Germaine de Staël

WHEN THE DEVIL WAS SICK

FFRANCE and England were at peace ;  but the cause of their quarrel remained, namely, the empire which France had lost and hoped to regain.  Bonaparte, in the year 1802, thought and spoke and acted as if he had not a moment to lose.  He was everywhere and did everything.  The finances were restored, the emigrants recalled, the civil war ended, the army reconstituted, the fleet reconditioned and trade and commerce established on a new basis behind the high walls of a protective tariff.  In addition, the Eastern frontier was strengthened by the formation of the Italian Republic (with Bonaparte as its President), by an arrangement with Switzerland and by a reshuffle of small states on the Rhine.  The authority of the Government grew from day to day and soon surpassed that exercised by Louis XIV at the height of his glory.  All power was concentrated in the Master’s hands ;  he was made Consul for ten years and then Consul for life (with power to nominate his successor) by an overwhelming vote of the nation.¹

This vote was challenged by Germaine’s friends as a matter of course.  From Coppet she kept urging them to be bolder.  At last in July 1802, Camille Jordan, an ex-member of the Tribunate and Mathieu’s bosom friend, published a pamphlet called The true meaning of the National Vote on the Consulate for Life.  This pamphlet was not exactly hostile to Bonaparte—the author said he had voted for him—but it dwelt long and lovingly on Liberty, as upon a dying mistress.  Germaine sent extras to the German Press and refrained with difficulty from presenting the author with a ring, made of her hair, which she had retrieved from the dead finger of Eric Magnus.  Bonaparte suppressed the pamphlet ;  he failed to prevent the printing in secret of a second edition.  In August 1802 the work to which Necker’s energies had been yoked in the previous year made its appearance under the title :  Derrières Vues de Politique et de Finances.  It was dull stuff (Jacques, as his daughter testified, was trying to live up to the title which he had recently given himself of Magistrate of the Truth), but it was a nettle in Bonaparte’s bed.  The First Consul was referred to casually as “the necessary man,” and advised that, sooner or later, he ought to make way for more intelligent rulers who would know how to secure Liberty.  There were sallies, evidently interpolations by Germaine, about military dilators and people with an itch to wear a crown.  Jacques invited plain speaking ;  he got it.  Writers who drew their inspiration from Bonaparte called him the cause of the Revolution and the murderer of Louis XVI.²

“ Happy man,” they sneered, “who has contributed powerfully to so many misfortunes without suffering any himself.  Happy man, who has never shed a tear except with a pen in his hand.”

Germaine fell into ecstasies.

“ He fears me,” she wrote to Lacretelle.²  “ There’s my delight, my pride ;  and there is my terror.  I confess it ;  I sink at the thought of a proscription and I’m ill-fitted even to endure the boredom of a long exile.  My courage wilts, but not my will.  I suffer ;  but I want no humiliating remedies.  I have a woman’s fears, but they can’t make a hypocrite or a slave of me.”

Her twisting of his tail was making the lion roar !  She hastened to publish her novel.  In December 1802 Delphine appeared.  Within a few weeks it was the chief topic of conversation not only in Paris but throughout France and Europe.  The lion crouched to spring.  Germaine was warned not to return to Paris.

Delphine offended Bonaparte in four different ways.  England was praised at the moment when his relations with that country were becoming strained ;  Protestantism was praised at the moment when he was re-establishing the Catholic Church ;  liberty was praised at the moment when he was restoring absolute power ;  and the right to love, with its contingent right to divorce, was upheld in face of his efforts to purge society and rehabilitate marriage.  He called the novel anti-social, and expressed a lively anger that it had been allowed to appear.  Here was a permanent salon which he could not close, the influence of which grew from day to day with the development of the policy which it attacked and the unfolding of the mind the validity of whose processes it denied.  The appeal was to women rather than to men ;  every woman who felt herself thrilled by Delphine became, inevitably, an opponent of Bonaparte and of Bonaparte’s State.

“ Women,” wrote Germaine,⁴ “have no life outside of love.  The histories of their lives begin and end with love.”

This was the challenge of the novel.  Bonaparte was accused indirectly of dragooning women as he was dragooning men.  Was not enforced faithfulness in marriage as much a part of his system as the conscription of youth or the censorship of the Press ?  “ You are taking liberty from men, she insinuated, and love from women ;  in the name of Church and State you are treating human beings as pawns in your game.  Men and women ought to assert their rights against you—namely, the rights to speak freely, to act freely and to love freely.  The prodigious success of the novel (of which no fewer than three German translations were made) stung the First Consul to reply to its teaching by attacking its author.  His friend Fiévée wrote in the Mercure on New Year’s Day, 1803 :

“ If you look closely at these women you will see how unruly are their lusts and with what imperiousness they conduct their liaisons.  To be their lovers is difficult enough ;  but it is much more difficult to be their friends.  Listen to them carefully ;  you will hear them complaining against everybody ;  you will hear them sighing in deepest melancholy :  their hearts, they will tell you, are bleeding from the wounds of ingratitude.  They keep shrieking for peace of mind, that peace of mind they say they will never enjoy till they lie in the graves towards which the grief that consumes them is slowly bearing them.  Look at them !  They are big, heavy, fat, strong.  Their faces, glowing with a superfluity of health, show not a trace of that anguish which heartache always leaves behind it.  And why ?  Because the only trouble they have ever known is wounded vanity.  In short, these women are compounded of excessive egoism.”

What triumph !  Germaine, at Coppet, fed greedily on the torrent of abuse with which Bonaparte’s newspapers sought to overwhelm her !  Every word was a new tribute to her success, to her power.  He feared her !  Even his love could not have afforded her a more exquisite enjoyment.  Transported to heights of self-congratulations, she brushed aside Benjamin’s half-hearted offer of marriage—without, however, forgiving its half-heartedness.  Was he really fool enough to suppose that Madame de Staël could become Madame Constant ?  Did he wish to “turn Europe upside down”?  Nor did pious Mathieu’s distress at her advocacy of divorce and her attacks on the Catholic Church occasion her the least concern.  Mathieu was no politician.

But she wanted to go to Paris, to see and to be seen, to hear and to be heard.  There was the fly in the ointment of her content.  Slowly, as she exhauted her resources of influence and friendship in trying to obtain leave to enter the capital, she began to realise how many and how formidable were her enemies —Bonaparte, Josephine (to whom the idea of divorce had become insupportable), the Catholic Church, the Government, the other women writers who found her success hard to endure, France herself, on the eve of her great struggle against England.

“ The French,” Fiévée had written, “have nothing to thank her for ;  her whole love goes out to the English.  Don’t let us be surprised.  Those minds which float above our sordid world have no fatherland.  Moreover, in Madame de Staël’s case the right of universal genius is supplemented by a personal right.  Born in a land which no longer enjoys a separate existence, married to a Swede, become French by chance, never having had a native land except in her imagination, it is quite likely that she can’t conceive of anybody else having a native land.”

Her will grew more stubborn as obstacles multiplied.  At first she thought of sending her father to plead for her, and poor Jacques actually prepared to travel to Paris.  Then she decided to go herself, and made her father write to various people who might be expected to be able to influence Bonaparte.  But Delphine had been too successful; everybody was frightened.  She learned that Paris was deriving great amusement from identifying the various characters in the novel and that Benjamin, her father, Lucchesini the Prussian Ambassador, and Talleyrand had all been discovered.  The fact that Talleyrand had been presented as a woman was everywhere an occasion of delight.⁵

“I hear,” remarked that statesman irritably, “that Madame de Staël has presented both of us, herself and me, disguised as women.”

Surely, her friends urged, it were better to avoid the hornets’ nest.  She tried Benjamin, who had returned to Paris and was looking for a wife—very secretly, it is true.  She tried Mathieu, Joseph Bonaparte, every friend she had ever possessed.  All made the same reply :  there was no hope of leave to return being granted.

“ I don’t want her to come here,”⁶  Bonaparte told one of her friends.  “Let her go to live in England as she threatens. . . .”  He added :  “ If it be true that she receives people of all shades of opinion at her house it is also true that she receives these people separately and in intimacy.  Every shade of opposition to the Government is welcomed in succession ;  morning, noon and night, people go to her one after the other to air their grievances.  And all who have thus abused the Government, some for one reason, others for another, spread, each from his own angle, the idea of the Government’s unpopularity, which consequently seems like a general feeling and assumes the character of a universal opinion.  I don’t want her to come here.”

Relations with England were growing worse every day.  Alarmed at Bonaparte’s success in buttressing himself against Austria, the British Government had retained Malta as an obstacle to further attempts by France to open a new way to India.  Bonaparte demanded the evacuation of Malta in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Amiens.⁷  Both nations realised that the conflict, so long postponed, was at hand, and began to make preparations.  Neither would yield anything, though Bonaparte would certainly have been willing to buy a prolongation of peace at a price which did not greatly strengthen his adversary’s hands.  The rupture came in the summer of 1803.  Bonaparte arrested every Englishman in France and assembled his army on the cliffs of Boulogne.  Germaine made a point of showing special friendliness to the English in Geneva.

“ If you are still at Zurich,” she wrote to Meister from Coppet on June 29, 1803,⁸ “ I wish to introduce to you two Englishmen, with whom I have spent two months during which I have seen them every day and felt, every day, the happier for seeing them.  One is Lord John Campbell, the second son of the Duke of Argyll, the other Mr. Robertson, a Scotsman of highly cultured mind.  Both possess those charming manners which we, in France, have lost and which it is so delightful to meet again.  But they are diffident and speak French badly.  They propose to spend two or three days at Zurich. . . Mathieu is here. . . . I have been speaking a great deal about England lately and I can assure you that my respect for, and interest in, that noble land have not diminished. . . .”

In a letter of August 2, she speaks of France as “a land of iron”⁹ in which everything seems motionless.  But she was not less determined to return there, for her prolonged stay in Switzerland had made her “sad, bored and dull.”  Early in September 1803, she took the road and installed herself in a hired house at Mafliers, near Beaumont-sur-Oise.  Her neighbours were Benjamin, at his new house Les Herbages, and Juliette Récamier at Saint Brice.  Bonaparte was busy with his preparations to cross the Channel and didn’t trouble about her until her enemies, among whom the women novelists, and notably Madame de Genlis, were prominent, called his attention to the fact that the salon of the rue de Grenelle was now reestablished in the Forest of Montmorency.  Here, they declared, were Benjamin, Juliette, Bernadotte, more hostile to Bonaparte than ever, Moreau and others of his enemies and critics.  Excursions were being made, too, from time to time, into the capital.  Bonaparte gave orders that Germaine must leave France within twenty-four hours.  She was warned by a friend and fled from Mafliers to the house of Madame de La Tour.  From there she wrote despairing letters to Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte begging them to intercede for her with their brother.

“ If only he will let me stay in France near Paris, I’ll thank him, I’ll pray to him as if he was God.”

Joseph wrote to her :

“ Madame, I have received your letters.  I went expressly to Saint Cloud this morning on your behalf and I have done all that the feelings, which you know I bear you, give you the right to expect of me.  But I’m afraid I haven’t succeeded.  The First Consul ended our talk by saying that he would, this evening, see the Grand Juge.  Accept, Madame, the lively regret I feel in not having been able to justify better the confidence you repose in me and which I deserve by reason of the friendship I bear you.”

She left Madame de La Tour and went to Juliette Récamier at Saint-Brice.  From there she wrote to Bonaparte :¹⁰

“ I was living peacefully at Mafliers, relying on your assurance that I might stay there, when I learned that gendarmes were coming to arrest me and my two children.  Citizen-Consul, I cannot believe it.  If you do this a cruel fame will be mine and I shall have a line to myself in your history.

“ You will break my good old father’s heart ;  he longs, I know it, in spite of his age, to come to you and ask what crime I have committed, what crime his family has committed, to deserve such barbarous treatment.  If you’re determined to drive me out of France at least give me a passport for Germany and allow me to spend eight days in Paris to get money for my journey and take my daughter to a doctor.  The long journey has worn her out.

“ In no country on earth would such a request be refused.

“ Citizen-Consul, the impulse to persecute a woman and her two children never came from yourself.  It is impossible that a hero can be other than the protector of weakness.  I implore you, once again, forgive me ;  let me dwell in peace in my father’s house at Saint-Ouen.  That house is near enough to Paris to allow my girl, when the time comes, to study at the École polytechnique and far enough away to prevent me keeping open house to visitors.  I’ll go there in spring when the weather makes travelling safe for my children.

“ Citizen-Consul, let me beg you, finally, to pause a moment before bringing heavy grief on a defenceless soul.  You have it in your power, by an act of simple justice, to fill my heart with a gratitude truer and more lasting than could perhaps be inspired by many favours.”

Bonaparte remained unmoved by the picture of Jacques’ grey hairs descending to an untimely grave.  “ When the Devil was ill,” he remarked, “the Devil a saint would be :  when the Devil was well, the Devil a saint was he” (Passato il Pericolo, Gabbata il Santo).  He sent no answer.  Germaine returned to Mafliers.  On October 15, 1803, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the dreaded horsemen arrived.  She was at table, eating grapes.  Her face stiffened.  “I’m going to be arrested,” she cried.¹¹  She got up and approached the horseman, who showed an order from Bonaparte to conduct her 12o miles from Paris.  She was given 24 hours to get ready.  She declared that time too short and asked for three days in Paris.  The horseman, who would give no name, agreed.  She ordered her carriage.  He entered it with her and paid her compliments.

“ You see,” she remarked, “what being a literary woman brings one to.”

They stopped at Saint Brice.  Germaine rushed to hug her dear Juliette while the horseman remained in the carriage.  It was an affecting scene, both women in tears with General Junot looking on.  Junot, for Juliette’s sake, dashed off to Saint Cloud to his old companion-in-arms to plead for Germaine.  He spoke of her as he might have spoken of his own sister.  Bonaparte stamped his foot.

“ What interest have you in this woman ? ” he cried.

“ The interest I always take in the weak, in the broken hearted, and mind you, General, if you like you can make this woman your devoted admirer.”

“ Yes.  Yes, I know.  When the Devil was sick. . . . No.  No.  No more truces or reconciliations between her and me.  She’s asked for it, let her have it.”

Junot returned crestfallen.  Germaine continued her journey to Paris, collected Benjamin and sent frantic appeals to Brothers Lucien and Joseph.  Both tried again ;  Joseph took his wife to Saint Cloud with him ;  both failed.  Germaine was receiving her friends and unleashing her eloquence ;  but her horseman came every day “like Bluebeard” to urge her to depart.  Joseph’s wife called and invited her to Mortfontaine “to gain time.”  She spent a few days there with these most un-Bonaparte-like Bonapartes.  On October 19 she had to go.  Benjamin accompanied her.  She hoped still for a reprieve.  Her face was glued to the back window of the carriage, but she saw only an empty road.  Benjamin talked more wittily, more wisely, than ever before.  She found herself beginning to listen to him, to grow interested in what he was saying,¹² to believe that Providence had called her to play the part of the stripling David before the eyes of all Europe.

¹ The question submitted to the nation was :  Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be made Consul for life ?  Out of a total electorate of 3,577,259, 3,568,885 voted “Aye.”  The voting for the Consulship itself in 1800 had been :  For, 3,001,007 ; Against, 1,526. No doubt these things can be arranged ;  but the figures, nevertheless, are impressive.  There can be no reasonable doubt that, at this period, France ardently desired Napoleon.

² “Mercure de France,” article by Fièvée quoted by Gautier, Madame de Staël et Napoléon, p. 92.

³ Lacretelle :  Testament philosophique et Littéraire, Vol. II, pp. 74 et seq.

⁴ From Delphine.

⁵ Sainte-Beuve in his essay on Madame de Staël in Portraits de Femmes discusses the characters in Delphine at length.  Madame de Staël always paid off old scores in her books, but she had a sense of humour.

⁶ Gautier quotes this letter, which is in the archives of Coppet.  It is addressed to Madame de Staël, but is unsigned.

⁷ The truth about the rupture of the Peace of Amiens seems to be that both sides recognised that the struggle must, in the nature of things, go on, and both were manoeuvring for position.  It was against English interest that Napoleon should be secure on his Eastern frontier.  The last time that had happened he had launched his Egyptian campaign with the object of cutting the Suez canal.  Malta had then been taken in his stride.  That, it was resolved in London, should not happen again.  Napoleon said to Gourgaud :  “ Qui est maître de l’Egypte l’est de l’Inde,” Vol. I, p. 315.

⁸ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 179.

⁹ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 180.

¹⁰ Gautier :  Madame de Staël et Napoléon, p. 133. The letter is in the Archives de Broglie.

¹¹ Coppet et Weimar, by Madame Lenormant. The letter is discussed by Gautier, Madame de Staël et Napoléon, who points out that there is no mention of it in Dix Années d’Exil.  See also on these doings the Salons de Paris of the Duchesse d’Abrantés.

¹² Dix Années d’Exil, Chap. II.

¹³ Madame de Staël à Gerando.