Germaine de Staël

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GERMAINE reopened her salon next day and abandoned herself to such transports of joy that her father, to whom she wrote regularly, felt it necessary to rebuke her.

“Your nerves have got the better of you,” he wrote a week after the beginning of the Consulate.  “It’s true, everything hangs on a single life.  But he’s young, and fate will take care of him for us.”  He wrote again on December 16 :  “ The general delirium which surrounds you ... your enthusiasm for Bonaparte. ... I congratulate you on being so greatly rejoiced of his glory.”  And again :  “You’re all spell-bound.  I congratulate you not on feeling so uplifted but on feeling so happy.”

Germaine awaited her call to the hero’s side in breathless excitement.  The makers of the new Constitution, with Sieyès at their head, came every night to the rue de Grenelle to refresh themselves with her wit.  Talleyrand, too, confirmed in his office of Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fouché, Minister of Police, Lucien Bonaparte, Minister of the Interior, Joseph Bonaparte, the Consul’s eldest brother, Elisa Bonaparte his sister, Benjamin, Mathieu.  She was back again in the spacious days of 1789 and 1790.  If only Bonaparte himself would haste !  She exhausted speech in praising him—his wisdom, his clemency, his tolerance, his virtue, his glory.  His brothers were bidden tell him what she felt.  But when he offered no sign the light began to fade in her black eyes.

Sieyès produced his last and greatest constitution.  Bonaparte disembowelled it, made its author, as a consolation prize, President of his new Senate and replaced him and his friend Roger Ducos in the Consulate by Cambacères and Lebrun.  On December 15, 1799, the First Consul’s own constitution was promulgated.  It restored absolute power to the head of the Government, abolished popular election altogether, but provided for a Council of State to be nominated by the First Consul, and two popular Chambers, the Tribunate and the Legislative Body, to be nominated by the Council of State.  Versailles had risen from the dead.

“The Revolution,” said Bonaparte, “is now anchored to the principles which gave it origin.  It is finished.”  Louis XVI had said much the same thing in 1789, when, after receiving the submission of the nobility and clergy, he had offered, within the limits of his own absolute authority, equal justice, equal opportunity and equal taxation to all citizens.  Germaine felt, suddenly, that she had been exiled from history.  Had Necker, then, counted for nothing ?  Had the Feuillants, Narbonne, Mathieu and the others, counted for nothing ?  Had the Constitutional Republicans, Benjamin, for example, counted for nothing ?  Who was this Corsican who, by implication, blamed the children of Liberty for the sorrows of France ?  She let her tongue run as freely in criticism as she had let it run before in praise.  Bonaparte sent his brother Joseph to remonstrate.

This was a tall, good-looking man with the grave brow and straight Grecian nose of the Bonapartes, but weak “of mouth, as are wine-bibbers and lovers of many women.  He was intelligent above the ordinary, a student who had profited by the 10,000 volumes in his father’s library ;  but knowledge had not brought peace of mind.  Giuseppe Buonaparte, Corsican, Italian, felt himself lost in a world where his rights as eldest son counted for nothing.  Too sensible of the value of money to dream for an instant of renouncing his share in Napoleon’s good luck, he continued to regard that good luck as a slap in the face.  Providence had been ill-informed.  Giuseppe lurked always behind the smiling mask of Joseph, troubling his kindly eyes and imparting bitterness, sometimes, to his speech.  Germaine had known how to address, flatter and console ;  Joseph held her in high regard.  He began by apologising for his brother.  France was at war with England and Austria, to say nothing of smaller states.  She was bankrupt, torn by factions.  A strong hand, therefore, was necessary.

“My brother is hurt by your attitude to him,” said Joseph.¹  “ ‘ Why,’ he asked me yesterday, ‘ doesn’t Madame de Staël attach herself to my Government ?  What does she want ?  The payment of the money lent by her father ?  I’ll order the money to be paid.  Leave to live in Paris ?  I’ll give it her.  What on earth does she want ? ’ ”

So, at last, the hero had condescended to notice her existence.  Her eyes sparkling with joy, she replied :

“It isn’t a question of what I want, but of what I think.”  France, she resolved, should hear what she thought.  She wrote at once to her friend Chabaud-Latour, a member of the Committee for organising the new popular assemblies, begging him to introduce Benjamin to Bonaparte.

“ M. Chabaud-Latour,” says Aimé Martin, ² who had the story from him, “took Benjamin Constant to the First Consul and introduced him.  Bonaparte remarked that he had read Constant’s works and had been much interested in them.  He congratulated him.  Benjamin returned compliment for compliment and then expressed his wish to be made a member of the Tribunate.

“ ‘ And why not ? ’ said Bonaparte.  ‘ Yes, that can be arranged.  We’ll see to it.’

“ At these words Benjamin warmly assured the General of his devotion to him, exclaiming :

“ ‘ Believe me, I’m with you.  I’m not one of those ideologues who think everything can be done by thought’ (a hit at Sieyès, now critical of Bonaparte).  ‘ Give me deeds ;  if you nominate me, you can count on me.’

“ They parted.  M. Chabaud-Latour remarked, as he and Benjamin were descending the stairs, that he was going to see Sieyès.  Benjamin said he would accompany him.  He didn’t need an introduction ;  he knew Sieyès.  He wanted to see him, to talk to him.  Sieyès’ office was in the same street as Bonaparte’s, directly opposite it.  They crossed the street, ran up the steps and entered.  Benjamin Constant succeeded in getting a short interview.  He asked Sieyès to have him made a Tribune, and said to him :

“ ‘ Well, you know that I detest force.  Never will I be friend to the sword.  What I love are principles, thoughts, justice.  So if I’m happy enough to get your support, you can count on me, for I’m Bonaparte’s strongest opponent.’

“ M. Chabaud was astounded by the coolness of Benjamin.”

Bonaparte nominated Benjamin.  Instantly that man became his bitterest critic.

“At eleven o’clock at night,” said the General, “he begged for the post on his knees.  At midnight, when he had got it, he began to insult me.”³

Germaine gathered round her everybody who had a grievance against Bonaparte.  Her salon was transformed overnight from a place of worship to a slaughter-house.  She exerted her agile wit to make sport of his constitution ;  and not of that only.  He, himself, and his worthy wife, his mother too, earned shares of her attention.  She had found a new friend, Juliette Récamier, a lovely girl of twenty-one, with a sharp tongue, the wife of an elderly millionaire.⁴  They competed in making epigrams about the Bonaparte family ;  that good old woman, the dam of the lively brood, called by her sons and daughters “Mama Letizia,” with her bony features, her work-worn hands and her Corsican French ;  the noisy, insolent minxes, her younger daughters, Pauline and Caroline, who were giving themselves airs already ;  above all, Josephine, Barras’s cast­off, who had so narrowly escaped divorce for her affair with Hippolyte Charles.  The great ladies of the rue de Grenelle looked down their noses at the other salon in the Luxembourg where Consul Bonaparte’s wife laboured to receive Consul Bonaparte’s friends in the humble spirit of a woman who has just had a new leaf turned over for her by her husband.  What a dreadful, dowdy, dreary caricature of bon ton !

Bonaparte, instructed by Fouché, heard it all.  He was busy ;  let them have rope enough.  On New Year’s Day, 1800, the Tribunate met in the Palais Royal, among the gaming-houses and brothels.  Two days later the first of Germaine’s champions opened the attack by expressing his pleasure that they were sitting in the building which had been a cradle of the Revolution and where,

“ When people talk of an idol fifteen days old one can remind oneself of another idol, aged fifteen centuries, which was shattered to atoms.”

Bonaparte defended himself in the Moniteur against this charge of tyranny.  One of his friends, on his behalf, called attention to the “restless and disturbing ambitions of a well­known person.”

Was it true, asked the writer, that the Tribunate was to degenerate into an “organised opposition” (Germaine’s phrase) and to make bad blood everywhere at the moment when the Government was labouring to restore good-will ?  The salon in the rue de Grenelle blazed that night with wit and candles, and though familiar faces, notably that of Talleyrand, were absent, Lucien Bonaparte was among the guests.  Benjamin approached Germaine.

“You see,” he said, “your drawing-room is full of people whom you like.  But if I deliver my speech to-morrow it will become a desert.  Have you thought of that ? ”

She eyed him coldly.  Would he too leave her ?

“One must be true to one’s principles.”⁵

Benjamin delivered his speech.  His bitter tongue, all the more bitter because he had no stomach for this job, jested at the rule that the Tribunate might discuss new laws but must not touch them.  Then he became eloquent with the turgid eloquence of Germaine.

“ We owe it to the People,” he cried, “to save it from these laws, if that is possible.  This is not our own cause which we are pleading but the People’s ! ... There is only servility here and silence, a silence to which all Europe is listening.”

Bonaparte did not take his Benjamin too seriously.  “There are a dozen or more metaphysicians in the Tribunate,” he remarked, “who should be drowned.  Lice on my clothes ;  but I’ll get rid of them.  Do they suppose that I’m going to allow myself to be attacked as Louis XVI was attacked ? ”

The Jacobin Press, under Fouché’s guiding hand, now gave Germaine a whiff of grapeshot.

“ It isn’t your fault that you’re fat,” one inspired pen declared, “but it is your fault that you’re an intriguer.  Mend your manners, for your kingdom is not of this world.  You know the way back to Switzerland.  Be off, before something nasty happens to you ... and take Benjamin with you. ... Let his light shine in the Swiss Senate. ...”

Said a Royalist writer :

“ She writes about philosophy which she doesn’t understand, about morality which she doesn’t practice, about the virtue of women which she doesn’t possess. ... ‘ Benjamin,’ says she, ‘ shall be Consul.  I’ll give the Finances to Papa, Justice to my uncle, an ambassadorship somewhere to my husband.  As for me, I’ll keep an eye on the lot.’ ”⁶

Half a gale, with Bonaparte at the bellows !  She gave a dinner in Benjamin’s honour.  Ten of the guests, including Joseph Bonaparte and Talleyrand, asked to be excused.  What could it mean ?  “ Who has been more enthusiastic for Bonaparte than me ? ” she wrote to Roederer, Bonaparte’s friend.  Her salon emptied.  Fouché called one day during business hours.  He bowed many times.  No doubt, he said, the First Consul had been misinformed, but that speech of M. Constant’s ...

“M. Constant,” cried she, “is a man of too lofty a mind to take his views from a woman.”⁷

Her despairing eyes saw the Minister of Police bend again before her as he offered the suggestion that a few days passed in the country, at Saint-Ouen, for example, would prove beneficial to her health.

She had to go.  Talleyrand was giving a ball on the 25th of February, at which Bonaparte had promised to be present.  She wrote to beg an invitation “in the name of our old friendship.”  The Minister of Foreign Affairs replied that he advised her to keep away “in the name of our old friendship.”  He did not send her an invitation.  She returned to Paris and got herself asked to an evening party at Madame de Montesson’s in the hope of running her quarry to earth.  She came in a tremendous dress of grey satin.⁸  There was no Bonaparte.  Nobody would speak to her, and she stood alone in a corner of the drawing-room until, at last, Delphine de Sabran⁹ took pity and murmured a few words.  These people were of no account.  But how to forgive the Bishop ?  The more she thought about his refusal to invite her to his ball the more bitter she grew.  Fouché had behaved better.

“Fouché,” she wrote, ¹⁰ “often spoke of virtue as of an old wives’ tale.  But a very wise head made him choose decent behaviour as the most rational, so that his wits brought him where other people arrive under the promptings of conscience. ... I had rendered M. de Talleyrand the most vital services and, what is more important, had been his unflinching friend for years.  He was going to give a ball, and Madame B. (Josephine), who was always kind to the underdog when possible, had promised that she would arrange for me to have a talk with the First Consul and had expressed a hope that this talk would completely remove the anxiety I felt that I might be sent into exile.  I counted the days to the ball, never dreaming that M. de Talleyrand might not invite me.  But he didn’t invite me.  No, not even after one of my friends had explained to him how much my peace of mind depended on being invited.  That man, who during ten years had spent most of his life in my house, who had me to thank for his return from America, for the management of his business affairs in his absence, that man to whose good luck, I swear it, I had powerfully contributed and from whom I received ten letters in which he swore that he owed me his life, that man gave the signal to my persecutors. ... There is a man very well fitted for this world’s commerce. ... He says little and so is able to weigh his words.  As he never learns anything except by listening, he hates arguments, where his lack of solid knowledge is exposed.  He has no eloquence because eloquence demands movement in the spirit and he has disciplined himself to such an extent as to be unable, even if he wishes to do so, to let himself go.  He cannot express himself, because to speak easily one must be able to write easily, and, with all his gifts, he lacks the capacity to write even a page of all the works which have been published under his name.

“ But, when he likes, his smallest gestures possess an inimitable good taste.  He knows how to possess himself of the intelligence of the whole world.  And yet, excellent judge and most discerning critic as he is, he is also strangely barren, a man who needs both power and riches for his mind’s as well as for his body’s comfort.  Possessed of them he will let fall, as occasion offers, sarcasms or compliments, having taken care, beforehand, to be surrounded by people ready to pick them up and prepare the way for more. ... Mask-like face, silent when it suits him, insolent in the most calculated fashion when that is necessary, displaying polished and charming manners when he wants to ... he cannot inspire trust in anyone.”

On February 19 Bonaparte moved into the Palace of the Tuileries.  Germaine watched him ride by to the house of the Kings of France, where, during ten years, the revolution had had its lair.  Others observed the sudden bowing of his head as the blackened standards of Arcole and Rivoli were carried past.  She saw only the well-disciplined smartness with which his lackeys lowered the steps of his carriage before he mounted his horse.¹¹

“As for him,” she sneered, “he looked at nobody and thanked nobody.”

She heard from him, however, through Joseph.  On March 19 Joseph brought her a letter from his brother which declared :¹²

“M. de Staël is in destitution while his wife is giving dinners and balls.  If you’re still in communication with this woman, might you not suggest to her the advisability of making her husband an allowance of from £500 to £1,000 a year ?  Or have we reached times where people can trample underfoot not good manners only but duties also as sacred as those binding children to their fathers, without at the same time forfeiting the regard of honest folk ?  One doesn’t, of course, judge Madame de Staël’s behaviour by male standards.  But would any man who was heir to the fortune of M. Necker, and who had, for long, enjoyed the privilege attaching to a distinguished name (de Staël) leave his wife in penury while he lived in abundance and expect at the same time to be received in decent society ? ”

It was the bitterest moment of her life, though she knew that her father had given Eric Magnus £1,000 to go home to Sweden, when, for the second time, he lost his job, and another £1,000 on his unwelcome return to Paris with a small pension added.¹³  “No money, no Swiss,” says the French proverb, and where there are proverbs there is sensitiveness.  But it was not only the financial matter that troubled her ;  she was still living with Benjamin.  Did this devil of a Bonaparte propose to attack her on the score of her private morals ?  In lively fear she appealed to her father, who sent Eric Magnus money and wrote his daughter letters full of good advice and fulsome praise of Bonaparte—letters meant to be opened and read by the police.  For example :

“ Your hero Bonaparte is admired by all.  Be wise.  Be prudent.”

Joseph consented to be her advocate with his brother.  “She’ll adore you,” he declared, “if you show her the smallest kindness.”

“No good,” said Bonaparte viciously, “I don’t want her adoration.  She’s too fat.”¹⁴

In April 1800 Germaine published a new book of 600 pages entitled De la Littérature, considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions Sociales.  Her first object in writing this book had been to suggest a form of soothing syrup for Terrorists, but before it was finished these had gone to Sanson for more radical treatment and she had come into association with Bonaparte.  De la Littérature, therefore, was reshaped for new uses.  Its readers were called to witness that the human spirit—by virtue of its perfectibility—marches from strength to strength, ascending ever to higher planes of goodness.  She had said it all before but felt compelled now to discuss the Reign of Terror which, after all, was an expression of the human spirit.  The fault—would-be dilators please note !—had been the denial of Liberty.  And the moral :  governments could not accomplish for men and women what (with the help of literature) these must accomplish for themselves.  She was at pains to indicate the kind of literature most likely to prove useful.  It was the literature of passion, eloquent, emotional literature, appealing directly to the heart, the seat of “perfectibility.”  In short, “love prepares the soul for virtue”;  love and liberty are aspects of the environment in which alone the march to goodness can take place.  And literature is the guarantee of both.  A ruler ought, therefore, to show special consideration to writers.  She mentioned Ossian, Bonaparte’s favourite, in the same breath with Homer.

Bonaparte tried to read the book.

“ I sat down with it,” he told Lucien,¹⁵ “for at least a quarter of an hour, in the hope of making something of it.  Devil take me if I can make head or tail.  Not that there are not plenty of words, big words too.  But all the concentration of which my mind is capable has not been enough to make sense of a single one of these ideas which I am told are so deep.”

Small wonder :  Bonaparte was an empiricist, in peace as in war ;  an empiricist, moreover, possessed of a respectable body of information about human nature.  “Savage man is a dog,”¹⁶ he had declared in Egypt.  He said now :  “Men are always and everywhere the same,”¹⁷ using the tones of a research worker who has proofs of what he alleges.  It was not, as Germaine supposed, an indictment ;  merely a statement of fact.  Bonaparte was well enough content with human nature.  There was the issue between the man and the woman.  He was labouring to enlist human nature in his enterprises ;  she to change it.  But the cleavage went deeper than that.  What she called “the pressure of the social order” had involved her in “social suffering,” by hampering her activities as a lover.  She was anti-social in the name of the soul which seeks to be prepared for virtue.  Bonaparte, on the contrary, held that religion, discipline, and maternity were the real needs of women.  His dealings with Josephine had convinced him of that.

In April 1800, when Germaine’s book appeared, an Austrian army, with which the British fleet was co-operating, was besieging Genoa, after having driven the French out of Northern Italy.  The Alps were about to be lost.  A second Austrian army, on the Rhine, awaited the signal to attack.  France was at war with England, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Russia, Sweden, Holland and Turkey, all of which countries were allied in some fashion, usually as the recipients of subsidies, with England.  Bonaparte, unmindful of Germaine’s advice, suppressed sixty-three Parisian newspapers and then, on May 6, 1800, left the city unostentatiously.  Next day Germaine left Paris also.  They took the same road to Switzerland, by Dijon, but he reached Geneva long before her.  There he spent an hour with Necker, who seemed to him “a big, fat, wheezy headmaster,” rather ill-informed even on financial matters.  Jacques tactfully avoided mention of his £100,000, but declared his readiness to shoulder once more, for his country’s sake, the burden of office.  He excused Germaine with such ample diligence that the Corsican, always susceptible to pleas by parent for child or child for parent, undertook to forgive her.  Necker, when Germaine arrived a few days later, told her that he had found “nothing very wonderful” in Bonaparte who, for the rest, had been very kind both about her and about himself.¹⁸

She was tired, run-down, disappointed, and not with Bonaparte only.  Benjamin was trying to jilt her.

“ I don’t know,” wrote Mathieu to Albertine Adrienne,¹⁹ “if you will reach the same conclusion as myself when you see her—a conclusion I do my best to avoid since our friend assures me, so earnestly, that it is mistaken—namely, that this fellow, by reason of her friendly feelings for him, contrives all the time, in one way or another and usually wittingly, to make her miserable.”

The excitement of Bonaparte’s crossing of the Alps by the Grand St. Bernard, which took place within a few days of her return, supplied a tonic.  She travelled up the lake, to get as near as possible to the great event.  On May 20 she wrote to Meister :²⁰

“ Did you resist the temptation to get a glimpse of the hero ?  He’s off to conquer Italy for the second time and sign a new peace of Campo-Formio.  Isn’t it historic ? ”

On June 14 the battle of Marengo was fought.  By noon the Austrians were everywhere victorious ;  before sundown Bonaparte had destroyed them.  Unhappily the news travelled in instalments :  the news of defeat and then the news of victory.  The First Consul’s enemies in Paris (the number now included his brother Lucien) were imprudent enough to show their hands for a moment.  “Do they think,” asked the General on his return, “that I’m a second Louis XVI ?”  Happily for herself, Germaine was out of that intrigue.  Her hero-worship of Bonaparte had taken a new lease of life so that she repented her own and Benjamin’s attacks on him.

“ This man,” she wrote to Juliette Récamier, “has a will strong enough to lift the world.”

And to Gérando,²¹ Mathieu’s friend, who had rented Saint Ouen from her :

“ The marvels of this Italian campaign would turn any head.  Enthusiasm has wrung from me—even from me—praises which spring from my amazed wonder.  The supporters of the Government will be pleased with me in the coming winter, those of them at least who want praise without servility.”

She began to study German and groaned at her task.

“ I can’t undertand,” she wrote to Meister in July,²² “how you write French so well, since you are so good at German.  It seems to me that the one language excludes the other.”

In September, however, she was “transported with eagerness ” to master the German language, which kept her mind occupied.  “Benjamin has just left here,” she added ;  “this isn’t a happy time in my life.”  In October her gloom had deepened.

“ I’ve come to the conclusion,” she wrote to Gérando, “that sorrow is the portion of men.  I live with a heartache as some others live with physical pain ... Ah !  Do you think the heart can ever free itself from such griefs as mine ?  The three men whom I have loved the most, whom I have loved since I was nineteen or twenty, are Narbonne, Talleyrand and Mathieu.  The first is a graceful figure ;  the second can no longer even boast a figure ;  and the third no longer has his old tastes, though his adorable qualities remain to him unimpaired.  I’ve got new friends who are very dear to me ;  but it’s the past which can really bid our dreams and stir our hearts.”

Narbonne lost to Madame de Montmorency-Laval, Talleyrand to Bonaparte, Mathieu to God, to whom, to what, must she lose Benjamin ?  Panic seized her.  She was thirty-four, bedraggled politically and socially, tired, bored ;  could she count on getting suited again if her lover gave notice ?  She packed her boxes and went off, wearily but with stubborn will, in pursuit of him.

“ My daughter,” wrote Jacques rather pathetically on November 30, 1800, “is ready to take the road for the great city :  it isn’t without searching of heart that I shall see those high mountains thrust between her and myself.”

She scarcely knew Paris.  Marengo and Moreau’s victory at Hohenlinden had destroyed the Coalition so laboriously built up by England.  Europe was ready to make peace with Bonaparte almost on his own terms.  And England, England too, was grown friendly.  The First Consul, surveying his work, sketched the future policy of France in three words :  “Ships, Colonies, Commerce.”  Frenchmen, emerged from the horrors of the preceding ten years, supposed that the Millennium had arrived.  Even Germaine was overawed.

“ I get stupid,” she confessed to Lucien,²³ “ in your brother’s company, because I want so much to please him.  I want to talk to him and my mind becomes a blank.  I try to wing my words, I want to compel him to give me his attention ;  when the blank in my mind is filled I’m as stupid as ever, as stupid as a goose.”

She met him at dinner one night at Berthier’s house ;  she had stuffed her memory with epigrams and compliments ;  he passed the time of day—and hurried on.  But her salon was gay again.  She invited everybody, from M. de Cobenzl the Austrian to Talma the actor.  “The lambs,” she wrote to Joseph Bonaparte, “are lying down here with the wolves as in the youth of the world.”²⁴  A whirlwind of balls, receptions, dinners, theatres and amateur theatricals swept over Paris, drying the blood in her squares and filling her streets with laughter.

“ I spent a quiet winter at Paris,” she wrote,²⁵ “I never went near the First Consul ;  I never saw M. de Talleyrand.  I knew that Bonaparte didn’t like me. ... The foreigners in the Capital treated me with the utmost consideration.  The diplomatic corps lived in my house and this European atmosphere protected me. ... Joseph Bonaparte invited M. de Cobenzl to his charming place, Mortfontaine, and I went there too. ... M. de Cobenzl was a singularly dull fellow ;  he said the same things to everybody with the same cordiality, which lacked all feeling or wit.  His manners were perfect.”

Benjamin, at heel once more, and Mathieu accompanied her to Mortfontaine, and contrived to amuse a company almost every member of which was indebted to Bonaparte for something and consequently only too pleased to be merry at his expense.  This was the rival establishment to Malmaison, Josephine’s country house, where the First Consul spent his week-ends and where wit was frowned upon.  Tale-bearers made the journey between the two establishments and so Bonaparte missed none of the epigrams.  He seems to have been stung more than once, notably when Germaine countered his word “ideologue” with “ideophobe.”²⁶

“Ah,” he cried, “how charming !  But why not hydrophobe when they’re about it ? ”

The two were watching one another, Bonaparte even more carefully than Germaine.  If she feared him, he was exceedingly uneasy about her.  Nobody was more firmly persuaded than he of the power of salons over the mind of Paris.  Resentments still smouldered in that mind ;  it wanted but a few words, a phrase, to light them up, and Madame de Staël’s were the lips most capable of uttering those words or that phrase.  Bonaparte had been at pains to study the history of the Revolution and was seized of the evil influence exerted thereon by the tongues and pens of the philosophers, orators and journalists who had attended Madame Necker’s “Fridays” and her daughter’s soirées in the rue du Bac.  That was a formidable enemy ;  he prepared to crush it.

“ Forcibly remind this woman, Her Illustriousness,” he advised his brother, “that I am not a Louis XVI.  Counsel her not to stand in the way along which I wish to go.  If not, I’ll crush and break her.  The best course for her, in present circumstances, is quietness. ... I won’t hurt her if I don’t have to.”

He warned Fouché that Madame de Staël disturbed people’s minds.  The hint was passed on to her, with a further hint that her influence on Benjamin had been noticed.  Angry, but with a new object dawning in her mind, she took the road to Switzerland.  It was May, and she liked to spend the summer with her father.  Hero-worship, in the last months, had turned to hate.  She knew now that Bonaparte would have none of her.  She saw his power growing from day to day, and began, like everybody else, to realise that its limits lay far in the future.  The innate pugilism of her nature, allied to its unthrifty vanity, prompted attack upon this tyrant who belonged—she thrilled at the thought—to the authentic race of tyrants.  Certainly, he was not another Louis XVI ;  but let him beware.  The weapons which had destroyed Versailles might prove formidable even to Ajaccio.

1 Dix Années d’Exil, Part I, Chap. 1.

2 Souvenirs inédites d’Aime Martin, quoted by Gautier.

3 Memorial, Vol. 3, p. 240.

4 The evidence is that Madame Récamier’s husband was her father.

5 See Madame de Staël et Napoléon, by Gautier.  Also Histoires des salons de Paris, Duchesse d’Abrantés, Part II, p. 451.

6 The Royalist newspaper called “ L’Ange Gabriel."

7 Dix Années d’Exil, Part I, Chap. 2.

8 Madame de Chastenay, Vol. I, p. 420.

9 Madame de Staël returned this kindness by calling her novel Delphine.

10 Dix Années d’Exil, Part I.

11 Considerations, Part IV, p. 259.

12 De Casse :  Mémoires du roi Joseph, Vol. I, p. 190.

13 Madame de Staël et Napoléon, p. 46. See also Roederer :  Œuvres.

14 Archives de Coppet, quoted by Gautier.

15 Jung :  Lucien Bonaparte et ses Mémoires, Vol. 2, p. 233.

16 Bourrienne recounts this remark, Mémoires.

17 All the memorialists of St. Helena put this statement into Napoleon’s mouth.  It was his philosophy of life and was in direct opposition to the idea of “perfectibility,” the idea that human nature can be changed.

18 Several accounts of this interview exist.  Bourrienne describes it (Mémoires) ;  so does Madame de Staël (Dix Années d’Exil, Chap. 4).  Bourrienne got his account from Bonaparte, Germaine from her father.  Naturally they differ.  The Memorial also describes it, and it is mentioned in the Considerations.

19 Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 134.

20 Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 166.

21 Baron de Gérando :  Lettres inédites.

22 Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 171.

23 Jung :  Lucien Bonaparte et ses Mémoires, Vol. II, p. 235.

24 De Casse :  Mémoires du roi Joseph, Vol. X, p. 417.

25 Dix Années d’Exil, Chap. 6.

26 Lucien Bonaparte et ses Mémoires.  There is a long conversation there from which this and succeeding quotations are taken.