Germaine de Staël

THE RETURN OF THE EXILE

ONE of the English Ministers asked Madame de Staël early in 1814¹ what she thought of the political situation.

“I hope,” she replied, “that Bonaparte will win and be killed.”

To Benjamin she wrote on March z2, 1814 :

“ Your associations have made a flunkey of you.  Do you seriously believe that Bonaparte isn’t fit to take his place in a meeting of princes ?  Forty battles are a patent of nobility.”

As she had wept for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, levying tribute even upon their anguish, so now she grieved for Napoleon.  He was the central figure still ;  still must she share the limelight with him, greedy of the greatness of his fall.

“ There was grandeur,” she wrote, “in the farewells of Napoleon to his soldiers and to their eagles, so long victorious.  His last campaign had been long and wisely conducted.  In short, the calamitous prestige of the military glory of France which attached to him was not yet destroyed.”²

Perhaps it was not all vanity on her part.  Anxious as she was to hunt with any hounds which looked like making a kill of her enemy, she was more French than English, so much more indeed that the longer she stayed in England the less she trusted the professions of the Ministers.  Benjamin sent her a memorandum for official consumption in which he suggested that France ought to be treated as the outlaw of the nations.

“ I’ve read your memorandum,” she rebuked him.  “God forbid that I should show it to anybody.  I’ll do nothing against France.  I will not use against her in her misfortune either the reputation I owe to her or the name of my father who loved her.  These burnt villages are on the very road where the women threw themselves on their knees to see him (my father) pass (at the time of the taking of the Bastille).  You’re no Frenchman, Benjamin.”

In April, 1814, she wrote to him again :  “ Be faithful to France and to liberty.”  These ideas were in her mind when she left London on May 8, 1814, to return to Paris.³

“ After ten years of exile, I landed at Calais,” she wrote, “and I promised myself a great joy in seeing again this beautiful land of France which I had so sorely regretted.  My feelings were very different from what I had expected.  The first men I saw on the shore wore Prussian uniforms ;  they were masters of the town, and that by right of conquest. . . . O France, O France. . . .

“ I continued my journey, my heart always suffering by reason of the same thought.  As I drew near Paris, Germans, Russians, Cossacks, Baskirs were everywhere to be seen ;  they were encamped round the Church of Saint-Denis, where repose the ashes of the Kings of France.  The discipline, ordained by the leaders of these soldiers, prevented them from doing any harm to anybody—any harm except the oppression of soul which one could not help feeling.  In short, I entered this town where the happiest and most brilliant days of my life had been spent, as if I was suffering a bad dream.  Was I in Germany or in Russia ?  Had they copied the streets and the squares of the capital of France to recall memories at a moment when the capital itself existed no longer ?  Indeed, all was confusion in my spirit ;  for in spite of the bitterness of my thoughts, I felt that these foreigners had removed the yoke from our necks.  I admired them without reserve at this period ;  but to see Paris occupied by them, the Tuileries, the Louvre, guarded by troops, fetched from the limits of Asia, to whom our language, our history, our great men—all were less well known than the latest Khan of Tartary, that was an unbearable distress.  If that was my feeling, who had not been able to come back to France during Bonaparte’s reign, what must have been the feelings of the warriors, covered with wounds, and the more proud of their military glory in that, during a long time, they had been unable to claim any other kind of glory for France ?

“ Some days after my return, I went to the Opera.  Often, during my exile, I had recalled this daily fête of Paris, more gracious and more brilliant than all the special fêtes of other countries.  They were giving the ballet of Psyche, which, during twenty years, had been presented continuously in very different circumstances.  The staircase of the Opera was decorated with Russian sentries.  In entering the house, I looked about me for a familiar face but saw nothing but foreign uniforms.  A few old Parisians of the middle class still showed themselves among the audience, from force of habit.  Otherwise all the spectators were changed ;  only the spectacle remained the same.  The decorations, the music, the dancing, had lost nothing of their delight, and I felt humiliated to see this amazing French grace displayed before these swords and moustaches, as if it was the duty of the conquered to amuse their conquerors. . . .

“ They (the French officers) walked about sadly, in plain clothes because they could not endure to wear their military decorations since they had failed to defend the sacred land, the keeping of which had been committed to them. . . . The position of the King, who had come back with the foreigners, was full of difficulty so far as the army, which detested those foreigners, was concerned.”

Germaine quickly forgot her emotions ;  as the memory of Napoleon at Elba began to fade, her interest in him evaporated.  She opened her salon, this time in the rue Royal, and offered lavish hospitality to all the victors of Leipzig—Alexander of Russia, Francis of Austria, Frederick William of Prussia, Bernadotte, Wellington—the new idols basking in the new limelight.  “In Europe to-day,” wrote Madame de Chastenay, “there are three powers :  England, Russia and Madame de Staël.”  Her drawing-room was crowded to suffocation with kings and princes, ambassadors and ministers, men of the ancien régime, Liberals, even Bonapartists such as Queen Hortense.  The King, Louis XVIII, though he had forgotten nothing, found it expedient to be kind ;  Talleyrand was reconciled to her, so was Fouché.  Mathieu was back again, Benjamin too.  They rubbed shoulders with Lafayette, Lally-Telendal, Boissy d’Anglas, with Gentz, the Humboldts, Sir James Mackintosh, Canning, Harrowby, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, above all with Alexander of Russia himself.

She spent hours with Alexander—the hours that good young man could spare from the society of Josephine and Hortense at Malmaison.  The Russian was piqued because England and Talleyrand had upset his plan to put Bernadotte on the throne ;  still more, because Louis XVIII did not seem to understand that he, Alexander, was the real deliverer.  She flattered him, soothed him, spoiled and petted him.  And together, in delicious twilights, they discussed the rights of man, liberty and love.  Alexander forced King Louis to give his subjects a Constitution.  What matter, England was the real sovereign.  The kings went their way.  Germaine returned to Coppet for the summer.

“ We’re here in a flat calm,” she wrote to her friend Miss Berry in London, “. . . as for Society, it is nothing now.  I’ve been gathering some wreckage in my drawing-room, but there’s no cohesion.”

She had grown thin, nervous, unfit.  As for Rocca, he had fallen into consumption and was spitting blood.  But he remained faithful.  “Since I left you,” she wrote to Albertine Adrienne, “only John has given me real affection, all my strength is in him.”  Sleeplessness was again afflicting her and she was taking opium freely.  “This wretched insomnia makes life too long,” she cried.  “There isn’t enough interest in life to spread over twenty-four hours.”  Nevertheless, she worked with merciless energy.  The Bourbons were not friendly.  Interest in her was flagging.  Even Mathieu, who had become chevalier d’honneur to the Duchesse d’Angouleme, Louis XVI’s daughter, and aide-de-camp to Monsieur (the Comte d’Artois), and was concerned only to forget his past, had grown shy.  Mathieu wrote and spoke about “Our Glorious Restoration”;  she failed to see the glory.  She returned to Paris in the autumn of 1814 and at once began to make arrangements for her daughter’s marriage.  It was no longer a question of the veil or M. de Baudissin ;  a suitor of the most desirable kind had been found in the person of the Duc de Broglie, a young man of 29, whom Madame de Staël had known from the time when she rescued his mother from Robespierre.  An excellent young man who had learned wisdom serving Napoleon and who remarked of himself with becoming modesty :  “My feelings were healthy ;  my intentions right ;  my views sensible.”

His purse was not in so good a state.  A big dowry was necessary therefore.  Germaine applied to the King for her £100,000, still hidden in the Treasury.  And Louis XVIII promised to pay.  Only one fly appeared in the ointment—namely, Benjamin.  Become more Royalist than the King, this fellow had now, very unseasonably, fallen in love with Juliette Récamier and, because she remained, as ever in the presence of a lover, quite unmoved, had sought the help of the prophetess Madame de Krudener, a hysterical woman who had acquired influence over Alexander of Russia, and was, by that means, established as a fashionable mystic.  Madame de Krudener contracted to produce a “soul-bond” between Benjamin and Juliette, and gave him a “writing” for the lady which so moved him that he cried :

“It is here the truth lies.  I see it all.  All my emotion is calmed.  Good and powerful God, finish my healing.”

He spent his nights in tears, on his knees in prayer or lying on the floor in ecstasies.  The “conversion” of this hardened sinner made a great stir and annoyed Germaine so much that she resolved once more to be done with him for ever.  She had other troubles.  She had been writing treasonably to Murat, the King of Naples, Napoleon’s brother-in-law.  Her letters were opened and read.  Louis XVIII sent them back to her by the hand of M. Dandré who told her :

“ Madame, here is your correspondence with the King of Naples.  I bring it you and you can send it to its degination.  The King has read it.  You may, Madame, continue to write and receive letters, you may travel in France, go out of France and come back.  You may make your home here.  We attach so little importance to what you do or say or write, that the Government wishes neither to know nor to disturb you nor ever to give you any anxiety about your plans and your mysteries.”

That she could not bear.

¹ Considerations, Part IV, p. 418.

² Considerations, Part IV, p. 419.

³ Considerations, Part V, p. 55 et seq.

⁴ Quoted by Gautier, Madame de Staël et Napoléon, p. 368, from Intermédiaire des chercheurs, Vol. XXIII.