Germaine de Staël

THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES

THAT task had dominated her thoughts during her pregnancy.  She had just written an essay on Suicide, the object of which was to recall the German peoples from despair and summon them to arms.  England was held up in this work as the shining example among the nations, and there was a preface in which the excellent merits of Bernadotte were extolled.  No sooner was she out of her child-bed than she began to prepare for action.

“I fixed May 15 for my departure,” she wrote.  “Preparations had been begun long before this date and had been carried on in the most profound secrecy.”

She was going to Russia and had no time to lose, because already Napoleon was massing his forces at Dresden.

“On Saturday, May 23, 1812,”¹ she wrote, “at two o’clock in the afternoon I entered my carriage, remarking that I would be back for dinner.  I took no luggage of any sort with me.  I carried my fan in my hand.  My daughter had hers also.  My son and M. Rocca had stuffed their pockets with such articles as were indispensable for a journey of a few days.”

She travelled day and night, at the utmost speed of which her horses were capable, until she reached a farm-house, near Berne, where Augustus William had been ordered to await her.  Her son Auguste hurried into Berne to the Austrian Minister, who supplied him with passports made out in assumed names.  The young man then returned with Rocca to Coppet.  She continued her journey, travelling now in her berline, which had followed her.  At Salzburg Rocca rejoined her.  On June 6 she reached Vienna.

Austria had already been forced by Napoleon to declare war on Russia, and the Emperor Francis had gone to Dresden to attend his son-in-law.  She was compelled, therefore, to use great circumspection in applying for her passports to enter Russia.  The Austrian police, at the bidding of the French Embassy, began to trouble her and she was shadowed wherever she went.  Worse still, a formal demand was made by the French that Rocca, as a French officer, should be handed over to the authorities of his country.  Terrified, she rushed to police headquarters where a courteous official asked :

“Do you suggest, Madame, that we should go to war because of M. Rocca ? ”

“Why not ? ”²

Day followed day without bringing the Russian passports.  In lively anxiety she thought of trying to reach Constantinople.  She would, she told herself, be able to sail from that city for England.  She demanded and was granted a passport entitling her to travel through Galicia, and towards the end of June, resumed her journey, leaving Rocca and Augustus William behind her to await the Russian passports.  The Austrian police used every effort to speed the parting guest, and followed her wherever she went, so that, after a time, she grew to hate them.  Were these the good Germans whose praises she had so often sung ?  She reached Brunn in Marovia on June 3o.  They hurried her on.  On July 7 she was at Wadoyitz.  A few days later she spent the night with the Princess Lubomirska at Lanzut.

“I travelled slowly,” she wrote, “to allow the Russian passports time to follow me. . . . At last they came, for which deliverance I shall be grateful all my life, so lively was my joy.”

On July 14, the anniversary, as she duly noted, of the taking of the Bastille, she crossed the Russian frontier, vowing, as she did so, never again to set foot in any country under Napoleon’s rule.  Napoleon, on that day, was also in Russia, advancing at the head of his great host towards Moscow.  He had Narbonne with him, and placed so much trust in Germaine’s old lover that he had him sent on a special mission to the Emperor Alexander.

She was compelled to change her route so as to avoid the French army.  She gazed on the wide, sad spaces of the great land through which her carriage went rolling and bumping, and noted the eternal horizons, the insignificant villages, the sense of standing still which attended even the hottest pace.  Life, in this wilderness, was expressed only by the silhouette, seen now and again, of a Cossack, on his lean nag, with his long lance trailed across the sky.  As usual, the people interested her more than the country.  She heard the folk-songs of the Ukraine with delight, for they told of love and liberty.  And she felt, dimly perhaps, that “quelque chose de gigantesque” in the soul of the Russian peasant.  She was received everywhere with rapture, for the Emperor Alexander had issued a ukase commanding that she be hospitably entreated.  The local squires and their wives hurried to shake her hand as she passed among them ;  they convinced her that they had read her books, and that they knew how much she had suffered at Napoleon’s hands.  With shining eyes and a heart full of gratitude she drove, on August 1, into the city of Moscow.

She had outstripped her enemy, who was still far from the Imperial city.  But already the fear of him was hovering over the golden cupolas.  Alexander had left the city on the previous day, but the German patriot, Stein, was still there.  He visited her hotel on the night of her arrival.  She had gone to bed.  Moscow, even in its extremity, did her honour.  Day after day, while Napoleon drew nearer, she was feasted and praised.  But there were critics here and there.

“Men and women came running from all quarters to see her,” wrote a Russian woman,“³ and were rather disappointed.  They saw a big, fat woman of fifty, dressed in a fashion very little suited to her age.  Her tone did not please ;  her speeches were too long, her sleeves too short.  She sat (at dinner) in the place of honour, with her elbows on the table, rolling and unrolling a spill of paper.⁴

“She seemed rather out of humour.  On several occasions she tried to speak but failed to express herself.  Our wits ate and drank in their usual fashion and seemed much better pleased with their fish soup than with the conversation of Madame de Staël.  Few said a word.  How empty must our high society have seemed to this woman !  She is accustomed to be surrounded by men quick to understand every expression of feeling, every eager word ;  and here not a thought, not a clever saying in three long hours. . . . How bored she was !  How weary she seemed !  She has seen how much these apes of civilisation can take in.”

She did not stay long in Moscow.  On August 10 the berline reached St. Petersburg, and the first sight which greeted her was the Union Jack flying at the mast-head of an English ship.

“I felt,” she wrote, “that in confiding myself to the ocean, I should be passing into the powerful safe keeping of God.”

Petersburg, in fact, was become the metropolis of all the enemies not of Napoleon only but of France.  The city was full of Germans, Spaniards, French emigrés and Englishmen, each of whom was concerned, first of all, to defeat the French bid for world-power.  Into this anxious company Germaine was received as “the conscience of outraged Europe.”  She took her cue in an instant, and declared, with all the emphasis at her command, that the Emperor Alexander was become the chief hope of Mankind, of the French as well as of their enemies.  This was exactly what the Prussian patriots, and notably Stein, desired that she should say.  They knew their Alexander and had not forgotten Tilsit.  What would happen if Napoleon reached Moscow ?  The young Emperor must be stiffened in his resistance and confirmed in his faith.  He must be flattered and cajoled.  Stein hurried to pay his court to Madame de Staël.  He sat on the same sofa with the great lady and flirted with her, in spite of his dismay at her ugliness and his astonishment at the freedom of her speech.  They dined together and heard, together, the cheering strains of “God Save the King,” which she called “the National Anthem of Europe.”  She read a page or two of her unpublished book on Germany, and he was so moved that he asked leave to copy out what he had heard and send it to his wife.

“She moved me much,” the Prussian confessed, “by the depth and nobility of her feelings and the elevation of her thought, which she expresses with an eloquence that goes straight to the heart.”⁵

A few days later Germaine met Alexander.  This was a sovereign who prided himself on being the greatest Liberal in Europe.  A dreamy fellow, mystical, superstitious, fond of women, but too vain to give himself wholly to anything.  Alexander’s share in the murder of his father, Paul I, had left its mark on his character.  He was subject to fits of horror.  But he felt himself caught up, sometimes, to the clouds in moral ecstasies, which ravished his soul.  Gentle as a purring tiger, candid, devout, he was also more crafty than any other sovereign of Europe, and autocratic in the tradition of the Tsars.  “He wants men to be free,” said one of his friends, “so that they may be free to do what he tells them.”  In that respect he resembled Germaine very closely.  These two did not cease to talk about Liberty and to proclaim themselves her apostles.  But they kept their doctrines well away from their lives.

“As I talked with the Empress,” wrote Germaine,⁶ “the door opened and the Emperor Alexander did me the honour of coming to speak to me.  What most struck me about him, when I first set eyes on him, was an expression of goodness and of dignity of so remarkable a nature that it seemed that these two qualities had been fused into one.  Then I found myself deeply touched by the simplicity with which from his first word he discussed the great issues of European policy.  I have always considered the reluctance of most European sovereigns to talk of serious questions as a sign of their mediocrity.  They are afraid to utter words to which a real meaning attaches.  Alexander, on the contrary, spoke to me as had done the English statesmen who are accustomed to find their strength within themselves and not in the barriers with which power can surround itself.  The Emperor Alexander, whom Napoleon has tried to present in a false light, is a man of remarkable mind and of wide culture, and I do not believe that he could find anybody in his realm better endowed than himself with judgment and with leadership.  He did not hide from me the admiration he had felt for Napoleon during his dealings with him.  . . . He painted with much acumen the effect upon his mind exerted by Bonaparte’s conversation. . . .

“Alexander told me how much he regretted that he was not a great captain ;  I answered this noble modesty by saying that a sovereign was harder to come by than a general and that the greatest victory he could win was to support the public spirit of his people by his example.  The Emperor spoke to me with enthusiasm of his nation and of its possible evolution.  He expressed the desire, which everybody knows that he feels, to improve the lot of the peasants who are still slaves.

“ ‘Sire,’ I said to him, ‘your character is a Constitution for your Empire, and your conscience is its guarantee.’

“ ‘If that is so,’ he answered, ‘I’m only a happy accident.’

“Splendid words, the first of the kind, I believe, ever uttered by an absolute monarch !  How truly good one must be to be able to pronounce judgment on despotism when one is a despot !  And how good never to abuse power when the nation one governs is merely astonished at so much moderation.”

In short, these two admirable actors fell on each others’ necks.  They had need of one another.  Alexander explained that he had still 20,000 men tied up in Finland because he could not feel sure of Bernadotte ;  and Napoleon and his host were already at the gates of Smolensk.  Germaine told what she knew of the Prince Royal of Sweden, of his weaknesses and his vanity, and instructed the Russian how to play upon those chords.  She emphasised the usefulness of Bernadotte’s thorough knowledge of Napoleon’s methods and of the condition of the French army.  Further, she urged that the presence of so illustrious a Frenchman among the enemies of the Emperor of the French could not fail to impress the public mind of Europe.  Alexander was about to meet Bernadotte at Abo in Finland.  He went to the meeting determined to win the man at all costs, offered him Norway in exchange for Finland and returned with a promise of neutrality in his pocket.

“I saw the Emperor Alexander on a second occasion,” wrote Germaine, “on his return from Abo, and the interview I had the honour to have with him completely convinced me of the firmness of his determination.  He was good enough to tell me that, after the taking of Smolensk, Marshal Berthier wrote to the Russian Commander-in-Chief about some military matters and ended his letter by saying that the Emperor Napoleon retained the warmest feelings of friendship for the Emperor Alexander--absurd hypocrisy which the Emperor of Russia measured at its true value.”

Alexander then spoke “with the highest esteem” of Bernadotte.  It was decided that Madame de Staël should leave at once for Stockholm to place herself beside that man so that, if he was tempted to change his policy, she might help him to resist temptation.  A few days later she took leave.  Among those who came to bid her good-bye were Sir Robert Wilson and Stein, for both England and Germany were as deeply interested in her enterprise as Alexander himself.

The supreme moment of the struggle was at hand.  If Alexander, repeating his performance of Tilsit, made peace with the Emperor of the French, Napoleon would have achieved his purpose, and won such a position of strength as must have shaken British world-power to its foundations.  France, in that event, might conceivably have regained the first place among the nations.  The Russian Emperor, for all his protesting, was harassed by doubts and anxieties upon which the supporters of Napoleon’s policy among his advisers played unceasingly.  In these circumstances a declaration of war by Sweden, from which country Russia had just taken Finland, might easily have broken Alexander’s resistance.  The Swedish nation was anxious that war against Russia should be declared ;  only Bernadotte had prevented a rupture.

Madame de Staël sailed from Abo with Albert, Albertine, Rocca and Augustus William, was nearly shipwrecked on the island of Aland, and did not reach Stockholm till September 24, 1812.  She came not a moment too soon.  The news of Napoleon’s victory over the Russian army on the Borodino and of his entry into Moscow arrived at Stockholm almost at the same time as herself.  It caused something like a panic among the Swedes.  As soon as she heard it she rushed to the palace.  She found Bernadotte in such dreadful anxiety that she almost lost her own nerve.  The fellow pulled himself together in her presence and told her Napoleon was lost ;  but she knew that, behind her back, he was trying, already, to wriggle out of his promises to Alexander.  His ministers were urging him to declare war on Russia.

She gathered her courage and set her teeth.  She plied him with flatteries, arguments, promises.  Within a few days she had opened a salon and plunged into politics.  Englishmen and Germans thronged her rooms.  She talked, she plotted, she planned, rushing from Embassy to Embassy and minister to minister.  An intelligence service was organised and relations established not only with Petersburg but also with Berlin and Vienna.  Bernadotte was compelled, daily, to hear what was passing in the Russian capital ;  he was challenged daily to renew his assurances.  She called him the saviour of Europe and the hope of humanity.  When he fainted, her eloquence revived him ;  when he would have bolted, she was standing, sword in hand, in his path.

And meanwhile, in the Kremlin, among the smoking ashes of Moscow, Napoleon lingered in an agony of alternating hope and despair, while the days of salvation marched away into the winter darkness.  Would Alexander make peace ?  Would Bernadotte make war ?  Couriers were despatched almost hourly to Petersburg, where the irresolute Russian, in his Winter Palace, was giving himself to all the demons which resided in his own dark spirit.  Alexander had reached so hysterical a condition of mind that he would have welcomed any good excuse for a reconciliation with Napoleon.  Would Bernadotte declare war ?⁷

On the contrary, Bernadotte wrote to point out the weakness of the French position.  He counselled courage and resolution.  October passed ;  the Retreat from Moscow began.  A world breathless with astonishment beheld the wreckage of the Grand Army sinking among the snowdrifts.

It was all over.

¹ Her descriptions of her travels are taken from Dix Années d’Exil.

² Metternich goes out of his way to recount this incident.  See Blennerhasset, Vol. III, p. 444 (after the unpublished papers of Metternich).

³ Pouchrine :  Fragments et Mémoires inédites d’une dame, published by the Russian review Sovremenike and quoted by Paul Gautier, Madame de Staël et Napoléon, pp. 307, 311.

⁴ Sometimes it was a spill of paper, sometimes a wand, sometimes a sprig of laurel.  She always held a “sceptre” of some kind when talking at meals.

⁵ See Pertz :  Life of Stein.

⁶ Dix Années d’Exil.

⁷ Alexander’s doubts and hesitations at this time were soon forgotten in the tide of victory, but they were real.  He was several times on the point of treating with Napoleon, and Sir Robert Wilson and Stein had an anxious time.  The Imperial family, too, was divided in its attitude to Napoleon.  The Emperor’s brother was for negotiations ;  his womenfolk were against.  A threat by Bernadotte must, in these circumstances, have “tipped the balance” in Napoleon’s favour.