Germaine de Staël

A NEW EVANGEL

THE explanation of this curious mistake made at the moment when the Reign of Terror was about to begin, is to be found in Robespierre’s behaviour.  He and Carnot and their associates on the Committee had so effectively performed their work of pulling France together that all danger of invasion had been averted.  The nation, possessed once more of a sense of security, reacted against the methods by which security had been achieved—namely, massacre and repression.  Deputations from the cities where the most horrible atrocities had been committed began to arrive in Paris and to utter protests of such vigour that even the cringing Convention was moved to wrath.  The Parisians took sides with these visitors, and let their feelings be known.  For a moment Robespierre and his friends thought that the time had come to change their tune.  But while they were making ready the olive branches and doves, Danton suddenly proclaimed himself the true apostle of loving-kindness, and called Paris and France to witness that he had pleaded, against Robespierre, for the Queen’s life, for the lives of the Girondists, and for mercy and peace for all men.  It was a bid for power which, in the existing state of public feeling, threatened Robespierre with the doom to which he had sent so many others.  With quickening anxiety the Dictator saw the effect which Danton’s eloquence was exerting on the Convention and realised that the members of that Assembly, overawed so long by fear of the guillotine and of the Committee which ordered it, were recovering their nerve.  Led by Danton, these cowards were likely to assert themselves.  The danger was imminent and terrible ;  in face of it Robespierre put the doves and olive branches away and exhibited the swiftness of a panther.  Pretending to agree with Danton, he turned, on March 15, 1794, upon the men who had incited to massacre, the mob leaders of Paris, that pack of wolves led by Hebert, madmen, foaming for blood, and sent them, livid and gibbering,¹ to the guillotine.  Then, while the cheers which had greeted this stroke were still echoing through France, he turned on Danton and accused him of political and financial corruption.  It was touch and go, but the Convention, once more scared out of its wits, surrendered its favourite after a short sharp struggle.  On April 5 Danton and all his associates were hurried off to the guillotine.  It was a wild spring evening, full of sunshine and rain.  As the red carts trundled along the rue St. Honoré past the windows of Duplay’s house where, in an upper room, Robespierre lived, Danton, foaming with rage, shook his fift at the drawn blinds :  “You will follow me, Robespierre,” he shouted.  Then he began to sing and came singing into the place.  He watched his friends’ heads fall on the spot where the King and Queen and Manon Roland had died, and went up the steps himself, the last.  “Come, come, Danton, no weakness ! ” he was heard to say, and then, with a laugh, to Sanson, who had cut off all the heads, from the beginning :  “ You will show my head to the people ;  it’s worth it.”  The crowd, silent, afraid, saw his silhouette against the crimson and saffron of sunset as he walked to the knife.

Robespierre was right, probably, in thinking that if he had not sent Danton to the guillotine, Danton would have sent him there.  The trouble was that France was become full of Dantons, men who wanted to make an end of the guillotine.  Robespierre now tried to associate with these honest folk and, to prove his good faith, made new war on the people who had conducted his massacres for him.  This tidy fellow, always well dressed, smug, with powdered hair and laundered cravat, set up, in the Spring of 1794, as a scourge of God.  He delivered sermons in a screeching tone and took to spying out backsliders, moral, political and financial.  All the brothels of Paris, for example, were shut and all the whores beheaded.  Men who delayed to wed their mistresses accompanied them to the guillotine, which was fed daily with the unchaste, the dishonest and the debauched.  Atheists, too, went to Sanson, because Robespierre had a mind to believe in God.  It was the Terror to end Terror, and it gathered force every day as the blue-coated apothecary discovered fresh recipients of his “purge of Virtue.”  In three months more than a thousand sinners were killed.

Nobody had foreseen such a development ;  nobody, perhaps, could have foreseen it.  And so, when Hebert and Danton died, it was prophesied confidently that Robespierre was about to lead the people to greener pastures.²  That was what Germaine heard at Zurich.  Instantly she decided to take the remains of the Kindergarten back to Paris and to comfort her affliction at Narbonne’s desertion by trying to get back her father’s £100,000.

“ I am very grateful, my dear sir,”³ she wrote to Meister in April from Baden on her way back from Zurich, “for all your goodness.  It has been the more useful to me in that it has enabled me to profit by circumstances so as to be in a position to go back to France.  I have seen with great pleasure that you approve this decision.  All my friends now in France, those who have remained there and those who have gone back, urge me to come.  My mother, unhappily, can’t bear the idea of our being separated.  It won’t be for long.  After having approved of my going, she has become the prey of millions of anxieties, and so I don’t speak about it to her ;  I don’t say I’m going and I don’t say I’m not going.  At the last moment I shall get her to read the letter of M. Schulthess, those of my friends in France and that which you had the goodness to write to me.  Getting them all together will make a greater impression on her.  At the same time, as the affair is very important, if I think that she is likely to try to stop me, I’ll put all these letters into somebody’s hands to be given her after my departure.  We can’t all three go at the same time ;  the weather is too bad for Mamma to travel and, besides, the expense would be beyond my means.  I’ll travel cheaply myself in excellent and very useful company.  I’ll send them (my friends) the money they will need to come and join me.  They will find all the arrangements made.  I feel sure I ought not to delay a moment.  “I’ll send you my corrected manuscript. . . .”

This was the manuscript of Zulma, the novel she had just completed in which a full account of her relations with Narbonne and his desertion of her is given ;  the first considerable literary work of her life.  Zulma—“ This work of mine which more than any other proceeds from my soul”—is written in sobs, sighs and shrieks, with the hiss of the lash which its author was applying to her lover’s back for setting.  Here is Narbonne naked, trussed up for whipping ;  Germaine naked too, that she may whip with the more vigour.  And the moral :  Hands off love !  After the transports of her rage had passed, it was the moral which interested her.  Narbonne, she recognised, was a social coward who could not face public disapproval.  The vicars’ wives in Surrey and the pastors’ wives in Geneva had been too much for him.  With a gesture worthy of Mirabeau she turned on these scandalmongers.

“ If to love deeply that which one respects, if to remain faithful to the sacred bond of friendship is to act a part, then I have acted a part ;  or rather I have nothing in my being which urges me towards, which even allows me to practise, any other way of life.”⁴

But she held them all, nevertheless, in apostolic hate.  Was this the “Society” which Rousseau had promised should be the guarantor of love ?  This poultry-yard of cackling hens ?  Her mind travelled to France, where Robespierre’s work of “cleansing the Revolution” was now, as she had learned, in full swing.  Rousseau had promised that Society would guarantee liberty also.  The event, in both cases, had shamed the prophet ;  she was done with Rousseau.  Nothing was to be expected from Society ;  men and women who wished to be free, whether politically or emotionally, must fend for themselves.  They must oppose Society since Society was certain to oppose them.  The State, in short, was at best a necessary evil.  Men and women were above the State and had the right, therefore, as men and women, to perfect themselves by liberty and by love, no matter what any constituted opinion might decree.  Full of this evangel, Germaine returned to Lausanne.  She found her mother at the point of death.  On May 5, 1794, she wrote again to Meister :⁵

“ I can’t tell you what I owe you.  You are necessary to me and I want to bring my life into closer touch with yours because you delight my whole heart and mind.  Tell me, then, where I can find a place for my father if I bring him (to Zurich) immediately after the heartrending event (her mother’s expected death).  Is there a furnished house to be had in the faubourg ? ”

Poor Suzanne died the next day, May 6, 1794, at 55 years of age.  “She met the right man and spent her whole life with him,” said Germaine piously.  “Peace be to her ashes.  She deserved far more than I to be happy.”

On May 18, 1794, Germaine wrote to Meister :⁶

“ You are aware of the calamity which has befallen my father.  But perhaps you don’t know that my mother left orders of an amazing and most extraordinary kind about the different steps which were to be taken to embalm her, to preserve her and to place her, under a glass lid, in spirits of wine, so that, as she imagined, her features would be so perfeftly preserved that my poor father would be able to spend his life gazing at them.  It isn’t in that way that I feel the need of being held in memory !

“ As a result of all this, my father won’t leave this neighbourhood until (my mother’s) tomb is built, that is until August.  After that I don’t think he will have any objection to going to Zurich.”

She wrote again from her new house, Mezéry, near Lausanne, on the 3oth :

“ Nothing will separate my father from that dreadful coffin.”

The company at Mezéry was plunged into lively distress by the news from Paris, for all, except Germaine, had relations in the capital.  Robespierre, smelling out sin like a witch-doctor, was finding it in exalted hearts.  Madame du Barry, uttering cries so terrible that even Paris shuddered, had gone to the guillotine.  Madame de Montmorency-Laval, Mathieu’s mother, seemed likely to go there also.  His brother, too, and his wife’s mother were in great danger.  Germaine set about, with an excellent enthusiasm and diligence, the work of rescuing these unhappy people.

“ M. de Jaucourt,” she wrote,⁷ “was living in my house, under one of the Swedish names which we had invented for him.  At the news of his nephew’s arrest (at the Swiss frontier) his despair was terrible. . . There was only one hope, namely, to induce M. de Reverdil, Lieutenant Baillival at Nyon, to claim M. du Chayla (the nephew) as a native of the pays de Vaud.

“ I went to M. de Reverdil to ask this favour ;  he was an old friend of my father and mother and one of the most enlightened and respected men in French Switzerland.  He refused at first, giving me good reasons for doing so.  He hated, he said, to tamper with truth on any pretext.  Further, as a magistrate, he feared to compromise his country by a falsehood.  ‘ If the truth is discovered,’ he said to me, ‘ we shall lose the right of claiming our real fellow-countrymen who have been arrested in France.  So that I shall be risking the lives of the people whose safety has been entrusted to me for the sake of a man who has no claim on me.’  It was a strong argument ;  but as the pious fraud which I asked for could alone save the life of a man who had the murderous axe hanging over his head.  I stayed during two hours with M. Reverdil trying to overwhelm his conscience by means of his humanity.  He resisted a long time, but when I repeated, over and over again :  ‘ If you say No, a marvellous son, a man of irreproachable character, will be assassinated in twenty-four hours, and it will have been your word which killed him,’ my emotion, or rather his own, won and the young du Chayla was claimed. . . .

“ Alas, I wasn’t always so lucky in my relations with my friends.  It fell to my lot, less than a month later (in June) to tell the man (of all my friends the most capable of affection, and in consequence of profound grief), namely, M. Mathieu de Montmorency, about the sentence of death pronounced on his young brother the Abbe de Montmorency whose only fault was the illustrious name he had received from his ancestors.  At that moment, M. de Montmorency’s wife, mother and mother-in-law were all in danger of death.”

The news of his brother’s execution was a knife in Mathieu’s heart.  Was it for this that he had forsaken the faith of his fathers, political as well as religious, to bend the knee to Liberty and live in sin with Germaine ?  The good young man fell into repentance with as much abandon as in his first youth he had fallen into revolt.  A licentious grief, like the grief he had experienced when his cousin died, wrought upon him such transports of remorse that even Germaine, who understood the mechanism of these symptoms very well, became alarmed.  Mathieu dwelt upon the King’s death, his appointed Lord whom his hands had helped to scourge.  Step by step, with a singular diligence, he trod, in spirit, the way which Louis had trodden, from the Tuileries to the Temple, from the Temple to the place.  The King had died as only Christians can hope to die, with blessings and forgiveness on his lips and in his heart.  Mathieu resolved to live in the light of that example.  He edified Germaine with the spectacle of a conversion to which no detail of penitence on the one hand, or of hope on the other, was lacking.  She learned that he would be a brother to her, and then, a little later, that his energies had been consecrated to the winning of her soul for God.  Very much impressed, she walked with this beautiful young man in the meadows by the lake and agreed with him upon the mystery and sadness of human life.  They drew inspiration and help from Mont Blanc, so remote and pure in a naughty world, and from the summer flowers, generous of their virtue while men were ravening for blood.

They were not always alone on these walks.  There had come into both their lives a new and gracious, if rather coy, influence in the person of Madame Necker de Saussure, the wife of Germaine’s cousin.  True, the lady had been known to both of them for years ;  but, until now, only distantly and, in Germaine’s case, unfavourably.  Albertine Adrienne de Saussure, like Suzanne, was the learned daughter of a learned Swiss father who had taught her four languages, much science and more philosophy.  Her early marriage to Louis Necker’s son had anchored her to Geneva and made her, so far as Germaine was concerned, something of a poor relation, for though Louis Necker had acquired an estate named “Germany,” and was now known as “M. Necker de Germany,” he was small beer when compared with Jacques.  Albertine Adrienne, nearly as proud of her father as was Germaine of hers, had added his name to that of her husband.  She excelled in good works, in the office of motherhood and in the contemplation of virtue, qualities which her cousin had not found attractive in the rue du Bac, but which shone with a bright lustre by the lake-side in these days of moral and spiritual stock-taking.

Albertine Adrienne was pretty, with fluffy, golden hair and blue eyes of an excellent candour.  Her complexion, strawberry and cream, her manners squirrelish, her mind simple, sincere, of the bread-and-butter variety.  No wonder she had shrunk from Germaine at their early contacts !  But little by little the zeal of her cousin had eaten her up.  Germaine’s Liberalism, her lovers, her lewd enjoyment of notoriety, her babyish vanity, the réclame which attended her, her flaming griefs and furious boredoms, the rich, raw colours of her mind, above all her aggressive vitality, won Albertine Adrienne from disapproval to devotion.  The cousins, who were of the same age, became so necessary to one another that, soon, on dark days, Madame de Staël found her deepest comfort in weeping upon the bosom of Madame Necker de Saussure, who knew better than any other how to dry such tears. Albertine Adrienne was not less successful with Mathieu.  They had met for a moment in the trying circumstances of Juniper Hall.  But now, with Narbonne fled and the Bishop beyond the sea, a closer approach was possible.  Mathieu derived from the Swiss girl’s purity the same kind of help as he was deriving from the purity of Mont Blanc ;  an uplifting of soul the ecstasy of which was not diminished by its freedom from danger.  Their golden heads, bent together over the Confessions of St. Augustine, made a pretty picture for Germaine’s beholding.  She could view it without a pang ;  these two, as she was assured, had no other object in life than her salvation.  Mathieu with his reviving faith brought the manners and speech of Versailles to the alliance, Albertine Adrienne the sweet wisdom of her motherhood.  It was love among the lilies with the heartache left out.

But such souls as Germaine’s are not won without affliction.  June and July 1794 were anxious months for the new friends.  Could they hide from themselves that their hostess was pining for Narbonne and the Bishop ?  Mathieu threw himself with enthusiasm into the work of helping to rescue his relations from the guillotine and found a new, rich satisfaction in the escapes of his mother, his wife and his mother-in-law.

Germaine deserves credit for these achievements for, in the last days of his sovereignty, Robespierre’s zeal was quickened.  The fellow had been so successful that, when summer rode into the sky, everything seemed possible.  The armies continued to win battles, the Commune of Paris, tamed by Hebert’s death, cooed, dovelike, on the Dictator’s finger ;  as for the Convention, its members crawled on the ground, beating the earth with their hands.  Since their surrender of Danton, they scarcely dared to breathe.  With Robespierre were the lively oracles.  These now counselled “Recognition” of the “Supreme Being,” as they had counselled, formerly, the chastisement of the ungodly.  Preparations were instantly made.  Robespierre addressed the Convention on the immortality of the soul and demanded in threatening tones :  “ Will the idea of his annihilation inspire purer and more exalted sentiments in a man than that of his immortality ? ”  Those atheists who continued to live shrank from answering him.  Could they forget that they had worshipped Reason, in the person of an actress, in Notre Dame, but a little while ago ?  Or that Robespierre had been educated by the Jesuits ?  The Festival of the Supreme Being took place and all the members of the Convention who were not in hiding attended.  They wore caps covered with feathers, and each carried in his hand a bunch of flowers, fruit and ears of corn.  They saw Robespierre set a torch to the figures of Atheism, Discord and Selfishness and await with holy joy the emergence of Wisdom from the ashes of these false gods.  When Wisdom, rather blackened by smoke, appeared, the high priest of the new faith ascended a little hill made of stucco, on which incense was burning, and preached to the people.

“ To-day,” he screeched, “let us give ourselves up to the transports of a pure enjoyment.  To-morrow we will combat vice and tyranny anew.”

The preacher was in sky-blue, with a big tricolour plume in his hat.  His square, slightly squat face, with its pouting lips, big forehead and short-sighted, green eyes, had never looked so catlike.  The cat purred ;  but every eye was on its claws.  What would to-morrow bring forth, when this man, who had learned virtue from Rousseau himself, who owned no money, drank no wine, and had known no woman, addressed himself again to the extirpation of greed, lust and unbelief ?

That question exercised particularly a group of sinners each of whom knew that the preacher was determined on his death.  They were not all present in the congregation.  Joseph Fouché, for example, the ex-Oratorian, who had caused some 2,000 men and women and children to be massacred in Lyons, was absent, but his accomplice Collot d’Herbois, Robespierre’s old secretary, was there.  Fouché’s long, grey face, so sheep-like but for the big, half-closed eyes, had not seen the light of day for some weeks.  He dwelt with his wife and children, who adored him, adventuring out only after the fall of night.  His case was the worst of all because he had quarrelled with Robespierre and was atheist, communist and pilferer as well as assassin.  Jean Lambert Tallien, greatly daring, stood under the pulpit ;  he too was atheist, thief and assassin, who added lechery to his backslidings.  This fellow, bullet-headed, with a brush of hair like a terrier, a great birth-mark on his face, and eyes full of surliness, was son of an upper servant and had been lawyer’s clerk and printer.  Sent to Bordeaux to slay, he had spared Therese de Fontenay, wife of the Marquis de Fontenay, daughter of the Spanish banker Cabarrus, fallen in love with her and brought her home with him to Paris.  Robespierre had the lady safe now, under lock and key, well established on her way to the guillotine.  With Tallien was Paul Frangois Nicolas, Comte de Barras, ex-officer of the King’s army, who had helped to defend the remnants of French power in India against England.  A gay fellow this, lewd and debauched, who boasted that he had reduced the population of Toulon, after the siege, from 29,000 souls to 8,000, and who was fat already with gains from the swindles he had conducted at France’s expense.

These men and their friends, held in horror by all decent Frenchmen, had not yet been called to account by Robespierre because, having been his special agents in the work of terrorising provincial France, they were well-informed about him.  Possibly he had thought of sparing them, but that was before his divine mission had been revealed to him.  How should Agag not be hewn in pieces before the Supreme Being ?

A few days later, Fouché, Tallien and Barras learned that their hour had come.  It was July 26, 1794, the 8th Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar.  Stiff with terror, feeling the knife at their throats, they decided to resist.  Next day, when Robespierre ascended the Tribune to pronounce their names, they howled him down.  Tallien was boldest ;  he had a letter from Thérèse in his pocket in which she told him that she was condemned to die on the following morning.  Startled and shocked, Robespierre appealed to the “good men, virtuous men” of the Moderate party to help him against the Sinners.  The leaders of that party were Sieyès and Cambaceres, worthy citizens, timid as hares ;  while Tallien and Barras thundered and the President, Billaud-Varenne, drowned Robespierre’s voice with his bell, they took their inevitable decision.  It had been proposed to arrest the Dictator ;  trembling but determined, they rose in support of the motion.  But Robespierre had one card left—namely, the Commune.  His friends delivered him from prison, brought him to the Hôtel de Ville, and rang the alarm bells.  Would the Sections rally to his support as in the days of old ?  The Convention, terrified at its own boldness, appointed Barras to command the troops of the Paris garrison and retake the prisoner, and at the same time passed a decree of outlawry on Robespierre.  For an hour or two a fight between the mob and the soldiers seemed inevitable ;  then rain began to fall, and the Sections, half-hearted from the first, for even they were sick of massacre, went home to bed.  Barras entered the Hôtel de Ville, and Robespierre and his folk were seized.  Robespierre’s jaw was broken, either by a shot fired at him or by a shot fired by his own hand.  They let him lie bleeding all the next day on a table in the Hall of the Committee of Public Safety, the same from which he had ruled France.  Hundreds came to mock him.  Only one man spoke a kind word.  To that man he replied :  “Merci, Monsieur,” though the title had been abolished in favour of Citoyen.  At four o’clock the carts arrived, for outlaws have no right of trial.  Robespierre was twentieth on the list.  Just before the knife fell, Sanson snatched the bandage from his broken jaw.  He uttered a scream which was heard all over the place and which was greeted with delirious cheers.

Just eighteen months had elapsed since the execution of the King.

¹ Hebert died very badly.  Under the pseudonym of “Père Duchesne,” he had written daily to demand fresh executions.  Street boys followed the tumbril in which he was taken to execution, and mocked him, calling “He’s in a devil of a rage to-day, is Père Duchesne”—the cry of his own newsboys.  In fact he was fainting with terror and had to be dragged to the knife in a state of collapse.

² Queen Hortense, who was a child in Paris at this time, is emphatic about the high hopes which were entertained about Robespierre.  See her Mémories, Vol. I.

³ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 106.

⁴ From the Preface to Zulma.

⁵ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 109.

⁶ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 111.

⁷ Considerations, Part III, p. 137.