“ Parler politique pour moi, c’est vivre.”
MADAME DE STAËL to the DUKE OF WELLINGTON.
“ Je déteste parler politique.”
The DUKE OF WELLINGTON to MADAME DE STAËL.

“ Je n’aime pas beaucoup les femmes, ni le jeu—enfin rien ;  je suis tout à fait un être politique.”
NAPOLEON.

Germaine de Staël

LION HUNTING

BONAPARTE had given her leave to go to Germany.  Joseph had supplied as many letters of introduction to French agents as she wished.  It remained only to ask her father’s consent.

But she had no intention of going back to Coppet.  The carriage which contained her son Auguste and her daughter Albertine, as well as Benjamin, was stopped at Metz, while a courier was sent off to Jacques.  Germaine, so miserable and depressed yesterday, was, to-day, full of fight.  She had discovered in Metz a famous emigrant,¹ Charles de Villers, who, as it happened, was on his way to Paris to see her.  Instantly the tabernacle was pitched in the wilderness, though Villers’ mistress, Madame de Rodde, proved rather an encumbrance.  Germaine shone :  Benjamin flashed, while Villers pounded out the superiority of Prussia to all other nations and peoples.  With hearts uplifted and refreshed the travellers addressed themselves anew to their journey.  It was not very prosperous.  Germaine fell ill at Forbach ;  at Frankfort little Albertine got scarlet fever.  Benjamin, who was on the point of returning to France, was retained.  Perplexed but not in despair, he became nurse, comforter and interpreter while worthy Jacques, made aware of these distresses, sent letters full of encouragement.  On December 13, towards evening, the berline rolled into Weimar, the “German Athens.”  Germaine had not recovered her spirits, lost at Forbach and again at Frankfort.

“ By dint of high thinking,” she wrote to Gerando, “I am enduring the meagre life of an exile ;  but my heart is shut.  There’s a proverb, the simplicity of which appeals to me :  ‘ God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.’  May He save me from a heavier burden than I can bear.”

Benjamin had lingered at Gottingen, in the library of that town.  In his absence the tabernacle was erected once more and Goethe, Wieland and Schiller invited to pass in and hold converse with the Sibyl.  They exhibited a strange reluctante.  Goethe fled to Jena ;  Schiller, at work on William Tell, cried bitterly :  “ And now the Devil brings me this philosophising Frenchwoman,” and hid himself.  Germaine had come lionhunting and was determined to flush her quarry.  She soon showed these good Germans that a season of conflict with Bonaparte had wrought powerfully upon her courage and resource.  One by one they were compelled to break covert.  She travelled to Jena and forced herself on Goethe.

“ If you don’t come back with me to Weimar on Monday,” she told him, “ I warn you that I shall be a little hurt.”

The hills were covered with snow, but the poor man crossed them.  Schiller had already succumbed, finding that the easiest course.  “ She takes all the poetry out of me,” he wailed.  She received them, clad in her great robes of green or grey or yellow, with the green turban she had lately adopted, coiled over her black hair, and her little wand, another innovation, held like a sceptre in her right hand.  She told them she had come to enter into their minds and to open her mind to them.  When somebody suggested that, perhaps, she did not fully understand Goethe, she declared :

“ Sir, I understand all that is worth understanding ;  what I don’t understand is nothing.”

“ I have dreadful hours to live through,” groaned Schiller.  But he did not dare to absent himself from the tabernacle.  By the time Benjamin arrived, towards the end of January, Germaine was master of the situation.  She carried him off to Goethe with whom for an hour she discussed the difference between French and German poetry.

“ I’ve seen Goethe,” wrote Benjamin in his Journal,² “subtlety, vanity, almost painful physical irritability, remarkable wit, a beautiful expression, a rather dilapidated appearance, there is his portrait.”

Benjamin was more flattering when face to face with the great man.  “ The world,” he stated, “is wonder-struck at your stupendous genius.”

“ I know it.  I know it all,” Goethe cried.  “I know too that the world looks on me as a carpenter who has built a ship of the first class upon a mountain thousands of miles from the sea.  But the water will rise.  My ship will float and carry her builder in triumph where human genius never reached before.”  Benjamin and Goethe did not see eye to eye, but they grew to respect one another.  Of Wieland, Benjamin wrote :  “ He has a French mind, is cold as a philosopher, as a poet trivial, interesting, a great agnostic.”  Of Schiller :  “ Almost solely a poet.”  The women who worshipped these gods he dismissed as “insipid.”

Germaine felt her soul expanding.  With a flourish of trumpets she abandoned, formally, the doctrine of happiness in favour of the doctrine of duty.  There, in duty, she proclaimed, was the chief end of man, her own from this day forward.  The holy light of conversion shone in her face.  But Benjamin wrote in his journal :

“ That which constitutes what are called femmes d’esprit is agitation without object.  They are wholly a social creation and consequently artificial.  As long as there is a certain amount of beauty, that makes them passable ;  a little physical interest sustains and wins indulgence for the useless and fruitless agitation of their moral natures.  But after middle-life women are not adapted for society.  The role of friend remains to them, but of friend in retirement, receiving confidences and giving advice to the man with whom they rank as the second or third interest in life.  A sad lot is that of women. . . After they are thirty of what use is their liberty to them if they can only offer what nobody wants ? ”

Germaine was thirty-seven.  Everybody, she was convinced, wanted what she had to offer.  And even if they didn’t want it, they had to swallow it.  She preached her gospel of liberty and love to the blinking Germans, marrying it, easily, to their gospel of duty.  Love, she argued, prepared the soul for duty.  The newspapers gave her columns ;  the Duke and Duchess of Weimar gave her receptions ;  the common people cheered.  She buzzed from house to house, from dinner-table to dinner-table, from the theatre to the lecture-room, making so prodigious a stir that the echoes reached Paris and penetrated even to the ears of Bonaparte.

By the end of February everybody in Weimar was exhausted.  Never before had these dreamy souls been hustled with such unmerciful diligence.  They begged for rest.  Germaine packed up ;  if they had had enough of her, she was tired of them.  They talked, they wrote ;  but they did nothing.  She decided to go to Berlin, where words were transformed into acts.  When Benjamin pleaded a nervous breakdown and a wish to stay and study in the Duke’s library, she offered no objection.  She had testified.  Germany knew her now, the priestess of liberty and love and duty.  Thanks to Weimar the moral law, as she declared, had been established in her heart.  Thanks to Weimar her name had been borne across Europe so that even Bonaparte had not been able to avoid hearing it.

She wrote to Albertine Adrienne :³

“ Your kind letter, my dear friend, has carried me right back to you.  Excluding the annoyances of the place where you live (Geneva), there’s no society which I prefer to yours. . . I continue to be pleased with the life I am leading here.  The Court circle, which gets bigger and bigger as neighbouring Courts keep on joining it, produces on me the usual effect.  When great nobles who have no sort of need of us choose to be interested in us, we are naturally flattered.  Far above the general run, I place the Duke, who is an enlightened man, and the Duchess, a woman of exceptional goodness, who treats me like a mother or an elder sister, that is to say who admires me and protects me at the same time.  The women enthuse about me in the German way and pay court to me like lovers.  As for the men, they are literary men. . . . Goethe, Schiller and Wieland have more originality and depth of mind in literature and in philosophy than any others I know.  Their talk bristles with ideas.  There is no question, of course, of making brilliant remarks ;  but never do they leave me without my feeling impelled to jot down new thoughts.  I’m sure the diary I’m keeping will interest both my father and you this summer.  The German stage supplies me with new material.  Schiller and Goethe are trying all kinds of experiments in dramatic art :  Greek chorus and fantasias.  I find our art superior everywhere and I love to detect the causes of our superiority.  The Germans, heavy as they are, have more of the spirit of youth than the French because they aren’t blase and because they surrender themselves cheerfully to anyone who tries to amuse them.  Their comic operas are full of mechanical figures which delight Albertine greatly and in which one sees a kind of romantic imagination able to evolve peaceably before people who are not exacting and who do not find such things ridiculous.  Thus originality exists here in literary works rather than in individuals.

“ Enough about Germany.  Although my stay here pleases me I would feel very lonely and isolated without Benjamin, who has been, and is, truly, kinder to me than ever.  He’s a great success here and I believe that he will be sincerely sorry to leave.  As for me, the thought of going away is so sorrowful that I keep putting off my departure as long as possible.

“ I hope my letters no longer worry my father ;  I hope I have regained my self-control, though that is perhaps only because I feel less wretched. . . . Tell me, I beg you, how you find my father in health and spirits.  Assure him, I beg you, dear friend, that we are all physically in the best of health. . . . I know now for a fact that the French Ambassador has demanded of the Elector of Saxony that he shall forbid the sale of Delphine.  They believe in France that they can prevent the success of my novel in Germany by prohibiting its sale in the Leipzig book market.  They deceive themselves.  Good-bye, dear, I embrace you.  No woman for an instant approaches the place you occupy in my heart.”

She wrote again, on January 31, 1804 :

“ I keep prolonging my stay here to delay my parting from Benjamin and to avoid the Carnival at Berlin, which is too noisy and big. . . . The truly unheard-of success I’ve had in Germany would satisfy the greediest vanity.  But it isn’t my vanity which is difficult to satisfy, but a certain need of change, of interest, of distraction which only Paris can supply.  Again, I can’t be happy away from the place where I want to live and die ;  temporary resting-places, in my case, are even more shadowy than in the case of others.  I have a constancy of heart and an inconstancy of mind for which the land where my old friends dwell and where the scenes are unceasingly being changed, was created by Providence.  In short my imagination decks out the unattainable in charms which pierce my heart.

“ There, dear friend, there is what I feel and what I tell you with absolute frankness.  I’ve acquired rather a bad trait in Germany—though a natural one—namely, enough self-confidence to parade my eccentricities.  For anybody who has written four lines gets enough notoriety here to make it possible for such as I am to magnify and emphasise prodigiously.  I’ve always felt that there’s something in literary ability which upsets the ordinary way of life and I say this knowing that you possess literary ability.  But you haven’t delivered yourself over to it and moreover you were brought up in a land which is like a bee-hive :  everybody there behaves exactly like everybody else.  This place, on the contrary, is full of eccentric people ;  I like it all the better for that.  I like it, too, because they think a million times more of me here (than in Switzerland).  All the same, even if there were no strong bonds to draw me back to Geneva I wouldn’t establish myself here.  If I was free to live where I chose I would live in England.  The few English whom I meet here have far more ideas in common with me (than the Germans), and get to like me with a quickness which pleases me very much.  But will England weather the storm which threatens her ?  It is reported everywhere that (Bonaparte’s) expedition against her has been postponed till next winter—which makes me feel pretty sure that I won’t be able to spend next winter at Paris.  What I really mean to do is to spend two months during the summer somewhere about sixty miles from Paris so as to see my friends again ;  I hope to pass the autumn and winter with you.  But everything is so uncertain !

“ Do send me news of my father’s health.  All my being is centred there.  Why do you accuse me of having written a poetic description of the snow here ?  It had gone when I wrote ;  and as I had to wait to get clear roads to Berlin, I just tried to give you a few amusing details.  My father is truly awfully kind to be so worried about my physical health ;  I would much prefer that he should worry about my state of mind.  But don’t let us speak about that and perhaps we shall avoid thinking about it.

“ You were wrong to be anxious about my friend Benjamin.  Nobody could have had a better reception that he has enjoyed here.  Both Duke and Duchess have made a thousand times more fuss about him than has any member of the (Genevan) circle (of big-wigs).  Aristocrat for aristocrat, give me the great nobles every time !  He’s asked to Court twice a day ;  and every day of his life, the literary men keep buzzing round him.  In short, he’s got a position here because these are people with opinions of their own and not mere party hacks, and because the taste for literature and culture is very highly developed even among quite commonplace people.  They don’t sneer at the talents they don’t possess.  How little you say about yourself ;  and how I plague you with myself.  But you have managed to master the wildness in your nature ;  whereas that element rules me.  Good-bye, dear friend, I’ll bring you some new ideas and will talk and talk about them. . . .”

She reached Berlin early in March 1804 and wrote to her father :

“ I was presented yesterday to the King and Queen.  Let me tell you all about it.  It was the Queen’s birthday.  When she entered the room, which was full of men and women covered with gold braid and diamonds, the cymbals clashed, a form of music which increased the emotion I felt.  The Queen is charming.  I don’t flatter when I say that she’s the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen.  Her toilets are splendid and in the very best taste.  She overwhelmed me with the warmth of her welcome.  When she greeted me she paid me some charming compliments and then said :

“ ‘ Madame, I hope you give me credit for too much good taste not to be flattered that you have chosen to come to Berlin.  You’ve been admired here for many a day and you’ve got no more sincere admirer than myself.’

“ I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t answer her.  But a little later I did say how much I regretted having written a novel before I had had the pleasure of meeting her, and that my imagination was on fire with a personality of which, until now, I had possessed not the least conception.  All the princesses who accompanied the Queen greeted me and those whom I knew embraced me.  I was so touched by these great kindnesses that my heart was swept by a wave of tenderness towards you, my dear father, and my friend, who could not see me, and towards my native land which is so little interested in me.

“ Next I was presented to the King, who spoke charmingly of his hope that I would enjoy my stay in Berlin.  The King has a charming face and is so simple and kind.  The rest of the evening was spent in paying me court in every conceivable way. . . .”

She wrote to Albertine Adrienne :

“ What a delightful letter I’ve received from you, dear friend ;  how richly rewarded I feel for having given you, absolutely and exclusively, the whole of those feelings which one woman alone can inspire in the breast of another.  Your letter affords me a new proof of one of my most cherished beliefs, namely, that in personal matters, what we write displays our souls more than our talents and reveals our whole being and not only the mind, the most superficial of our faculties.  To write as you do, a woman must have a solid character, capable of true affections and deep thoughts, and in addition a highly cultivated mind.  So I can feel that there is nobody like you.  The same is true, in other ways, of my father, of Benjamin, of Mathieu ;  indeed the huge throng of new acquaintances whom I have made in Germany serves only to emphasise the distinctive qualities of my real friends.

“ Who has interested me most in this great city of Berlin ?  The famous Prince Louis ?  No.  One or other of the great nobles who abound here ?  No.  A professor, a German professor !  What do you say to that, dear friend ?  Doesn’t that make you think that I must have lost something already in Germany and set you coining jests about my being a Parisienne no longer ?  If you’re telling yourself that this is a new love affair, you’re mistaken.  One glance at the man’s face would convince you, however unbelieving you were ;  moreover Benjamin has robbed me of the capacity for love affairs.  But if you want more mind and originality in literature than the whole world has so far been able to give you, I’ve got it here.  As I think I may be able to bring him to you, I won’t say any more.

“ What do I think of Berlin ?  My impression is far less clear-cut than my impression of Weimar.  I don’t know if Benjamin’s company at Weimar made a difference and if, in his absence, I have not been able to look below the surface ;  but it’s certain that, though I find much more stir here, much more that, in appearance, recalls Paris, I would never willingly make Berlin my abode.  Germany is seen at her best in a University, not in a salon on the French model.  The two social worlds, that of the learned and that of the Court, are completely separate, with the result that the learned cannot talk and the smart people do not think.  Frivolity, without French charm to support it, is quite intolerable, and as the Germans are not naturally frivolous there is a sadness in their gaiety which always makes one want to say :  ‘ Why do it ? ’  But they have funds of good nature and respect for ability which saves one from the need of being always on one’s guard as one must always be in France.  On the other hand, you may very well meet two hundred people and not have a word to say to one of them ;  and they’re so like each other that I’ve actually been introduced ten times to people and yet been unable to recognise them.

“ Among them all, however, there are people well worth getting hold of ;  learned men, foreigners, the diplomatic corps.  Nothing much worth while among the Berlinois themselves.  They give parties every night, just like Geneva ;  and each of these is furnished with a colossal supper of excellent food at which the men drink as much as their dinners allow them.  Can you believe that the charming Prince Louis, who certainly does possess wit and a handsome Prussian face, can never speak after dinner, and that I find it much more pleasant to meet him in the morning ?  And he’s the German Lovelace !  The simplicity of Weimar, the highly educated women, the keen interest everybody takes in literature, all these make a stay in that town much more agreeable to me than a stay here.  I learned there how charming a small town can be ;  here I see that every great city makes one long the more for Paris.  Alas !  All the same I’ve had a welcome here of the kind which one has a right to expert only from one’s native land, but so far this welcome has brought me no new friend.  They gather up my words.  I’ve had a success which might well have turned my head if my head could be turned by anything but my heart.  But when there’s nothing in the heart, nothing at all, life is sad.  I’ve given up a tremendous supper to-night, for example, to write to you ;  but really there’s nobody likely to be there with whom I wish to talk intimately.

“ I must tell you about your dear friend the Princess Louise of Prussia, with whom I often sup.  Her house is charmingly furnished ;  everything French except the people.  She has charm in her raillery but something buffoonish in her way of telling a story which makes sharp contrast with her general bearing and her determination to play the princess.  I can’t say that I’ve found in her a single word or even tone that can be called sincere.  Her good taste in the matter of the novels she enjoys is inexplicable because one feels that what she ought to like are such books as the Roman Comique or Cléopâtre.  Sometimes she’s dignified, sometimes mocking ;  always she’s spiritual ;  but she’s dry, and though she says that I charm her, I don’t think the effect is likely to last long, because I don’t see how or where we can advance (in knowledge of each other).  Her enthusiasm for your letters is proof, though, of her good taste.  I’ll see if I can find something new and more important in her character ;  let this be between ourselves.  The really charming person is the Queen.  She has irresistible sweetness and grace.  The King too is an awfully good fellow.  There’s a niece of the Duchess of Weimar here, the bride of Prince William, the King’s brother, in whom I find myself tremendously interested.  But one sees the Royal Family very little ;  the most open of their houses is that of the Princess Louise.  Apart from Society there’s the theatre where I go often, though more from reasons of study than from reasons of pleasure.  There are public concerts, too, which are sometimes very wonderful.  For example, on Good Friday they sang a cantata on the death of Jesus Christ which affected me and saddened me more than anything I have ever listened to before.  I’m bringing you this cantata, because you must learn German so that we can speak it and read it together.

“ I’ve written to Mathieu to suggest a meeting lasting about a fortnight and to take place somewhere 120 miles from Paris.  If he agrees, as I hope he will, my arrangements for this year are complete.  The visit to France excepted, I’ll spend ten continuous months with you.  I’ve sent you my time-table.  I know my father laughs at it.  I’ll keep to it, none the less, day for day.  You don’t know what a joy it is to me to tick off the days on my calendar.  I’m staying on here at present to kill time, to keep up appearances and to be sure of good weather when I travel.  But I feel that my task is finished and if you can suggest any reason for hurrying home I won’t hesitate to set out.

“ Ah, how I’m relying on your promise to take care of my father’s health.  I’m terrified about what I heard at Weimar.  If Providence hadn’t denied me faith in the future, which lack I find a blessing for the first time, I’d be more frightened still, for I don’t believe that I could survive his loss.  During the last three days I’ve examined my heart and satisfied myself that my whole life is centred on him.  He is part of every memory ;  partner in every thought.  Without him nothing in the past, nothing in the present, nothing in the future.  Nothing but despair !  It’s a fearful thought, for Nature certainly did not intend that anyone should love thus another so far advanced beyond her in years.  But he found means to inspire in me a loving tenderness of so inexpressible a strength that when, sometimes, I have tried to weaken its influence over me, the result has been, merely, an enormous increase of that influence.

“ What a long letter I’ve written you, dear friend ;  and how much I still have to say.  Benjamin should be arriving near you now. . . .

“ Dear friend, let me say it without seeming fatuous, my letter has been interrupted by Prince Louis, who has supped alone with me.  I’ve been burning the candle at both ends.  I’m weary and must go to bed.  Ah ! how I long to return ! ”

¹ Charles de Villers was already well known for his writings on Kant.  Though a Frenchman, he had become a violent apostle of Prussianism.

² Benjamin Constant :  Journal Intime.

³ These letters are given in the Appendix to Dix Années d’Exil, in the edition produced by Paul Gautier.