She wrote to Maurice at every stopping place on the way back to Coppet, at Gotha, on June 20, at Frankfurt on the 26th, at Basle on the 30th.  And every letter bore further witness to her wish to marry him.  Back at Coppet this determination gave her no rest.

“ You must agree to what I want to propose for you,” she told him.  “I shall send you on Tuesday an order for £125¹ on a banker who is in business relations with Geneva and not with me.  I implore you on my bended knees to allow me to do this for you. . . . If you don’t realise that I love you more than anybody on earth you have very little acumen.  Everybody asks me why I look so sad. . . Remember that I have an income of £5,000 without a penny of debt. . . .

“ I find here, awaiting me, the bas-relief of Tieck for the tombs of my father, my mother and myself.  My mother is taking my father by the hand to lead him into Heaven.  As for him, he casts a glance full of kindness upon a kneeling and veiled figure.  It’s truly very beautiful. . . .”

Again :

“ Dear friend, shall I spend the winter with you ?  We won’t go out into Society, what do you say ?  I want to lead a different kind of life ;  my whole nature has changed.  I’ve changed for your sake ;  I shall live only for you.  Your uncle and the Prince de Ligne—there shall be my social circle.  If I lose you I’ll go mad with grief. . . I’m thinking about sending my eldest son to America a year hence.  I’ve got a good deal of land there. . . He wants to go, and I’ll come back to Vienna in spring to bid him good-bye. . . . Coppet was exceedingly lovely this evening.  I’ve been looking at the moon reflected in the lake like a column of fire.  Ah, if you were with me.  You, who are the life of Nature for me !  Adieu, Maurice, noble choice of my heart.  Adieu.”

Meanwhile there was Benjamin :  that young man, in Germaine’s absence, had grown melancholy.  He wrote in April to Prosper de Barante that he had been turning out old love-letters.

“ I gaze on all these letters, written by hands which now are dust, and on those letters which can no longer be answered, and to which, when I did answer, I opposed so many arguments based on life and circumstance and the future—all those arguments, all those uncertainties, all this future is buried in the grave which has itself disappeared.”

He was wondering whether or not he should marry Charlotte before “my harpy” returned from Vienna.  Charlotte had been divorced ;  there was no obstacle.  He took her to his father at Dôle, and the old man urged him to marry.  On June 5 a secret wedding which, however, was not performed in accordance with French law—and was therefore invalid—was celebrated by the pastor of Besançon.  Benjamin took his bride to Lausanne and introduced her to Rosalie.  Then his nerve shook.  He left her and rushed off to Coppet, meaning to tell Germaine what he had done.  He told her, instead, what he was going to do—namely, to marry Charlotte in the autumn.

“ I’ve had it out with Benjamin,” Germaine wrote to Maurice on July 12, 1808, “and I believe that our summer will be calm, though necessarily sad.”

Troubles soon multiplied for her.  On August 5 she got a letter from Maurice in which he reproached her bitterly and told her that he meant to break off his relations with her.  A second letter reached her on the 14th which announced itself as the last she would ever receive from him.

“ This morning,” she wrote to him, “I got your letter from Baden of July 3o and I simply can’t believe that the expressions you use are meant to apply to me : ‘artfulness ! ’ ‘deception !’ ‘abuse of confidence !’  If I had shown your letter to the friends who are with me, Camille,² Mathieu, Elzear, etc., they would have thought you mad.  But your madness has none the less given me a dagger thrust from which I shall never recover.  What shall I say to you when you have believed such absurdity, such vileness, such stupidity of me ?  You accuse me of delighting to let it be thought that you love me, when everybody can see that I love you.  That’s a feeling so natural in a woman that it’s incredible that anybody could find fault with it. . . But to have told anybody that you want to marry me and that I don’t want to marry you—that would have been as wicked as it would have been absurd. . . .

“ I know I’m very rich, and when I was a girl I used to say that only the attentions of the Knights of Malta flattered me, because they can’t marry ;  since I became a widow men have written or spoken to me to that sense on ten occasions, but I told you nothing about it in case a reference to my fortune disturbed you.  That isn’t all.  I have had it on my tongue ten times this winter to tell you that, if your feeling for me was genuine, I would be happy and proud to devote my life to you. . . . When I begged you to come to Coppet, when I offered to accompany you to Italy, was I not taking on myself all the consequences of that association ?  When a woman does not love a man, does she leave all her friends to go travelling with him ?  Does she think of marrying a man she doesn’t love when she has need of no support except that of the heart ?  And you call all that trickery !  Torrents of tears, convulsions at Madame de Vrbna’s, forty letters in two months, the resolve to return to Vienna—artifice to make people think that you want to marry me ! . . .

“ After having told me at Stockerau that it was ‘for our mutual happiness’ that the Prince de Ligne had joined our hands at Madame Palfy’s, after having written to me to Dresden that I was ‘the first love of your heart,’ you end by wishing me an eternal good-bye.  Wretched man ;  what an expression !  How can any one of God’s creatures make use of it ?  And to whom ?  If my heart was as guilty as it is pure, as ungrateful as it is devoted, how could you say that to me ?  Do you think you show manliness in tearing out my heart ?  What harm can it do you ?  What danger do you run ?  Who is going to punish you for plunging me into despair ?  Your own conscience, perhaps, but certainly no human voice.  In a land where I lived only for you no voice is likely to ask you :  ‘ Why do you force her to die of grief ? ’  Your letter is a poison ;  I’ll never be cured.  I’ve been accused in my life of inconsequence, impetuousness, but no living being, no enemy, has called me other than true and generous.”

She returned to that theme day after day, in an avalanche of self-pity.  Her tears were not dried for more than a month, and they stained her letters.  Thus :

“ I swear before God that I have loved you and do love you with all my soul. . . I call God and one of his Saints, my father, to witness again that I have loved you and do love you. . . . The only real things in life are religion and the capacity to love. . . When I try to rise up I have to cling to things and I tremble frequently. . . . If you never wish to hear again that voice which has told you that it loves you with such abandon and enthusiasm, my decision is taken.  I shall go to America. . . . You exile me with a force equal to Bonaparte’s.”

She was working on her book De l’Allemagne.  It was to be a compendium of the gospel which she had preached all over Europe as well as a plea for the good Germans on whom Napoleon was trampling, a political act, in short, like everything she wrote.  Maurice’s treason made Benjamin necessary again, and he was bidden to remain.  Coppet had become a prison with policemen peeping through all the hedges, for Napoleon’s suspicions were growing stronger as the dangers which threatened him increased.  The Tilsit plan, upset at Copenhagen, had suffered a fresh reverse in Spain.  A French army laid down its arms, there, at Baylen on July 23, 18o8, and King Joseph thought it well to leave Madrid for the frontier.  The left wing of the battle against England was broken.  Napoleon’s eyes turned to the countries in his rear :  Russia, Austria.  Could he count on Alexander if he went in person to restore the position in Spain ?  He knew that Austria was arming and that the zeal of the Germans for liberty was growing warmer every day.  It would be necessary to send troops from the Rhine to the Pyrenees ;  it would be necessary to replace these troops.  A fresh conscription must be ordered.  Would the French people willingly give him their young lads ?  Soon he heard the bitter reproaches of mothers and wives, French mothers and French wives this time.  He had robbed them of liberty ;  now he was taking love as well.  And for what ?  Merely to satisfy his dreadful ambition.

He tried to tell these simple people that this was a life-and-death struggle and that England’s victory meant the final loss by France of the first place among the nations.  He tried to show them his plan.  (“Who,” he lamented later, “saw in my Spanish policy the control of the Mediterranean?”)  Their minds could not grasp his ideas ;  but fastened instead on the ideas opposed to him.  They saw their lads march away and, in their anguish, cried that this was a crime against humanity.  Frenchwomen began to think the same thoughts and use the same phrases as German women and Austrian women and Russian women.  And Germaine, speaking through the millions of copies of her books and through her ubiquitous salon, became their High Priestess.  She was as famous as Napoleon ;  she was “The Woman” in the sense that he was “The Man.”

“ I regard as my personal enemy,” said Napoleon, “every foreigner who shows himself in Madame Récamier’s salon.”  That was because Juliette Récamier was Germaine’s friend.  “I’m torn,” wrote Germaine to Juliette, “between my longing to see you and my fear of getting you into trouble.”  Madame Récamier’s most honoured guest was Metternich, the Austrian Ambassador.  The Germans were her close friends.  And when they left her, they travelled to Coppet.  Napoleon announced that those who wished to please him would, for the future, avoid Coppet.  Germaine saw many old friends pass her door.  She grew depressed, nervous, afraid and sleepless.  She took much opium and began to lose all her self-control.  The idea of going to America grew in her mind.  She resolved to ask for leave to embark at a French port.  This was given on condition that she did not approach nearer to Paris than 150 miles.

She spent the winter waiting and watching.  Napoleon met the Emperor Alexander of Russia at Erfurt with the object of binding that sovereign anew to his policy.  Goethe was of the party and succumbed to Napoleon’s flattery.  Alexander, on the contrary, paid compliments, made promises, drank toasts, and met Talleyrand privily by night.  Napoleon, more or less dissatisfied, bustled off to Spain.  Within a few weeks he was at Madrid ;  the English army under Sir John Moore was forced to re-embark.  But victory came too late.  Talleyrand’s whispers that if Austria drew her sword the Russian cock would not fight for Napoleon were spreading terror in Paris and filling Metternich’s letter-box with offers of help.  Even Josephine showed herself ready to leave a ship which the most sanguine believed to be sinking.  Napoleon rushed back to his capital, scattered the plotters and recruited a new army.  In April he led it against the Austrians.  He was in Vienna in May.

But the reverse which he suffered outside that city, at Aspern-Essling, robbed him of the fruits of his energy.  The news of the reverse was wine in the blood of his enemies ;  Spain set her teeth ;  Russian opposition hardened ;  a shiver ran through the prostrate body of Germany.  Germaine, throbbing with hope, ordered the berline and went galloping into France.  She was off, she said, to see Talma acteing in Lyons ;  but Juliette had been called from Paris to meet her.  For a few days they planned and plotted together ;  then the bells of Lyons rang out the victory of Wagram and the end of the campaign.  She fled back to Coppet.  There she heard of the divorce of Josephine and of Napoleon’s forthcoming marriage with the Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria.  She heard, too, that Benjamin proposed to marry Charlotte.  On August 22, 1809, one of her guests wrote to Meister :³

“ Madame de Staël is frightfully upset just now because of the forthcoming marriage of Benjamin, fixed for this autumn.  She’s refused during the last six years to marry him, but she can’t endure the idea of his marrying somebody else.  This contradiction ought to look absurd enough ;  but for those who know the human heart, it’s easy to understand.  It’s our thwarted wills and the contrasts in our natures which give the touch of reality.

“ Madame de Staël has forbidden all those who surround her and all who come to see her to utter a word about the event which occupies and devours her mind.  She wishes to find the means of resigning herself in her own spirit and she has turned on one or two people who have attempted to discuss the matter.  They have complained to me of the treatment meted out to them.

“ Benjamin is to leave here in September or October to go and get married and establish himself with his wife in Paris, where his house awaits him.”

¹ She seems to have insisted on giving money to all her lovers, and she knew that these gifts helped to bind them to her.  The admission is not without its pathos.

² Camille Jordan, Mathieu’s friend ;  Elzear de Sabran.

³ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 206.