Germaine de Staël

AFTER THE STORM

EVEN the Royalists had to confess that the happy issue of the war was due, in some respects, to Robespierre’s chastening hand ;  Barras and Tallien had their share of that glory.  The letters to Verona grew more frequent and the face of Paris was cleansed of Equality’s dusty kisses.  In April a Committee was appointed to draft a new Constitution.

Eric Magnus, established again in the rue du Bac, found himself a more considerable figure than at any earlier period of his official life.  When, on April 22, 1795, he presented his credentials as Ambassador of the Regent Suderman of Sweden,¹ the Convention cheered him.  He was the only representative of royalty accredited to the French Government, and he possessed in addition immense prestige as a nobleman who had been the personal friend of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Therese Tallien and Josephine de Beauharnais, mindful of his conquests at Versailles, found him charming ;  Barras and Tallien, too.  De Staël, these harassed men were aware, was in touch with exiled Royalty.  They took him into their confidence, disclosing their plan of a constitutional monarchy, with an upper and lower chamber.

The chief obstacle in the way of this plan, they pointed out, was the republican sentiment of the Girondist rump, the largest party in the Convention.  This party, though it hated the Jacobins, remained faithful to its Radical principles and would shy at a King.  On the other hand, it was not unfavourably disposed towards the exiled Constitutionalists and might, if brought into contact with them again, modify its views to some extent.  Eric Magnus could not mistake the meaning.  They were inviting him to recall Germaine from Switzerland so that her salon might become, once more, a meeting-place for men of all parties.  He took the hint.  On May 15 the Swedish ambassadress set out from Mezéry with Benjamin.

“ Calm your ambition,” her father wrote to her.  “Permit me to ask M. Constant not to urge you, and to give you frequent lessons in prudence and patience.”²

The couple visited Bienne and spent a short time with the Kindergarten, the members of which were informed of the great destiny awaiting them when the new Constitution should be completed.  Germaine and Benjamin reached Paris on May 23, five days after the Jacobins had made a second attempt to overturn the Convention (on 1st Prairial).  That attempt was so formidable that troops had been called to the help of the special constabulary.  Again the riff-raff had been beaten off.  The first sight which the travellers saw, when they reached the barrières, was a cartload of gendarmes, who had helped the Jacobins, being trundled off to the guillotine.  An hour later Germaine was mounting the stairway of her huge house.  Benjamin went into lodgings near by, but he spent his days in the salon, which was opened without a moment’s delay, and which became, immediately, the only feature of the Parisian landscape that had not changed in the past two years.

“ There are districts of Paris,” wrote Meister,³ after his arrival there a few months later, “which seem to be entirely deserted.  The most deserted of all is the Faubourg Saint-Germain where, in streets of palaces, only a house here and there is occupied—as a rule by officials of the Government.  If you happen to enter one of these houses, across the façade of which is written, in huge red and black letters :  ‘For Sale :  National Property,’ you will be horrified at the state of disrepair in which you will find it.  Most of these houses have been stripped of furniture, glass, fixtures :  and, on the pretext of getting lead from the roofs and saltpetre from the cellars, the woodwork has often been ruined and the very walls broken down.

“ Evening began to draw in.  Passing near the dome of the Invalides—that wonderful house of God which they have treated as if it was the house of a nobleman or an emigrant—I saw a biggish group of huge figures, of a shining whiteness, crowded together like sheep in a fold.  I couldn’t make out at first what they were, but when I got nearer I recognised the enormous marble statues of saints which formerly occupied the niches of the superb church.  They were up for sale, like so many other objects of all kinds which one sees everywhere.  But these poor saints !  Who will buy them ?  Who will dare to buy them ?

“ It is at ten o’clock at night that the sadness and bareness of Paris are most apt to strike a visitor who has known her in happier times.  In the old days, at that hour, one was hurrying off to sup or to amuse oneself.  The wheels of a thousand carriages filled all the streets with a sound which expressed the joy and the gaiety of a light-hearted, care-free, contented people—or at least of a people which seemed to be so.  To-day, after the emptying of the theatres, silence reigns everywhere, and if a carriage passes you, you notice it.  With the exception of the patrols, there are scarcely any foot-passengers either.

“ There are very few cabs for hire.  For, people who kept their own carriages in better times, don’t reconcile themselves easily to paying £4 for a journey, even though, when exchanged for goods, these £4 are now scarcely worth a shilling. “ Almost all the spaces in front of the houses, and all the important streets, have become markets for furniture, china, pictures, etc.  You see everywhere the same sort of stuff that we used to see, in the old days, for sale on the pont Saint-Michele, the quai de la Ferraille, and under the piliers des Halles.  The capital of the world looks like an enormous old curiosity shop.

“ Fear of dying of hunger has driven people to invent all sorts of ways of feeding themselves.  One often sees a cage of rabbits at a house door or outside of a shop, and one sees, too, skinny goats whose milk may easily be very precious if things go wrong.

“ What strikes me most, in a general way, in Paris is the queer look of uncertainty, of ‘uprootedness’ on almost every face, a look at once restless, defiant and tormented, often haggard, too, and convulsive.  I believe that anyone who had never before seen, or even heard of Paris, on seeing it to-day, would echo the remark of M. de Jussieu to some man whose name I don’t know.  ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘ I have not the honour of knowing you :  but I find you very much changed.’ ”

Meister detested Revolutions ;  he was old.  Benjamin found Paris exciting.

“ Although,” he wrote to his aunt, “everything seems to be very dear, owing to the debased value of the assignat, although a dinner costs £4, a coat £120, yet nowhere can one live so cheaply as in Paris.  My lodging, consisting of four very attractive rooms, costs me 5s. a month, in silver, and the rest in proportion.  As the farmers are forced to pay half their rents in kind the interest from property is enormous.”  And again :  “ The triumph of the Convention has been as complete as its courage has been sublime.  The bloodthirsty men (Jacobins) are crushed, the insurgent quarters are disarmed, the guilty members of the Convention are imprisoned and handed over to justice. . . . I have not seen a single pinched face or a single beggar.  The Jacobins are detested ;  the Royalists are laughed at and despised ;  peace, order and the Republic are what people want and what they mean to have. . . . In short, opinion is being formed . . . and we may expect, shortly, the announcement of a strong, solid government. . . . Property and talents, the two reasonable bases of equality among men, will resume their rights, and humanity will have gained by all the sufferings which have oppressed the world through this Revolution.”

This lyrical tone was less noticeable in his next letter :

“ Freedom of speech and of the Press is extreme here ;  it is unheard of, this union of the most arbitrary power that ever existed on earth, with a licence complete in every direction.  The Government possesses everything, fears everything ;  it never puts through any measure thoroughly, it does not know either how to adopt principles of Liberty or how to make its dreams of despotism respected ;  and all this produces a combination of contradictions which has upon Society almost the effect of good government.”

The State’s disruption, in other words, was the individual’s opportunity.  Benjamin was become man-about-town and dandy ;  he was always scented now and wore his hair curled.

“ He is really delightful, if you could see him in Society,” wrote Pierre de Roussillon to Madame de Charrière ;  “ the salon of the Ambassadress suits him better than the little study at Colombier.  In a large company one makes more effort to please and talks more. . . . If you were not so averse from Society and enjoyed gathering in your study twenty-five persons of whom one was a Girondist, another a Thermidorian (i.e. of the party which, in the month of Thermidor, destroyed Robespierre), another an out-and-out aristocrat, another a Constitutionalist, another a Jacobin, we could enjoy the spectacle of Constant listened to and appreciated by all.  The salon here suits him much better.  If he passed only two hours a day, then it would be the best kind of education for him.  But alas-he passes eighteen hours there, lives entirely in this salon, and the salon exhausts him.  His health is ruined. . . . That figure, which had become elegant, is resuming to-day its stoop. . . . I have just come from his rooms.  I have been eating cherries with him . . . he fell asleep while we talked. . . .”

In his old age, Benjamin thus described the salon :

“ Members of the existing Government whose confidence she (Madame de Staël) sought to win ;  some relics of bygone days, whose appearance displeases their successors ;  all the returned nobility whom she was at once flattered and uneasy at receiving ;  writers who had recovered their influence since the 9th Thermidor and some of the Diplomatic Corps. . . . Amid the conversations, gesticulations and intriguings of these different parties my Republican naïveté found itself strangely embarrassed.  When I talked with the Republicans, who were victorious, I heard that it was necessary to behead the anarchists and shoot the emigrés almost without trial.  When I approached the little group of disguised Terrorists who had survived I heard them say that we must exterminate from the Government the emigrés and the foreigners.  When I allowed myself to be persuaded by the Moderates, and the flatterers among the writers who proclaimed the return of morality and justice, they implied at the second sentence that Justice could not get along without a King, a thing which shocked me strangely.”

For all that, Benjamin helped Germaine with her work of preparing the ground for a Constitutional Monarchy.  He was still in love with her and, as she had fallen in love with him, they were happy.  Each was necessary to the other, intellectually as well as emotionally, for Benjamin possessed so sure a nose for humbug, his own included, that Germaine in his keeping was rescued from her worst faults, fortified with a sense of humour and confirmed in that part of her faith which had a firm basis.  He, for his part, derived vigour from her mind, which served him best in its crudest operations.  Between them they made a prodigious stir and became, immediately, the talk of Paris, which, at that moment, stood in need of something to talk about other than the doings of gilded youth.  The city was in the mood of a man come straight from a death-bed to a feast.  It had ceased to sing the Marseillaise, having replaced that fierce song by the Thermidorian chant :

“ The tardy day of vengeance
Now makes the butchers pale,”

but Robespierre’s blue coat and nankeen breeches, his powdered hair and prim, spinsterish face still haunted its memory, side by side with the gracious, portly figure of the good King whose blood he, and it, had shed.  The intellectual fireworks of the rue du Bac served at once as anodyne and analgesic ;  the message of the rue du Bac, that “a man’s a man for a’ that,” was welcome to ears deafened by the bawlings about the Nation, the People, the State and Society.  Madame de Staël and her young friend, as the apostles of individualism in a world weary of social experiment, had a great success.  But jealousies were awakened :

“ The influence of the women,” Germaine wrote,⁴ “and the ascendancy of good company—what were called the ‘ gilded salons ’—seemed very formidable to the people who were not admitted to these salons.  They accused us, when we happened to invite some of their friends, of trying to seduce them.  You saw, on the 10th days, for Sundays no longer existed, all the elements of the old and new régimes gathered together at parties ;  but they were not reconciled.  The charming manners of well-brought-up people shone through the humble clothes, adopted during the Terror, which these people still wore.  The converts from the Jacobins found themselves for the first time in the society of the grand monde and were more disturbed about the bon ton which they wished to imitate than about anything else.  The women of the ancien régime paid court to them, to secure the recall of brothers, sons, husbands ;  and the gracious compliments which they knew how to pay them, exerted a profound effect on rough ears, inclining even the bitterest partisans towards conduct of which we have since seen so many examples.”

Snobbery is always a good card when the game is social fusion as a preliminary to a reaction in politics.

¹ Sudermann (Duc de) was the younger brother of the murdered Gustavus III and acted as Regent for his nephew Gustavus IV.  Sudermann was suspected of having had a share in his brother’s assassination.  He favoured Eric Magnus and the French Revolution.

² At a later date Necker complained bitterly of the way in which Barras and Tallien had made use of his daughter to further their schemes.

³ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, Introduction.

⁴ Considerations, Part III, p. 151.  Madame de Staël was not the only person who noted the eagerness of the Revolutionaries to acquire good manners.