Germaine de Staël

THE MANTLE OF ELIJAH

GERMAINE had left Paris in bitterness ;  she returned in hope. For she came as a forerunner and missionary of Necker, bearing glad tidings for spirits in perplexity.  Jacques, by the shores of his lake, under the shadow of his mountains, had taken counsel with his spirit and evolved a new way of life for the French people.

“ As we walked together, my father and I, under the great trees of Coppet,” she wrote,¹ “trees which seemed to me to be friendly witnesses of his noble thoughts, he asked me once if I believed that the whole French people shared the vulgar suspicions of which he had been the victim during his journey from Paris to Switzerland.

“ ‘ It seems to me,’ he said, ‘ that there were some districts in which, until the very end, the purity of my aims and my devotion to France were recognised.’

“ He had scarcely asked me this question before he brushed it aside as if afraid of being too much moved by my reply.

“ ‘ Say no more !’ he exclaimed.  ‘ God can read my heart.  That’s enough.’  “I didn’t dare to reassure him at that moment, because I saw how deeply he was moved.”

Meanwhile the fallen statesman had published a work entitled, “De L’Administration de M. Necker par lui-même,” in which he had thus apologised to the Assembly :

“ I know it.  I will be blamed for my stubborn devotion to the principles of Justice, and the attempt will be made to discount these principles by calling them ‘snobbery’ (pitié aristocratique).  I know my own principles better than you do.  The first on whose behalf my feelings of affection were kindled were yourselves, when you had neither cohesion nor power.  You were the first people for whom I fought.  Then, when I was distressed at the contempt with which you were being treated, when I proclaimed the respect that was due to you, when I displayed a ceaseless anxiety about the People’s lot, I was held up to the same kind of scorn which you, yourselves, now heap on me.  You say that I was ready, when you abandoned me, to transfer my allegiance to others ;  that I lusted after power.  I cannot so flatter myself.  Your enemies and mine have placed between you and me a barrier which I will never try to break down.  They will hate me for ever because they have saddled me with their own faults.  It was not I who gave them hopes of being able to enjoy their ancient powers undiminished ;  it was not I who stiffened their resistance when the time had come for them to treat with fortune.  Ah, if they were not now being sorely oppressed, if they were not steeped in misfortune, how many reproaches could I not heap upon them.  The next time I put in a word for them in the matter of their rights or their possessions, they won’t imagine, I hope, that I wish to get these back for them.  I desire to-day to associate neither with them nor with anybody else.  Let me live and die with my memories and my thoughts !  Contemplating the purity of the feelings which have guided me, what social stay do I need ?  Ah yes, every feeling heart has need of human contacts.  I am forming them, these contacts, in a hopeful spirit, with the honest men of all lands, with those—how small their number is !—whose ruling passion is the love of righteousness on earth.”

From which it is clear that Jacques still cherished a lively hope of being able to live down his mistake and take up his burden.

“M. Necker,” wrote Germaine² with artless candour, “regretted bitterly that popularity which, without a moment’s hesitation, he had sacrificed to his sense of duty.  People have blamed him for attaching so much value to it.  Unhappy those statesmen who have no need of the support of public opinion !  Courtiers or oppressors, they are ready to win by intrigue or terror what men of generous mind seek not except as the expression of the regard of their fellows.”

Necker’s message of hope to France, which Germaine brought with her, was thus proclaimed by him :

“ I see,” he told her³ “primary assemblies nominating an electoral body, the electoral body choosing the deputies to the National Assembly, the National Assembly making laws and bidding the King approve and promulgate them, the King dispatching the laws to the departments, the departments sending them to the districts, the districts passing them on to the municipalities, the municipalities putting them in force with the help of the National Guard, the National Guard exerting a controlling influence on the People, the People obeying.”

But this House-that-Jack-built would not, the banker thought, be complete without the controlling influence of a House of Lords.

“ The legislator would have too easy a job,” he continued, “if all that was necessary to run this great political machine, the submission of the many to the wisdom of the few, was to conjugate the verb to command and repeat, like a boy at school, ‘ I command, thou commandest, he commands, we command, etc.’  An effective subordination, guaranteeing the free play of all the diverse elements, needs a carefully graduated system of consideration and respect as well as of official rank.  Distinction must grow from rank to rank, and there would be, at the top, a power able, by virtue of its actual strength supported by its effect on the popular imagination, to exert a direct influence on the whole political hierarchy.”

The salon in the rue du Bac, swept and garnished, rang with the evangel, and here were Narbonne, Talleyrand, Mathieu de Montmorency and the rest of them gathered to receive it.  That it was stale goods mattered nothing at all.  Necker’s stock, in the turning of Liberalism towards the Throne, had risen sharply, and there were many who believed that he would soon be with them again.  Had he not, in season and out of it, advertised his English Constitution as a certain preventive of democracy ?  Paris was in cheerful mood because the King had signed the Constitution.

“ The King and Queen,” Germaine wrote,⁴ “had been urged to go to the Opera.  When they arrived in the house they were greeted with hearty cheers in which the whole audience joined.  The ballet Psyche was being given.  While the furies danced and waved their torches, filling the theatre with light, I saw the faces of King and Queen, lit up by this pale imitation of Hell.  A horrible presentiment overwhelmed me.  The Queen was forcing herself to look pleasant, but one could see the deep sadness behind her charming smile.  The King, as usual, seemed more concerned about what he was looking at than about personal reactions.  He glanced round him calmly, even carelessly.  He was accustomed, like most sovereigns, to hide his feelings, and perhaps that long restraint had diminished their intensity.

“ We strolled afterwards in the Champs Elysées, which was brilliantly lighted.  Only the fatal Place de la Révolution⁵ separated us from the Palace and its garden.  The illumination of the Tuileries and the gardens was joined, in admirable fashion, to that of the long avenue of the Champs Elysées, garlands of lamps being used for the purpose.

“ The King and Queen drove slowly through the crowd.  The moment their carriage was recognised there were shouts of ‘ Vive le roi ! ’  But these demonstrators were the same who had insulted this very king on his return from Varennes ;  their applause was of no more account than their abuse.

“ I met a few members of the Assembly during my walk.  They looked like dethroned sovereigns, very much worried about whom their successors were going to be.  Undoubtedly there were good reasons for sharing their wish that they had had the task of maintaining the Constitution, such as it was, entrusted to them, for enough was already known about the spirit in which the elections to the new Assembly were being conducted to dispel any hope of improvement.  But our attention was disracted by sounds which came from all directions at once.  The people had begun to sing, and the newsboys, singing too, called in loud voices :

“ ‘ La grande acceptation du roi.  La constitution monarchique,’ etc.

“ It seemed that the Revolution was complete and that Liberty had been established.  But, all the same, people kept glancing at each other as if they hoped to find in their neighbour’s expression the security which none of them felt.”

On the proposal of Robespierre, the old Assembly had decreed that none of its members should be eligible for election to the new.  It was a move against the Liberals, who possessed the ablest parliamentarians in France and therefore stood to suffer most by the prohibition.  It had succeeded because the Royalifts of the old school, in their hatred of Liberalism, had supported it.  The effect was to furnish a body of deputies wholly lacking in experience of affairs.  The Legislative Assembly, as the new Chamber was called (to distinguish it from the old Constituent Assembly) contained few nobles and very few clergymen.  Most of its members were drawn from the middle class.

Germaine’s friends meanwhile had established a club, in the rue St. Honoré, a large, pretentious building with a restaurant attached.  They called themselves “Feuillants” from the name of this building, which had belonged to a religious order.  All were rich or, at least, well-to-do, and many were noble.  Now that the old aristocracy was gone over the border, the Feuillants were the smartest set in Paris as well as the brightest ;  puffed up most of them with spiritual and intellectual pride.  Here was Sieyès fresh from his labours on the Constitution of 1791.  Here the gentle Lameths, Mathieu Dumas, Jaucourt, Girardin, Bailly the Mayor, Talleyrand the Bishop, Mathieu de Montmorency-Laval, Narbonne, eight hundred “Friends of the Constitution” with the oracles of Necker buzzing in their ears and the belief that they had been divinely appointed to rule over France rooted in their hearts.  It was this belief which had caused them to come forth (in July 1791) from among the Jacobins who, having been honestly wed to Liberty, were now gone a-whoring after her slut of a sister, Equality.  From the rue St. Honoré to the rue du Bac they moved easily, full of talk, with their heads in the air, rejoicing in the vigour which Germaine’s unruly sex infused into their ideas.  They did not doubt that she was right.  France, as she said, could be ruled only by men of breeding and intellect, men of substance, women of wit.

Very different was the view expounded nightly by Madame Roland, Manon Jeanne Roland, born Philpon, who had her own salon and her own circle.  Manon was thirty-seven, twelve years older than Germaine, with a husband twenty years her senior and no money to speak about.  Her parties, for the Liberals of the Left, were dingy affairs, intolerably shabby by comparison with those of the rue du Bac ;  but what Manon lacked in splendour she possessed in ecstasy.  Frigid, rather plain, oldish, with nothing to give, she could excite the men who surrounded her as Germaine had never excited any man.  Brissot, Pétion, Robespierre himself, warmed their enthusiasm daily at this fire, which Buzot, with his love unrequited, had tended so long and so piously.  When Manon spoke, dreams borrowed flesh.  She gave her own flesh to Liberty that men might see and believe.  To be free, her message ran, is to be equal, since freedom is the nursing-mother of the love of humanity.  Manon, in the autumn of 1791, was queen of the Jacobins as Germaine was queen of the Feuillants.  The Jacobins, like the Feuillants, had their headquarters in the rue St. Honoré in the refectory of a religious house.  From small but respectable beginnings at Versailles, during 1789, when all its members were deputies from Brittany, this club had developed into a political octopus with its body in Paris and its tentacles in every village in France.  Where once Mirabeau had counselled, Marat now fell into convulsions so that more moderate spirits were saddened and alarmed.  But the Liberals of the Left, Manon’s men, still held the reins ;  Republicans at heart, they paid lip-service to the King.  That was their link with the Feuillants whom, for the rest, they held in jealous hate.  If only Manon could have rid herself of her loathing of Danton she might have led her flock along the path, soon to be trodden by the feet of Robespierre, which conducts from the Plain to the Mountain, from persuasion to force, from Liberalism to Dictatorship.  As it was, both she and her people lived in fear which quickened from day to day, for at bottom they were timid souls.  How long would it be before Danton’s great voice commanded the echoes of the Jacobin Club as now it commanded those of the Cordeliers, his own little Bethel, across the Seine, in the rue Dauphine ?  The Cordeliers had chosen an open eye as their sign.  The Girondists, as Marion’s folk, the most distinguished of whom came from that district, were now called, marked it with terror.

Danton’s open eye made the Girondists vote with the Feuillants as a rule.  But sometimes, when its glare had robbed them of their wits as well as of their courage, it made them vote with the extreme Radicals.  Nor were the Feuillants themselves immune from the influence of that basilisk eye.  They too had their moments of panic when every instinct counselled submission.  If the opening of the Jacobin Club to the public on October 4, 1791, three days after the first session of the new Assembly, was a Girondist sop to the Reds, the feeble opposition offered by the Feuillants to the decrees of the Assembly against the emigrants and the priests was, equally, a gesture of weakness.  Both parties were trying to run with the Royal hate and hunt with Danton’s and Marat’s hounds.  Louis on this occasion acted with an excellent courage.  He refused to sanction laws which condemned his own brothers, now emigrants, to death (November 9) and which imposed heavy penalties on priests whose consciences forbade them to take the civil oath (November 29).  The Girondists hoped fervently that this baiting of the King would convince Paris that they were true patriots.

Germaine, meanwhile, grew more and more convinced that France was perishing for want of her father’s vision.  She cast Necker’s mantle, therefore, about the shoulders of Narbonne and set to work with diligence to get him appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.

“ No Minister appointed yet,” wrote the Queen on November 7, 1791.  “Madame de Staël is working hard for M. de Narbonne.  I never saw a stronger and more involved intrigue.”⁶

The post was filled.  But Germaine did not despair.  A month later Narbonne became Minister of War.

“ Comte Louis de Narbonne,” wrote Marie Antoinette on December 7, “is at last, since yesterday, Minister of War.  What glory for Madame de Staël, and what a pleasure for her to have the whole army at her command.”

¹ Considerations, Part III, pp. 13 et seq.

² Considerations, Part III, pp. 13.

³ Considerations, Part III, pp. 16.

⁴ Considerations, Part III, pp. 454 et seq.

⁵ Where the guillotine was soon to be set up.  Now, the Place de la Concorde.

⁶ See Marie Antoinette’s correspondence with Fersen.