Germaine de Staël

COUP D’ÉTAT

HÉRIVAUX, in the Department of Seine-et-Oise, was a convent for which, in the previous November, Benjamin had given £2,000.  He had pulled down everything but a single wing ;  here he installed Germaine.  Mathieu soon joined them.

“ We have been three days, tête à tête in the desert . . . where our friend fears brigands more than boredom,” he wrote to Albertine Adrienne.

Benjamin returned to Paris to prosecute his labours.  He found Barras full of cheer ;  the bogy of Royalism was working wonders with the armies, who began to see a crown under Carnot’s hat.  Paris, on the other hand, was inclined to listen to Carnot.  The elections in April made the bogy lifelike.  A number of Royalists were returned, and even Germaine, with her inside information, began to fear that the Republic was lost :

“ My father assures me,” she wrote to Meister on April 22, 1797,¹ that you are so kind as to spare me a thought.  Till now I’ve been so persecuted, so lonely that I’ve sunk to nothing in my own eyes.  When the elections are over I’m going back to Paris.  When I get there I hope to write you letters more worthy of you, that is if you don’t come yourself into a country which is now more aristocratic in feeling even than you are.

“ Goethe has sent me a novel of his called Williams (sic) Meister, superbly bound.  As it’s in German I have been unable to admire anything but the binding so far.  (Benjamin, between ourselves, who read it, says I’m luckier than he.)  Do please send Goethe, from me, the most handsome thanks, taking care to hide my ignorance.  Say a good deal about my admiration for and recognition of the author of Werther. . . .

“ Aren’t you curious to come to a country where they choose as their representatives M. de Vauvilliers because he is involved in a Royalist plot, M. Bourlet because he was one of the Comte d’Artois’ valets ?  Here is a democratic Republic where you stand a good chance of being stoned if you aren’t an aristocrat, a land of philosophers where the most unenlightened kind of Catholicism is the most popular.  But for the armies there would be no further hope of the Republic.  I’m thinking of beginning a new book with these words :

“ ‘ The counter-revolution is accomplished.  Louis XVIII reigns.  It remains to be seen whether the two Councils and the Directory can plot so cleverly as to be able to dethrone him. . . .’

“ The Republic exiles me ;  the counter-Revolution will hang me ;  what I want is a place in the middle.  But in France things go from one extreme to the other so quickly that places in the middle are passed in an instant.”

Troubles, other than political, were accumulating.  The Parisian journalists, Royalist and Jacobin, had spied Benjamin and her in their nest and were entertaining their readers with tit-bits of information—about her pregnancy, her love-making in a convent, her recent relations with Ribbing, her former relations with Narbonne (now settled in Paris with Mathieu’s mother), with the Bishop (newly returned from America), with Mathieu himself.  The news reached Sweden, where Eric Magnus’ stock was low ;  he was dismissed and had to leave the rue du Bac.  Germaine stopped his allowance and refused to give him another penny.  He threatened divorce ;  she told him to go ahead.  Penniless, he had to dismiss his servants, sell his wines and turn to the money-lenders, who accommodated him at rates in the neighbourhood of 40 per cent.²  Mathieu was in despair.  Something must be done, but what ?  Did she wish her unborn child to be repudiated ?  He urged, entreated, prayed, begging her to leave Hérivaux and take a house of her own.  Appeal was made to Talleyrand, who wrote to her with his tongue in his cheek :

“ Mathieu is awfully pleased about his plan of a house for you.  It’s the only favour he dares now to ask of you.”

She yielded.  On May 13, a month before her confinement was due, she went to Ormesson, a place of Mathieu’s.  On May 30 she returned to Paris, and, financial arrangements having been made, placed herself once more under the same roof as her husband.  It was none too soon.  Her child, a girl, was born a week later, on June 8, 1797.  She called it Albertine, after her cousin.  The good Mathieu wrote to that lady :³

Paris, June 9, 1797.

“ I am happy to act to-day as our friend’s secretary, and to inform you from her bedside, that she was delivered yesterday morning, at ten o’clock, of a little girl, that she is very well this morning, and that my thoughts, like hers, turn to you.  I hadn’t the resolution to be here at the great moment, in fact, I only returned from the country yesterday evening and only learned then that the cruel moment had passed.  I am doubly thankful because there is now nothing to fear.  She tells me herself that her husband has taken it very well (a été bien), without, it is true, any very lively expression of feeling but with interest and kind attention.  I must finish my letter quickly because I want it to reach you by the same courier as that bearing her husband’s letter to M. Necker.

“ I wish we had her in the care of her most lovable cousin !  I’m a poor substitute for you, you know.  I want, meanwhile, during the next day or two, to prevent her seeing all the people she is longing to see. . . .”

Germaine was up in a week, opening her salon and entertaining “Jacobins in the morning ;  emigrés in the evening, and everybody at dinner.”  Here was the Bishop again, sunburnt from his long sea voyage, rather threadbare, with only twenty pounds in his pocket and threatening to blow his brains out if she couldn’t find him a job.  Benjamin, too, proud of his little daughter, deep, as he supposed, in Barras’s councils.  Mathieu, pained, prayerful ;  at rare intervals when Madame de Montmorency-Laval wasn’t looking, Narbonne.  Barras showed himself more obliging every day, for he was still uneasy about the generals.  The Bishop received from him, at Germaine’s urgent request, the appointment of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and as Talleyrand began his second career ;  Barras acknowledged, too, the debt of £100,000 to Necker and held out hopes that he would pay it ;  Benjamin’s suggestion that a club of the “lovers of Liberty” ought to be formed was welcomed with rapture.

“ You have no doubt seen in the papers,” wrote Benjamin on July 11, 1797, to his cousin, “much misrepresented details of a Club which originated at a dinner given by me and which is now composed of more than 600 members, among them all that is estimable and distinguished in the Republican party.  The Government greatly encourages this assembly, which has served already as a stimulant of public opinion.”

The Club had its headquarters in the Hôtel de Salm, rue de Lille, and was known as the “Salm.” Barras, Talleyrand, Sieyès, all the ministers, became members.  Germaine too.  They combined politics with pleasure, pleasure with wit ;  were gay, statesmanlike, greedy, garrulous, but never half so important as some of them supposed.  For the Salm, like the bogy of a Royalist reaction, was merely part of the Barras façade, a bait for fools who saw in it promise of more spacious days, of a larger liberty or more richly endowed licence.  Talleyrand knew better.  He got into touch with Bonaparte in Italy and gradually withdrew himself from the public eye.  Bonaparte sent his kinsman Lavalette, a man of integrity, to investigate and report :

“ I wrote the truth to General Bonaparte,” Lavalette stated.⁴  “ I declared that he would tarnish his glory if he gave any support to acts of violence which the situation of the Government did not justify ;  that nobody would pardon him if he joined the Directory in their plan to overthrow the Constitution and liberty ;  that proscriptions were about to take place against the national representatives, against citizens whose virtues made them worthy of respect ;  that punishments would be inflicted without trial ;  and that the hatred resulting from such measures would extend not only to the Directory but to the whole system of Republican government.  These considerations made so much impression on the mind of General Bonaparte that he soon avoided, in his correspondence with the Directors, all allusion to the interior situation of France, and at last left off writing to them altogether.”

It was enough for Barras that Carnot had not been able to mobilise the generals.  The moment he knew that he had nothing to fear from the military side, he set about preparing his blow.  Hints of what was coming reached Germaine, who perceived that everybody connected with the Royalists would be in danger and warned Mathieu, Narbonne and others to leave France at once.  They took her advice.  She flung herself whole-heartedly into the plot.  Thibaudeaut states that he dined with her one night.  Benjamin was present.  Both urged him to throw in his lot with Barras, assuring him that the Bourbons were at the gate.

On the night of September 4 (“18th Fructidor”) Barras struck.  Troops were called up and ordered to enter the Chambers and arrest the “Royalist” deputies.  The Director himself, in his apartments in the Luxembourg, awaited news, surrounded by a crowd of politicians, soldiers, citizens and women which included Germaine and Benjamin.  Somebody warned Carnot ;  he fled across the garden.  A few hours later a cowed and obedient Parliament, sitting in the presence of grenadiers and the mob that had gathered at sight of them, annulled the recent elections and condemned more than fifty persons to transportation without trial.  Barras was master of France.  “Some individual misfortunes,” remarked Benjamin saucily on the morrow, “were regrettable, but nevertheless necessary.”  Germaine took the same view.  Barras, in her opinion, had merely dissolved Parliament in the English fashion.  But away in Switzerland poor Mathieu, out of breath from his flight, saw the event from a different angle.

¹ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 146.

² Revue bleue, 17 June, 1905. Lettres à Nils von Bozenstein, cited by Paul Gautier, Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 103.

³ Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 108.

⁴ Lavalette :  Mémoires.

⁵ Thibaudeau, A.C.:  Mémoires sur la Convention et la Diretloire, 2 vols.