Germaine de Staël

BENJAMIN

TALLIEN’S “Moderate Policy” was an invention born of necessity.  The gang of ruffians who overthrew Robespierre had small thought in that deed of anything but their personal safety ;  it was not until they woke up on the morrow of the Dictator’s death that ideas about a change of policy entered their minds.  Then, finding, to their surprise, that they were looked upon as heroes who had rid the world of a bloody tyrant, they made haste to appear in sheep’s clothing.  What a stroke of luck !  The memory of their massacres wiped out overnight, and places assured them in the counsels of just men.  Barras and Tallien proclaimed their love of mercy and threw open the prison gates to set Thérèse de Fontenay and Josephine de Beauharnais free.  Together they descended from the Mountain to that Plain on which, through so many scorching days, Sieyès had shepherded his timid flock.  A new government of all the virtues was formed and preparations made to beat off the inevitable counter-attacks of Robespierre’s bereaved followers.

Barras had the wit to see that this danger was not the only one likely to threaten his new power.  Millions of Frenchmen, forgetful to-day, in their relief, of the chastisements laid upon them, would on the morrow recall these chastisements and renew their demands for vengeance.  The throne as well as the guillotine had now, again, to be reckoned with and scapegoats would be needed.  He glanced about him, selecting them from among his associates.  Fouché,¹ in alarm, hid himself once more.

Authority had perished with Robespierre ;  compromise reigned in its stead, a marriage of murder, baptised to virtue in that Dictator’s blood, with Liberalism.  France, devoured by the greedy horde of Barras’ parasites and bemused anew by the eloquence of political jerry-builders, began to fall to pieces.  In Paris the Jeunesse Dorée, the Merveilleuses, the Incroyables, young men, banded together for Jacobin-baiting under the leadership of Freron, ex-assassin of Marseilles, ushered in the reign of debauchery.  Thérèse, now Madame Tallien, “Notre Dame de Thermidor,” was Queen.  A lovely, lissom girl this, with the rage of pleasure in her black eyes, multiplied in lecheries, soft and sleek of body.  These little hands which—so she loved to say—had killed Robespierre, glowed nightly with the kisses rained on them by the greedy, the ambitious, the unchaste and the fearful.  Millions of francs were burned to feed, clothe, amuse and horse this brigand’s darling, whose frocks cost more than Marie Antoinette’s.  Very young, she had chosen an older woman as her companion, Josephine de Beauharnais, “guillotine widow” of Alexandre, Vicomte de Beauharnais, a constitutional nobleman who had sat in the Tiers État and embraced the Republic.  Thérèse called Josephine “Rose” (that was one of her names) and went about everywhere with her ;  and the condescension was not resented.  For Madame de Beauharnais was short of money, partly as a consequence of the ruin of her family in the West Indies, brought about by her father’s ill-health, the war with England and the troubles with the slaves which had followed the Revolution, partly by her husband’s proscription and execution, and partly by her own dissolute habits, because of which Alexandre had divorced her.  Josephine had early associated herself with the more violent among the Jacobins, notably with Tallien.  She had even signed herself, at this period, “Jacobin of the Mountain faction.”  Barras had long been one of her intimates ;  and as she had become his mistress after the death of Robespierre, she achieved an importance in the political life of Paris second only to that of Thérèse.  Thérèse was necessary to Josephine because of her immense popularity as Tallien’s wife and the power which it gave her of extracting money from men ;  Josephine was necessary to Thérèse because of her influence with Barras.  All four lived vampire-fashion with their lips set on the veins of France.  They sold offices and contracts and made the jobbers, merchants, financiers and rogues who were their clients pay stiffly for their patronage.  At thirty-one Josephine was still a bewitching woman, with beautiful chestnut curls and blue eyes.  She was possessed of a figure of singular grace and seduction.  But there was a hard quality in her expression which offset these charms, and she had bad teeth.  Though the mother of a son and daughter, she was not less extravagant than Thérèse, not less greedy of luxury, not less determined to be fashion’s queen.  Her head, too, was stronger than her friend’s, her courage of a harder temper, her lusts of a more unruly fleshliness. These two women were in the direct succession from Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, Gabrielle de Polignac, Germaine de Staël and Manon Roland, in the sense that they exerted influence over the rulers of France.  The succession had been broken by Robespierre ;  its restoration, on the lowest plane ever reached, was in accord with the march to power of the scum of the population.  France had no rulers now except her armies, keeping watch, far away, on the frontiers, but Paris was too full of pleasure to bother about soldiers.  The armies, in face of a hostile Europe, including England, remained unpaid, badly fed, badly clothed, and degenerated, in many areas, into needy hordes of brigands.  The money which ought to have reached them was wanted for the women.

Germaine, sleeplessly watchful of events in the capital, felt the quickenings of a new excitement.  What might not a woman with brains accomplish in this new Paris ?  But it was idle to think of returning with the Kindergarten.  Narbonne and Mathieu and the others were on the list of emigrés, and could not enter France ;  and, in any case, these were nobles pledged to monarchy.  A new knight must be found if the moderate men, Sieyès and his people, the remnants of the Gironde, were to be supplied with leadership and established in power.

Fate sent this knight in the person of a Swiss of Lausanne, named Benjamin Constant, a tall young man of 27 years, with curly, reddish hair and spectacles, loose and ill-favoured of body, but possessed of a lively and acute intelligence.  Benjamin had been absent during long periods from his native land, as a student at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh (at Oxford he had to employ a “bruiser” to protect him from his fellow-students), at Erlangen, at Brussels, in the Pays-Bas, in Paris, in London, in Scotland.  From his earliest infancy this motherless lad had possessed Europe for his play-ground and the backwash of the literary and philosophical worlds for his teachers.  He had gaped at Suzanne Necker’s “Fridays” while still in his teens ;  had made love, before twenty, usually unsuccessfully, to married women ;  always successfully to chambermaids, barmaids and harlots ;  and had at that age entered on a liaison of intellect and sentiment, but mostly of intellect, with a woman twenty-seven years his senior, Madame de Charrière, who called him her “ White Devil.”

In his early twenties he proposed marriage to a rich French girl, Jenny Pourrat ;  and, when her mother made difficulties, pretended to swallow opium.  The argument failed to convince, but to show that there was no ill-will, Madame Pourrat carried off the stricken young man with her daughter to the theatre and they had a jolly evening.  But in the course of his reaction to this refusal, Benjamin got syphilis and fell into melancholy.  His father urged a “cure-de famille,” and he went to live for a while with his cousins and aunts in Lausanne, but discovered so lively a dislike of Switzerland that, had Madame de Charriere not been staying in the neighbourhood, he felt that he must have lost his reason.  Lausanne produced upon him the same effect as it produced on Germaine, namely, a violent hatred of “Society” and a strong wish to assert against it the claims of the individual.  This wish accompanied him to Brunswick, where his father got him appointed Chamberlain to the reigning Duke, Charles William Frederick, he with whom Narbonne, as French Minister of War, had dealings.  Brunswick proved a second Switzerland, and Benjamin, who looked rather grotesque in Court dress, descended to lower deeps of melancholy.  In despair he married a plump girl, badly pitted by smallpox, one of the Duchess’s maids of honour.  But Wilhelmina de Cramm, “la bonne Mina,” was neither tonic nor purge ;  merely an empty-headed shrew with a taste for social success.  Benjamin quarrelled with her and turned his back on her ;  she made him cuckold.  Divorce proceedings began.  By way of easing his exasperation, he had affairs, simultaneously, with an actress and a nobleman’s wife, named Charlotte de Hardenberg, baronne de Marenholtz, who had fallen in love with him.

“ Although,” he wrote to Madame de Charrière on September 25, 1793, “ I tell her every minute that I feel for her nothing but friendship, she is mad to marry me.  And she doesn’t want to wait for a divorce or any arrangement of any kind.  If she can’t marry me, she will follow me :  if she can only live with me, honour and everything else can go to the winds.  And, believe me, it isn’t pretence or pose or self-interest.  What has she to get out of it ?  Woman’s head or woman’s heart or. . . . Where, oh where, does this madness spring from ? ”

He called Charlotte de Hardenberg “Lagrande,” to distinguish her from the actress, and, as a test of love, made her take luncheon alone with her rival.  This meal, at which he was not present, caused a scandal.  He left Brunswick, returned to Lausanne and met Germaine.

¹ Fouché now disappeared from public sight during a long period.  Evidence exists to the effect that he became a pig farmer or perhaps merely a swineherd.  In any case he suffered extreme poverty.