicité de Montmorency-Laval, twenty-three years of age, son of that Madame de Montmorency-Laval who had been Narbonne’s mistress, was mourning the loss of the woman he had loved, his cousin, the Marquise de Laval.  This lady had caught a fatal chill at the Celebrations of the 14th of July.  Mathieu’s grief was immoderate, licentious, and had assumed, from the vio­lence of its expression, a public character.  Everybody was talking about it, except Mathieu’s wife, Hortense de Luynes, who had the makings of a shrew.  Emotional expression of a dramatic kind was one of Mathieu’s gifts.  The youngest member of the Assembly, he had drawn attention to himself by demanding, the year before, that a declaration of the Rights of Man must precede any debate about the Constitution.

“ Truth and happiness,” he had cried on that occasion, “walk hand in hand.  Would we be here if Wisdom’s beams had not thrust back the shadows. . . . ?”

He it was who had urged the abolition of armorial bearings and “the foolish ostentation of liveries,” and had hailed with rapture the day when all Frenchmen would wear the garments of liberty.  His hands had borne Voltaire’s ashes to the Pan­theon, and from his lips had come the plea that those of Rousseau be similarly translated.  Already his portrait had been inscribed :

“ Faithful to the People’s Right,
Weeping for the People’s woes,
How shall virtue stay her flight ?
How defer the debt she owes ?
Summer all her gifts did bring
In the pleasant days of Spring.”

Here was godsend indeed for a broken heart.  Add that the young man had fought under Lafayette in America, had ex­quisite manners, was tall, beautiful and possessed of bright golden hair, and it is evident that Germaine must have sought, diligently, to afford him consolation.  She was a year older than he, of a riper knowledge, but not, certainly, further advanced in the ascent towards virtue.  She held out her hand.  Mathieu covered it with his tears.  When Gouverneur Morris called at the Swedish Embassy a few days later, he was told that Madame de Staël was not receiving anybody ;  he saw her new lover being admitted.  Mathieu’s tears and kisses effected an immediate salvage of confidence.  So much so that, in October, Germaine was able to take the road to Switzerland.  But as the big berline rolled out through the fortifications, her heart sank.  Coppet, with an infant on her hands, and her father and mother for company, was a nightmare so hideous that she dared not think about it.

She found the worthy couple sunk in gloom, though Suz­anne was glad, in a way, to have got her Jacques to herself once more.  There was nothing to do, nothing to see except the lake and the Alps beyond it, nowhere to go.  Germaine lived only for news from Paris.  It was not cheering.  Mirabeau had come to his kingdom.  He was master now of the Court, of the Assembly, of Paris.  The future of the Revolution was in his hands.  That, in Germaine’s view, meant that the Revolution had no future.  But she revised this view during a brief visit she paid to the Capital in January 1791.  She saw Mirabeau then, at close quarters, and realised, suddenly, that he stood, a rock, among shifting sand.

And so it was.  The King’s coming to Paris had deprived him of his usual exercise of hunting, and condemned him to a wretched idleness.  Body and mind were deteriorating.  He was grown fat, lethargic, despondent, as if the loss of authority had robbed him of the will to exercise it.  Nor was the Assembly in much better case.  That body was fallen more and more under the fear of Paris, which, from the public galleries, exerted a merciless compulsion.  Only Mirabeau could speak to Paris in such language as charmed her fury and removed her suspicions.  When he mounted the tribune France became united again, Throne with Parliament and Parliament with People.  The King trusted him, perhaps because, like a briefed barrister, he was taking the King’s money in exchange for advice ;  the Assembly, too, because his piping to the Parisian snake allowed deputies to forget their panic ;  above all, France, widowed of govern­ment, because he dared to command her, he alone, in the authentic accents of mastery.

To the King he proclaimed that the uses of the Revolution were accomplished.  Far from having lost by the upheaval, the Throne had achieved conspicuous gain.  Nobles and Church were beaten to their knees ;  taxes might be levied on the land ;  the assignats had furnished a short cut to an abounding pros­perity.  Greatest gain of all, the nation, freed from the yoke of feudalism, looked to the King to complete his work of giving it back its glory.  Only one obstacle to the gathering of this harvest remained, namely, the armed mob of Paris, whose leaders were falling into helpless irresolution.  “It is time,” Mirabeau declared, “to leave Paris.”  He advised that Louis should surround himself with his bodyguard and, in the full light of day, go out from his capital to Rouen or Compiègne, and that, having arrived there, he should summon his parlia­ment, the Assembly, to follow him.  To abandon Paris, thus, would be to return to France.  Bold counsel ;  but for bold ears alone.  Louis liked the idea, Marie Antoinette too, though she liked better her own plan to flee to the frontier where the emigrant nobles were gathered in readiness to receive them.  Suppose the Assembly refused to obey the King’s call ?  Suppose a rump of the Radicals joined with the Paris Commune in declaring for a Republic ?  There was danger of plunging the country into civil war.  So they talked, argued, hesitated, in these winter days of 1790-1791, while Mirabeau’s health failed and the mobs of St. Antoine were multiplied in boldness.  From the bowels of the city issued, night after night, men and women famished, predatory as wolves, to listen to new gospels in ram­shackle halls, by the light of guttering candles.  Marat served meat for these packs ;  Danton too, a lawyer, big of brow, bigger of mouth, with strong, coarse pugilist’s nose and neck and a complexion pitted like Mirabeau’s.  Great of stature and voice, Danton filled the Cordelier’s Hall with his wrath so that skinny bodies grew hot and spent muscles strong.  Away with the kings, away with the talkers.  To arms, citizens !

They were beginning to speak the same language at the Jacobin Club, though in milder accents.  Mirabeau, in the Club’s chair, marked the changing tone and bade the King haste.  In this Paris ambitions and greeds were lively as in a thieves’ kitchen.  But Majesty doubted, tarried, bound perhaps by scruples beyond even the Tribune’s knowing, an instinct of kings.  In April Mirabeau sickened and died.  “I am taking the last shreds of monarchy with me,” he gasped.  Talleyrand was beside him, among the heaped-up flowers which King and cot­tager had given.  The room throbbed with music which the dead man had ordered for the occasion.  And even Germaine, at Coppet, shed a tear.

Next day France was broken.  The Liberals carried Mirabeau’s body to the Pantheon.  In his dingy palace Louis mourned the man whose advice he had not taken.  The Assembly addressed itself, sadly, to the constitution which, as Arthur Young said,² it was making “like a pudding.”  And the Radicals in the Cor­deliers threatened violence because the poor were unfed.  The nation was dissolved into factions, sundered and divided as in the days before Richelieu’s hand fell upon it.  Hostile armies, vultures about a carcase, were gathering on the frontiers.  Shall we perish, Danton shouted to his night-birds, for want of a man with guts ?  Danton’s bawlings reached the Assembly and pained its respectable members ;  they echoed in the streets and slums.  At the Palais Royal tub-thumpers repeated them to gaping audiences of harlots and men about town ;  young noble­men, debauched with kisses, leering under the lamps at the wench Liberty ;  stock-jobbers ;  swindlers ;  here and there a soldier of the King’s Guard ;  a priest shambling across the city.  The Queen made ready to flee to the frontier in the carriage procured for her by Count Axel Fersen.³

That was Royalty’s solution, judged a bad one because it failed at Varennes, where the King put his head out of the carriage window and was recognised by the postmaster.  Had it succeeded, another judgment might have been needful.  For here, at least, was protest against the ruin of government.  All said and done, when the Royal Family was brought back to Paris on June 26, 1791, in a carriage with blinds drawn, its case was little worse than on the day, nine months before, when Lafayette fetched it from Versailles.  The King had been Paris’ prisoner and so remained.  Monarchy was destroyed already because the glory was departed.

Louis, indeed, had taught a lesson which the Liberals, by far the strongest body in the Assembly, should have been quick to learn, namely that constitutional monarchy is alien to the genius of Frenchmen.  His kingdom, when he left it, was in an uproar, city divided against city, province against province, class against class.  Only Mirabeau’s magic had held France together ;  and the Tribune died in the faith of Richelieu.  Louis could claim that he had given the new system a fair trial.  He could point to the rising tide of a despotism harsher even in its promise than that of Versailles.  They could not accuse him of lack of sympathy with modern ideas.  Had he not decreed, at the meeting of the States-General, equality before the law for all Frenchmen ?

The crows, for the Liberals, were coming home to roost, those ill birds which Necker’s hand had reared and Suzanne and Germaine had fed, Compte Rendu, the Mémoire Justicatif, the slanders on the King and Queen, the manipulations of the price of bread against Turgot, the financial policies, the ceaseless poisoning of Parisian opinion against Versailles, the Bastille, the Commune, the National Guard, the setting of Assembly against Throne, of Throne against Mirabeau, the baiting of Mirabeau.  There had been moments when Liberalism might have worked with Kingship for the glory of France, the moment, for example, before the threats of Paris drove the Tiers État into active opposition to the monarchy, the moment when Mirabeau, had he become minister, might have shown King and People that their interests were the same.  Who but Necker had snatched these moments out of Time, obedient to a vanity unhampered by allegiance or scruple ?  Of his raising was this Parisian Frankenstein which at the last had driven him forth and threatened now to make an end of Liberty herself.  The inheritors of his horrid legacy, with Danton’s bellowings in their ears, and his armed mobs before their eyes, began to think of their safety and recognised it, as the recalcitrant nobles and clergy had recognised it before them, in the King’s Majesty.  What calamity that that power had been broken !  Since the King and his family were brought back, prisoners, from the frontier, the royal emblems in the city had been defaced and bespattered.  On July 17 a petition calling for Louis’ deposition and trial was laid by Danton’s associates on the altar of the country in the Champ de Mars, the same whereon, a year before, Talleyrand had celebrated Mass.  The petition was signed by thousands of citizens.  The Liberals lost their heads.  When two men were lynched by the demonstrators round the altar, they called up the National Guard, under Lafayette, to fire on the crowd.  Repressive measures against Danton and his friends followed, and he and Robespierre and Marat had to look to their safety.

“ The Massacre of the Champ de Mars,” as it was called, was a naked sword between Liberalism and Radicalism ;  it had, in addition, other implications.  Large numbers of Parisians went “Red” and gave their allegiance to Danton.  The Liberals, in quickening fear, turned to France, hoping to find in the nation as a whole enough support to enable them to resist the Capital.  They discovered France monarchist at heart and were convinced anew of their dependence on the King.  The Constitution was finished at last, thanks to the tireless labours of Sieyès.  They implored Louis to sign it, and, when he did, abandoned themselves to transports of relief and joy.  “Long live the King !” sneered the Radicals, “if he keeps his word.”  The Assembly’s work was done.  It dissolved itself in September 1791.  In that month, Germaine, unable to endure the stagna­tion of Coppet for another day, returned to the rue du Bac, leaving her baby behind her in Switzerland.  She had been absent from Paris for nearly eleven months.

¹ Madame de Stalël à Henri Meister, p. 82.

² Arthur Young’s Travels in France.  No observer has left a more complete account of the old France.

³ Fersens’ disinterested love of Marie Antoinette is one of the great romances of history.  He had his carriage built specially, and kept it on public view in his garden so as to allay suspicion.