Germaine de Staël

THE END

GERMAINE was in no hurry to return to Paris to which, as Talleyrand sneered, Louis XVIII had returned, “ in the baggage of the English Army.”  Reaction, as she clearly saw, was inevitable.

“ I don’t feel any great keenness for France,” she wrote to Meister on August 2,¹ 1815, “in the condition to which it is now reduced ;  for I love it too much not to suffer from seeing that condition.  My son is going there ;  we’ll see what he reports.  I send him as my raven after the flood. . . . What sort of position does the poor King find himself in ?  Can he carry on without the Allies ?  And France, will she endure the presence of those Allies if they cut down the numbers of their troops ?

“ I don’t know if my personal business (the £100,000) though settled, will be carried through.  It seems to me that nothing more can be done.”

Still, she did not abandon hope, as her next letter to Meister shows :

Coppet, August 25, 1815.²

“ I haven’t replied sooner because I don’t know what I’m going to do.  My demand to be paid may recall me (to Paris) at any moment but, that apart, I’m sure I shall stay here, if it pleases God, until September 12, at least. . . . I hope that this debt to my father will be paid.  The King has promised to pay.  But when and how ?  I shall know during this coming winter, which I shall spend in Paris.

“ Will you do me a favour ?  You’ve told me that Madame de la Riandrie possesses, as a legacy from Mademoiselle Clairon, letters of M. de Staël which might cause me distress.  Can’t you get her to send them to me at Paris ?  She will earn, thus, the right to my gratitude, and who knows whether or not I may be able to give her proof of it.”

She remained at Coppet busy with her last and in some respects her greatest work, Considérations sur les Principaux evénements de la Révolution Françoise, which she had begun as a justification of her father.  The book outgrew its original purpose.  It became her political testament and the testament also of the Constitutional party.  It suffers from the same defects as her other posthumous work Dix Années d’Exil.  It is journalism rather than literature, and political journalism at that.  Germaine wrote, as always, with a purpose.  In the year 1815 her purpose was still to convince France that all the misfortunes and calamities, Napoleon included, had flowed from the rejection of Necker’s advice to adopt the English Constitution.  The merits of both books reside in their swift impressionism.  This woman saw all the lands of Europe with the eyes of a special correspondent.  Often faulty, her observation was never wholly at fault.  But it was always coloured by the need of the moment and by the prejudice which was its occasion.  Modern readers are likely to experience that sense of melancholy interest which is so often occasioned by the study of the files of a newspaper.

Madame de Staël never mastered the art of living, which is the art of being reconciled with oneself.  A Puritan at heart, she did not cease to deplore her unruly lusts.  They drove her, fatally, from lover to lover, so that the number of her lovers defeated all her hopes of love.  And so she passed, ceaselessly, from desire to disappointment and from disappointment to disgust and loathing.

“ The mystery of human life,” she told Albertine, “is the relationship existing between our faults and our sufferings.  I have never committed a sin which has not brought me to unhappiness.”³

That she was kind, impulsively generous, inspired by maternal feelings as licentious as her passions is attested by witnesses innumerable.  But beneath that agitated surface were the deep waters of vanity and calculation.  Nevertheless, if she found no sure way of life for herself, she offered suggestions many of which have become commonplaces of present-day thought.

Rocca’s health became very bad during the autumn of 1815.  In October she left Coppet with him and went, by way of Piedmont, to Pisa.  She nursed this husband, whom she still refused to acknowledge, with an excellent care and he became stronger.  Early in 1816, her debt was paid by Louis XVIII and she found herself possessed of a fortune, including the £150,000 which she had invested in American land, of more than £250,000, a sum worth to-day well over a million.  Albertine’s marriage was now finally arranged.  The bridegroom, accompanied by Augustus William, arrived in Pisa in January, and the wedding took place there a month later.⁴  In May she wrote to Benjamin, who had gone to London :

“ My health is failing and still more my interest in this short life.  But I value my life because it is now a happy one ;  I deplore the time of which I was robbed by unhappiness.  Who shall account for all those days to the Giver of such a wonderful gift ? ”

The reference is to Rocca ;  writing about him to Juliette Récamier, she declared :

“ Such patience, such thorough appreciation of, and thankfulness for, my care have made him the most perfect friend imaginable.”

In June 1816 she was back in Coppet.  Byron, Hobhouse, Stein, Lord Bredalbane, Lord Lansdowne, Henry Brougham and La Harpe came to visit her.  “ She was,” said Byron when recalling that visit, “the best creature in the world.”  Stein was of the same opinion.  They lamented together the spirit of reaction which was sweeping over Europe.  “Are the shadows or the lights,” she demanded of Meister, “going to triumph in Europe ? ”⁵

She returned to Paris in October and renewed her acquaintance with Wellington.  The Bourbons no longer pleased her and she began to intrigue with the Duc d’Orleans.  Her salon, as ever, was a centre of agitation.  When in the following year she heard that her daughter was going to be confined she presented her with a portrait of Necker for use during the pains of labour.  “Gaze on his picture,” she urged, “it will give you strength.”

In February 1817, while descending the staircase of the Hôtel Decazes, where a brilliant reception was in progress, she collapsed.  It was soon evident that she had lost the use of both hands and feet probably as the result of a cerebral thrombosis.  A new house with a big garden was leased in the rue Neuve des Mathurins, and there, seated in a wheeled chair, she continued to receive her friends.  Mathieu, recalled by this aflliction to his old allegiance, was best beloved of them all.

At first some hopes of recovery were held out, but when July came it was seen that the end was near.  She sent a message to Wellington asking him to visit her, but he was away from Paris.  To Chateaubriand she declared :

“ I have always been the same, lively and sad.  I have loved God, my father and liberty.”

A few days later she presented her friends with roses and blessed them solemnly.  Benjamin was not of this number.  The next day, July 13, 1817, she received Mathieu and the Duc d’Orleans in her bedroom.  She seemed overwrought towards evening, and opium was administered.  Miss Randall, her English nurse, asked her if she thought she would be able to sleep and received the answer :  “ Lourdement et profondément.”

She was right.  The next morning, July 14, of glorious memory, at five o’clock and while still sleeping, she died.  She was buried at Coppet beside her father and mother.  It was left to Benjamin, who watched during a whole night beside her body, to write her epitaph, thus :

“ In their misfortunes her friends counted on her as on a kind of Providence.”

THE END

¹ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 237.

² Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 238.

³ Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 302.

⁴ Albertine remained a Protestant, and there were therefore two marriages.

⁵ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 240.