by Will Durant
In the spring of 1801 Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph: “Monsieur de Staël is in the most abject misery, and his wife gives dinners and balls.”24 Joseph relayed the rebuke, Germaine went to Monsieur’s room in the Place de la Concorde, and found him in the last stages of paralysis. She attended to his care, and in May, 1802, she took him with her when she left Paris for Switzerland. He died on the way, and was buried in the cemetery of Coppet. In that year, increasingly excitable, Mme. de Staël began to take opium.
2. The Author
She was the greatest European authoress of her time, and the greatest French author, barring Chateaubriand. She had written fifteen books, now forgotten, before 1800; in that year she offered a major work, De la Littérature; thereafter she produced two novels—Delphine (1803) and Corinne (1807)—that made her famous throughout Europe; in 1810–13 she fought the battle of her life to publish her masterpiece, De l’Allemagne; at her death she left another major work, Considérations sur … la Révolution française, and Les Dix Années d’exil. All of those here named were substantial and conscientious productions, some running to eight hundred pages. Mme. de Staël worked hard, loved assiduously, and wrote passionately; she fought to the end the strongest man of her time, and sadly triumphed in his fall.
De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales undertook a large and heroic theme: “I propose to examine the influence of religion, morals, and laws upon literature, and the influence of literature upon religion, morals, and laws.”*It still breathes the spirit of the eighteenth century—freedom of thought, the individual versus the state, the progress of knowledge and morals; here is no supernatural myth, but faith in the spread of education, science, and intelligence. The first prerequisite of progress is the liberation of the mind from political control. With minds so freed, literature will embody, spread, and transmit the mounting heritage of the race. We must not expect art and poetry to progress like science and philosophy, for they depend chiefly on imagination, which is as keen and fertile in early as in later times. In the development of a civilization, art and poetry precede science and philosophy; so the age of Pericles preceded that of Aristotle, the Middle Ages preceded Galileo, the art of Louis XIV preceded the intellectual Enlightenment. The progress of the mind is not continuous; there are retrogressions, due to disturbances in nature or to the vicissitudes of politics; but even in the Middle Ages science and scientific method advanced, and made possible the appearance of Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes. In every age philosophy represents the accumulation and substance of the intellectual heritage. Perhaps (she mused) philosophy will in some future era be sufficiently comprehensive and mature to “be to us what the Christian religion has been in the past.”25 She defined les lumières philosophiques (philosophical enlightenment) as “the appreciation of things according to reason,”26 and only in the face of death did she waver from her faith in the life of reason. “The triumph of the light [les lumières] has always been favorable to the greatness and betterment of mankind.”27
But, she continues (having read Rousseau as well as Voltaire), the growth of the intellect is not enough; knowledge is only one element in understanding. The other is feeling. There must be a sensitivity of the soul as well as of the senses. Without it the soul would be a tabula mortua, a dead receiver of physical sensations; with it the soul enters into the life of other living beings, shares their wondering and suffering, feels the soul within the flesh, the God behind the material world. From this viewpoint the Romantic literature of the misty north—Germany, Scandinavia, Great Britain—is as important as the classic literature of the sunny south—Greece and Italy; the poems of “Ossian” are as important as Homer’s epics, and Werther was the greatest book of its time.
Napoleon (in his youth) would have agreed with these evaluations, but he must have been disturbed by the author’s view of the relations between literature and government. Democracies (she held) tend to subject writers and artists to popular tastes; aristocracies lead them to write for an elite, encouraging deliberate thought and sobriety of form;28 absolutism promotes art and science, thereby imposing itself through splendor and power, but it discountenances philosophy and historiography, for these make for a breadth and depth of view dangerous to dictatorship. Democracy stimulates literature and retards art; aristocracies impose taste but frown upon enthusiasm and originality; absolute government stifles freedom, innovation, and thought. If France could have a constitutional government—reconciling order and liberty—she might combine the stimulations of democracy with the judicious restraints of lawful rule.
All in all, this was a remarkable book for a woman of thirty-four years and several million francs. There are errors, of course, in these six hundred pages, for when the mind outgrasps its reach it is bound to risk a fall—though it may shake to the ground some elusive fruit. Madame was a bit vague in history and literature; she thought the Irish were Germans, and that Dante was a minor poet; but she argued bravely for a liberal government and a reasonable Christianity, and she spilled a hundred aperçus on her way. She foresaw that the development of statistics might make government more intelligent, and that political education might help prepare candidates for public office. She remarked prophetically that “scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.”29 “There is scarcely an idea of the eighteenth century which [the book] does not transmit, scarcely an idea of the twentieth century which it does not contain in germ.”30
She had written, in this volume, her lifelong plaint—that “the entire social order … is arrayed against a woman who wants to rise to a man’s reputation” in the realms of art and thought.31 Now she had to make an exception; for, as she wrote twenty-one years later, “in the spring of 1800 I published my work on literature, and the success it met with restored me completely to favor with society; my drawing room became again filled.”32 The faint of heart who had shied away from her salon after Constant’s blast against dictatorship returned penitent and adulant; and the Little Corporal in the Tuileries had to admit that he had found a foe to match his mettle.
In August, 1802, Jacques Necker sent to Consul Lebrun Les Dernières Vues de politique et de finance—his last views on politics and money. It excused the dictatorship of Napoleon, but as a necessary evil, presumably temporary; it warned against the continued concentration of power in the hands of the military; it expressed regret that the finances of the new government depended so heavily upon war indemnities; and it proposed a more liberal constitution of which Napoleon would be the “guardian.” Lebrun showed the book to Napoleon, who, already half imperial, resented the notion that he should reduce his power. Convinced that Mme. de Staël had guided the pen of her father, he issued an order excluding her from Paris—i.e., in effect, closing her mischief-making salon. He forgot that she could write as well as speak. She spent the winter of 1802–03 in Geneva, but in December she again became the talk of Paris by publishing a novel, Delphine. No one reads it now; everyone of literary or political consciousness read it then, for it was part of a virile struggle between a woman and her time.
Delphine is a virtuous girl who longs and fears to yield; otherwise she is Mme. de Staël. Léonce (= Narbonne) is a handsome aristocrat who loves Delphine but abstains from her because a rumor accuses her of “affairs”; he cannot risk his social standing by making her his wife. He marries Matilde de Vernon, whose mother is a scheming witch who covers her lies with wit; Paris saw this lady as Talleyrand despite her skirts, and Talleyrand revenged himself by remarking of the masculine authoress that she had disguised both him and herself as women. Delphine, rejected, retires to a convent, where the abbess hurries her into a vow of lifelong chastity. When Léonce discovers her innocence he thinks of divorcing his unresponsive wife and courting Delphine, but he hesitates to ruin his career by violating the Catholic code of irrefragable monogamy. Matilde dies, a victim of drama
tic convenience; Léonce persuades Delphine to elope with him and surrender to his passion; he deserts her, goes off to join the émigrés, is caught and condemned to death. Delphine, in love with his cruelty, rushes to save him, but arrives only in time to see him shot; whereupon she too falls dead.
This absurd and typically romantic plot served the authoress as a podium from which to discuss the legitimacy of divorce, the bigotry of Catholicism (she had inherited Protestantism), the moral rights of women as against the double standard, and the validity of the individual conscience as against the honor code of a class. Her arguments were well received by the intelligentsia of Paris, but they did not please Napoleon, who was turning to Catholicism as a cure for the mental and moral turmoil of France. On October 13, 1803, he issued an order forbidding Mme. de Staël to approach within forty leagues of Paris.
She thought it was just the right time to visit Germany. She had learned enough German to read it, though not to speak it; why not now sample the music of Vienna, the wit of Weimar, and the royal society of Berlin? On November 8, with son Auguste, daughter Albertine, two servants, and her now platonic cavaliere servente Constant, she crossed the Rhine at Metz into Germany.
3. The Tourist
Her first impression, at Frankfurt, was hostile; all the men seemed fat, lived to eat, and ate to smoke; she found it difficult to breathe when they were near. They wondered at this proud woman who could not appreciate the Gemütlichkeit of their pipes. Goethe’s mother wrote to him: “She oppressed me like a millstone. I avoided her wherever I could, refused all invitations to go to things she was to attend, and breathed more freely when she left.”33
Germaine, with her retinue, hurried on to Weimar, where she found the atmosphere purified by poetry. The town was dominated by writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers; the court was judiciously and tolerantly led by Duke Charles Augustus, his wife the Duchess Luise, and his mother the Duchess Dowager Anna Amalie. These people were well educated; they smoked with discrimination, and nearly all of them spoke French. Moreover, many of them had read Delphine, many more had heard of her war against Napoleon; and all noted that she had money and spent it. They feted her with dinners, theater parties, dances, and balls; they summoned Schiller to read scenes from Wilhelm Tell; they listened to her reciting long passages from Racine. Goethe, then at Jena, tried to play truant by pleading a cold; the Duke urged him to come to Weimar nevertheless; he came, and conversed with Madame uncomfortably. He was alarmed by her frank warning that she intended to print her report of his remarks.34 She was disappointed to find that he was no longer Werther, having changed from a lover to a pontiff. He tried to confuse her with contradictions; “my obstinate contrariness often drove her to despair, but it was then that she was most amiable, and that she displayed her mental and verbal agility most brilliantly.”35 “Fortunately for me,” she recalled, “Goethe and Wieland spoke French extremely well; Schiller struggled.”36 She wrote of Schiller with affection, of Goethe with respect; he and Napoleon were the only men she had met who made her realize her limitations. Schiller was fatigued by the rapidity of her thought and speech, but he ended by being impressed. “Satan,” he wrote to a friend, “has led me to the female French philosopher who, of all creatures living, is the most animated, the most ready for contest, the most fertile in words. But she is also the most cultivated, the most spirituelle [intellectually alert] of women; and if she were not really interesting I would not be disturbed by her.”37 Weimar breathed a sigh of relief when, after a three months’ stay, she left for Berlin.
She found the mists of Berlin depressing after the brilliance of Weimar. The leaders of the Romantic movement in Germany were absent or dead; the philosophers were immured in distant universities—Hegel at Jena, Schelling at Würzburg; Germaine had to content herself with the King, the Queen, and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose wide knowledge of languages and cultures delighted her. She engaged him to come with her to Coppet as tutor to her son Auguste; he agreed, and fell in love with her at the worst possible time.
At Berlin she received word that her father was dangerously ill. She hurried back to Coppet, but before reaching it she learned that he had died (April 9, 1804). It was a blow more desolating than any in her duel with Napoleon. Her father had been her moral as well as her financial mainstay; in her view he had always been right, and ever good; and not all her lovers could take his place. She found comfort in writing an idyl of adoration—Monsieur Necker’s Character and Private Life—and in beginning work on her masterpiece, De l’Allemagne. She inherited most of her father’s fortune, and now had an income of 120,000 francs per year.
In December she went to seek the sun in Italy. She took along her three children—Auguste, Albertine, and Albert—and Schlegel, who now tutored her also, for he found her poorly informed about Italian art. At Milan they were joined by a still better Baedeker—Jean-Charles-Léonard de Sismondi, who was beginning to write his learned History of the Italian Republics. He too fell in love with Germaine—or with her mind or her income—until, like Schlegel, he discovered that she never took a commoner seriously. Together they moved through Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Ancona to Rome. Joseph Bonaparte, always fond of her, had given her letters of introduction to the best society there. She was lionized by the aristocracy, but found the princes and princesses less interesting than the courtly cardinals, who, as men of the world, knew her books, her wealth, and her feud with Napoleon, and were not disturbed by her Protestant faith. She was received with an ovation, and with improvised poetry and music, into the Accademia dell’ Arcadia; she used that experience in introducing Corinne.
In June, 1805, she was back in Coppet, soon again surrounded by lovers, friends, scholars, diplomats (Prince Esterházy of Vienna, Claude Hochet of Napoleon’s Council of State), even a ruler—the Elector of Bavaria. Coppet’s was now a more famous salon than any in Paris. “I just returned from Coppet,” wrote Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, “and I feel completely stupefied… and exhausted by the intellectual debauches. More wit is expended at Coppet in a single day than in many a country during a whole year.”38 The assemblage was sufficiently numerous and talented to stage complete dramas; Germaine herself played the lead in Andromaque and Phèdre, and some guests thought her performances were surpassed only by the queens of the Paris stage. On other occasions there were recitals of music or poetry. Three times a day the table was set, sometimes for thirty guests; fifteen servants were kept busy; and in the gardens lovers might wander, and new friendships might be made.
Germaine’s time-beaten lovers—Montmorency, Constant, Schlegel, Sismondi—had cooled considerably, exhausted by her demand for obedient devotion, and she was warming herself with passion for Prosper de Barante. He was twenty-three, she was thirty-nine, but her pace soon tired him, and he sought refuge in distance and the indecisiveness which she was satirizing in the Oswald of Corinne. That once famous novel was nearing completion, and called for a French printer, who would need the imprimatur of Napoleon’s police. Prosper’s father, prefect of the department of Leman, assured Fouché that Madame had been “reserved and circumspect” for the past year. She received permission to spend the summer of 1806 at Auxerre, 120 miles from Paris; she took a villa there; and in the fall she was allowed to move to Rouen for the winter. Several of her friends visited her in these cities, and some of them expressed hope that Napoleon would at last meet defeat in the arduous campaign that made him and his army spend the winter in the freezing north.39 Napoleon’s secret police opened Germaine’s correspondence, and informed him of these sentiments. On December 31 he wrote angrily to Fouché: “Do not let that bitch of a Madame de Staël approach Paris. I know she is not far from it.”40 (Secretly and briefly she stole into Paris sometime in the spring of 1807.) Amid preparations for the battle of Friedland, Napoleon wrote to Fouché, April 19:
Among the thousand and one things concerning Madame de Staël that come into my hands, here is a letter from which you can see what a fine Frenchwoman we hav
e there…. It truly is difficult to restrain one’s indignation at the spectacle of all the metamorphoses this whore, and an ugly one at that, is undergoing. I shall not tell you what projects this ridiculous coterie has already formed in case by a happy accident I should be killed, since a police minister may be assumed to be informed of this.
And on May 11, again to Fouché:
This madwoman of a Madame de Staël writes me a six-page letter, in double Dutch…. She tells me she has bought an estate in the valley of Montmorency and draws the conclusion that this will entitle her to reside in Paris. I repeat to you that to leave such a hope to that woman is to torture her gratuitously. If I showed you the detailed evidence of everything she has done at her country place during the two months she resided there, you would be astonished. Indeed, although at five hundred leagues from France, I know better what happens there than does my Minister of Police.41