Germaine de Staël

MIST ON THE MOUNTAINS

GERMAINE had ruled once in France by setting Paris against the King and so defeating the King’s policy against England.  The memory of those golden days dwelt with her for ever.  Might not Paris and England, combined, do for her again what they had done before ?

This was not conscious treachery ;  “Louis XVIII” fell into the same fault when he called English ships to help him against his rebellious subjects.  Both the woman and the man counted their leadership so necessary that the want of it seemed to them the heaviest of all misfortunes for France, and so justification enough of any alliance with France’s enemies.  They saw Bonaparte as thief of liberty, as thief of legitimacy, as usurper of both their crowns ;  Bonaparte, leader of the French people in its greatest enterprise, was hidden from them.

And so Germaine allowed the good Prussians, England’s allies, to kiss her hands and pay her compliments and felt surprised when she learned that her triumph in Berlin was hateful to patriotic Frenchmen.  No need for Bonaparte to point the finger at the great travelling carriage, so like his own, which carried the Sibyl, her children, her lovers and her lackeys across Europe.  No need for him to make sport of the big woman, in her flaming robes, crowned and sceptred, journeying like some missioner of alien faith, from city to city.  France was watching with darkened brows and bared teeth.  Never had hatred of England reached such a pitch of fury in France.  Thanks to the Corsican, all men were seeing now with the eyes of the King they had murdered.  England alone was the enemy.  The lost empire, the ruined trade, the armies on every frontier ;  these were England’s works.  Bonaparte’s army on the cliffs of Boulogne was beloved of Frenchmen as no other army had ever before been beloved.

And so, when the news leaked out that a body of men pledged to kill their leader had been landed from an English warship and were in Paris, Frenchmen lost control of themselves.  Who were the assassins ?  The name of Moreau was mentioned ;  not even the victor of Hohenlinden could command pity in such circumstances.  Bonaparte struck with sudden ferocity and gathered, among his victims, the young Duc d’Enghien, a prince of the blood-royal of France whom he seized in Baden and carried across the frontier to Paris.  This charming young man had not plotted ;  but he was making ready to fight for England, in whose army he was an officer, against France.  Bonaparte, on the advice of Talleyrand,¹ had him shot.  The French nation as a whole showed very little concern.  But England and all Europe cried to Heaven for vengeance.  When the news of the execution reached Berlin, Prince Louis leaped onto his horse and rode to Germaine’s door.  It was eight o’clock in the morning.

“ He looked charming on horseback,” she wrote, “and his emotion added to the nobility of his face.”

“ ‘ Revenge or death ! ’ he cried. ”²

She unleashed her tongue and for days ran about magnifying this “horrible murder,” which, she declared, had revealed Bonaparte’s true character.  The King and Queen heard her with delight ;  every word she said was treasured.  Moral indignation swelled in her bosom, obliterating any recollection of the fact that she herself had been privy to Bernadotte’s plot to assassinate Bonaparte.  What a monster !  And how sacred a duty to deliver unhappy, suffering France from his bloody hands !  It had been worth while, after all, to kill time in Berlin.  She would leave now with a halo round her head.  Had she not been the first to hurl defiance at this enemy of mankind ?

On April 18 news reached her that her father was dangerously ill.  Weeping, she gathered her flock, which now included Augustus William Schlegel, the paragon of German professors, about whom she had written to Albertine Adrienne.  Augustus William had become tutor to her son.  He sat beside her, in the great carriage, comforting her heavily with abuse of Bonaparte and flattery of England, while they rolled and lurched across the Saxon plain.  At Weimar Benjamin, very grave, joined them.  Jacques had died on the 10th in the arms of Albertine Adrienne.  Germaine fell into convulsions, uttered dreadful cries, raved and wrote letters.  On the day following her arrival in Weimar (April 23) she informed Albertine Adrienne :³

“ All I can tell you, my friend, is that I live, and that the utter ruin of all happiness, of all existence, of all future, of all rest, leaves me, in spite of myself, physically alive.  I’m not fit, and neither is my poor friend (Benjamin) to travel from here for four days.  I’ll write to beg you to come and meet me at Berne.  I need you to lead me to the tomb which awaits me.  Adieu.  I can write no more.  Adieu.  You’ve been with him five months longer than I.  Five months which I have lost.  Ah, if I could die in saying these words !  Adieu ! ”

Benjamin added a postscript :

“ I’ll only add a word.  I can’t conceive of anything more touching, more angelic !  What use am I to console her ?  For, except for the unjust reproaches which she heaps on herself, I share all her feelings about the splendid soul whom she has lost.  Adieu, I daren’t hurt my eyes any more. . . .”

Albertine Adrienne and her husband met the travelling carriage at Zurich.  They brought Albert, Germaine’s second son, with them.  All three journeyed to Coppet.  Germaine on arrival saw, on Mont Blanc, “a cloud like a man’s face, which disappeared towards evening.”⁴ Jacques, with his dying hand, had written to Bonaparte to plead for his daughter.  She despatched the letter.  There was no answer.  But Bonaparte remarked, as he read it :

“ She may well regret her father.  Poor divinity !  Never was a more commonplace man with his flonflon, his self-importance, and his columns of figures.”

Germaine composed a prayer :⁵

“ O my God, forgive feeble creatures, if hearts which have loved so much can see in Thy Heaven only a father’s smile welcoming them into Thy courts.  Strong natures do not know the evil they do ;  what is religion to them but an instrument of tyranny in the hands of men ?  But when religion is the last, the very last, hope remaining to the heart, let them leave it alone, let them pass by without touching.”

Jacques left his daughter £150,000, not including the £100,000 still in the French Treasury, an immense fortune in those days.  She set about investing it.  Mathieu arrived in July, dimmer, more gentle, more religious than ever, and he and Albertine Adrienne resumed their contemplation of Mont Blanc, the more hallowed now that Necker had chosen its summit for his appearance in cloud-like form.  On August 16 Germaine wrote to Gouverneur Morris :⁶

“ There was nobody like him ;  there never will be anybody like him.  I’ve lost not my father, but my friend, my brother, the best part of me, the only noble part of me !  Ah, tell me, how, in your America where men love, in your America where men believe in God, how do you endure the anguish of death ? . . . I hope you won’t cease to look after my interests.  It’s to M. Necker’s family that you are being helpful.  I need advice.  When, again and again, my father wanted me to hear about his fortune, I always refused.  Now there’s need to look after the interests of three children, especially under a Government which can seize everybody’s goods, because it acts by a force uncontrolled by any consent.”

In a letter to an American, who had bought some of her land in the United States, she expressed the hope :

“ that you will take pleasure in increasing the fortune of a mother of three children and of a daughter of M. Necker.”

She wrote in English for the first time.⁷  Both by her investments in real estate and by her study of the English language she was preparing a line of retreat in case Bonaparte drove her out of Europe.  The diligence, indeed, with which she provided against misfortune was worthy of Bonaparte.  Nothing was left to chance, and all the chances were counted.  Bonaparte and she resembled one another more than either of them would gladly have allowed.  Restless, eager, dominating, easily moved on the surface, immovable under it, infinitely long-sighted, reckless within the bounds of an extreme carefulness, they blasted their several ways through the lives of others.  Each travelled like a touring company, talked like a missioner, gathered crowds like a showman and dressed like a cheap-jack.  Politics was the breath of life of both ;  literature only pamphleteering ;  rhetoric a loud advertisement.  If she had wit, he had sarcasm ;  and he matched her martyrdom with his glory.  But the man served a vision.

He was Emperor now, with the Pope en route to crown him.  Versailles was rebuilding in the heart of Paris.  When Napoleon identified himself with the Revolution he meant by that word not the achievements of Assemblies but the gift offered by Sovereignty and rejected long ago at the Royal Sitting of the States-General at Versailles.

“ The great principle of the French Revolution,” he said, “is civil liberty, that is to say equal justice everywhere. . . . Every citizen obeys the same law, appears before the same judge, suffers the same punishment, receives the same reward, pays the same taxes and is subject to the same military service, is eligible for and attains the same rank whatever may be his birth, his religion or his place of origin.”

So had Louis XVI defined liberty ;  so had Mirabeau conceived it.  France was to learn that this liberty was compatible with an absolute monarchy and an established church.  She was to learn, too, in her struggle with England, that the years spent in the pursuit of liberty as Germaine and her friends defined it were lost years, barren of advantage except to her enemies.  Could Napoleon, crowned and anointed, accomplish what Louis had failed to accomplish ?  England had gained a long start.

¹ Talleyrand’s share in the execution of the Duc d’Enghien remains unexplored.  But the evidence that he played a part of decisive importance is strong.  Napoleon accused him, to his face, of having recommended the execution, and the charge was never denied.  Talleyrand burned most of his papers.

² Dix Années d’Exil.

³ Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 192.  Gautier gives a graphic picture of this sad scene.

⁴ Dix Années d’Exil.

⁵ Madame de Staël :  Du caractère de Monsieur Necker et de sa vie privée.

⁶ Madame de Staël and the United States, by R.L. Hawkins.

⁷ Madame de Staël and the United States, by R.L. Hawkins.  This was probably the first letter written by her in English.