True Pleasures

by Lucinda Holdforth

  As the ball reaches its climax Talleyrand, with his famous limp, slowly leads in his guest of honor: it’s Josephine, gently regal in a thin gown and a diadem of antique cameos. But Germaine’s focus is upon the man following behind – uniformed, modest, sallow, short, heroic Napoleon. Like many moderates, she believes his combination of revolutionary passion and military know-how may offer France the best hope of stability and democracy.

  So she waylays him at the bottom of the stairs. She turns up again in the small salon. She pursues him on the way to the table. She tries every one of her conversational gambits. She is one of the most influential people in France and she can help Napoleon. She wants Napoleon to respond to her, to engage with her, to recognize her, yes, perhaps even to fall under her famous spell. But he doesn’t.

  The final conversation goes so badly that people talk about it for years.

  ‘General!’ exclaims Madame de Staël. ‘Who most represents your idea of a wife?’

  ‘Mine!’ replies Napoleon. Germaine persists.

  ‘That is simple enough, but what kind of woman would you admire the most?’

  ‘She who is the best housekeeper,’ answers the hero.

  Finally Germaine demands of him: ‘Who is the greatest woman, alive or dead?’

  Bonaparte looks at her. ‘The one who has made the most children,’ he says.

  The plaque says that this was the beginning of their mutual hostility – the phrase binding these two great adversaries together: after all, only equals have mutual feelings.

  But the truth is that the feeling wasn’t, at first, mutual – it was only Napoleon who was hostile. And, really, I can understand why. It must have been infuriating to have the question of woman put to him so directly – it must have seemed like a full-frontal assault. From that moment, Napoleon viewed Germaine de Staël through the prism of her femininity: she had, effectively, demanded it. Until the day he died, Napoleon’s epithets for Germaine de Staël never failed to allude to her gender: That hussy Staël, he called her. Or that whore, and an ugly one at that. Or that mad woman. Eventually she became just that woman.

  Germaine de Staël, however, did not indulge in personal politics. In the absence of better leadership options for France, she set aside Napoleon’s personal dislike. She continued to endorse him and engage with him. Once she even turned up at Napoleon’s little house in rue Chantereine. Told by the butler that Napoleon was naked in his bath she cried, No matter, genius has no sex!

  When Napoleon came back from Egypt and mounted a military coup against the Directory Government in November 1799, Germaine de Staël remained a reluctant supporter. But she had her limits. As Napoleon became more socially conservative, as he drifted towards totalitarianism and war-mongering, she pulled back. Pragmatic, yes, but she was never going to be an uncritical supporter of the emerging Napoleonic state.

  On the evening of 4 January 1800, Germaine de Staël’s lover Benjamin Constant was drafting his maiden speech to Napoleon’s newly formed Tribunate. Benjamin Constant proposed to call for the Tribunate’s independence and declare that otherwise there would be nothing left but servitude and silence – a silence that all Europe would hear. He knew this would provoke Napoleon’s wrath. The same night there was a big gathering at Germaine de Staël’s house. Half of Napoleon’s cabinet and even several of his brothers were among the guests. Benjamin Constant warned Germaine, ‘Tonight your drawing room is filled with people whom you like. If I make my speech it will be deserted tomorrow.’ Germaine de Staël told her lover simply, ‘One must follow one’s convictions.’

  Events transpired as Benjamin predicted. Napoleon was angry at the speech and blamed not Benjamin Constant, but his mistress, Germaine de Staël. Her regular guests suddenly avoided her salon. For a period she was socially ostracized. The press was already falling under Napoleon’s control and attacked Germaine de Staël: It is not your fault that you are ugly, but it is your fault that you are an intriguer.

  Towards the spring of 1800, Germaine de Staël published On Literature. The topic was literature, but the theme was artistic freedom.

  Its success meant that I was back in society’s favor. My salon was crowded with people again, and I rediscovered the pleasure of talking – talking in Paris – which I must admit has always been the most stimulating pleasure I have ever known. My book said not one word about Bonaparte, but it did contain some very liberal sentiments, rather forcefully expressed.

  More than anyone else, except perhaps Germaine herself, Napoleon recognized the significant subversive power of Germaine de Staël’s ‘liberal sentiments’. She was developing a coherent body of thought which challenged the dictatorial basis of his regime. He had his spies reporting her every conversation to him, receiving their reports as he sat in his bathtub. I can smell her a mile away, he steamed. At last he decided to neutralize this problematic political opponent. He asked his brother Joseph to find out what Madame de Staël wanted – to stay in Paris? The restoration of funds owed by the French State to her father? What? He should have known better.

  ‘It’s not a question of what I want,’ said Germaine de Staël, ‘but of what I think.’

  Napoleon and Germaine de Staël came face to face for the last time in early 1801. She had prepared any number of things to say to the First Consul. But Napoleon merely looked at her low-cut gown and exposed bosom and said brutally, ‘You must have nursed all your children yourself, Madame?’

  Of course I wondered: well, what did Madame de Staël say in response? Did she snap back a witty one-liner? Take the humiliation and smile blankly? Flare up in anger? But history, in its infuriating way, does not record what happened next. I am sure, however, that I know how Germaine de Staël felt. She was a sensitive and reflective person. She felt the wound alright. It hurt. And there was worse to come.

  In 1802, Napoleon made himself Consul for life. Having consolidated his position he now turned openly to menace. He said to his brother Joseph, ‘Serve notice to that woman … Advise her not to block my path, no matter what it is, no matter where I choose to go. Or else, I shall break her, I shall crush her.’

  Germaine de Staël once declared something remarkable. True pleasure for me, she wrote, can be found only in love, in Paris or in power. Love and Paris, yes, how easy to nod in sympathetic recognition. But how many of us would regard power as a pleasure? How many would admit to it? Power has become a dirty word in modern life and hunger for political power is especially despised. And it was not as if Germaine de Staël had anything to gain by her political activism – in fact, as an enormously wealthy woman she had much to lose.

  In the winter of 1802, Germaine de Staël published her first novel, Delphine. Set in revolutionary France, it was all about society’s hypocrisy and cruelty to an ardent and gifted woman. It was an instant bestseller. Even the English tourists in Paris stayed in their hotel rooms, sharing the novel around until each had completed it. We are all in floods of tears, Lady Bessborough wrote home to London.

  But this was a very interesting document. It was politics disguised as literature. Delphine promoted the rights of women at a time when Napoleon was suppressing their independence; it implicitly criticized the Catholic Church just when Napoleon was negotiating the Concordat with the Pope; and it generally praised freedom of conscience when Napoleon was exerting complete State control. To add to the insult, his name was not mentioned once.

  Napoleon was inflamed with rage by Delphine. For one intoxicating moment he thought about murdering Germaine de Staël. But he came up with an alternative, one which seemed to Germaine de Staël to be almost as cruel. Napoleon expelled her from France: the exile would last twelve long years. Germaine de Staël said bleakly, The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing.

  This is the rue du Bac. During her years of exile, whenever she thought of Paris, Germaine de Staël’s thoughts flew to this street. She had opened her first salon here in 1786, as the twenty-year-old bride of the Swedish Ambassador. Of course, I tri
ed to discover exactly which house she lived in, but accounts conflict. Perhaps this is it, perhaps this elegant townhouse at number 102 was where the young salonnière welcomed her guests? I’m not sure. I do know that Germaine de Staël resided in various houses around this area: the 7th arrondissement was her special patch of Paris. This street was important because it symbolized all that Germaine de Staël loved about the city, and all that she was forced to leave behind.

  Germaine de Staël found no consolation in the fact that her exile was spent in palatial luxury at her grand estate, Coppet, outside Geneva. She called Switzerland a magnificent horror and railed against the infernal peace of Coppet. The company of her provincial neighbors only exacerbated her despair: Please consider that, since my childhood, I have lived with the most distinguished and noble subjects; then ask yourself what it costs me to hear discussed from morning till evening whether Miss So-and-So, who bores me, will marry Mr So-and-So, who produces the same effect on me. England offered no alternative: I turn this country over in every direction to see it as something other than a panorama, and so far I have been unsuccessful … What I feel above all is boredom. Ah, the gutter of the rue du Bac! she would sigh.

  Sometimes Germaine de Staël would sneak back into France; a few times she even made it all the way into Paris. Heavily disguised, she would take nightly walks, breathing the treasured air of the 7th arrondissement. But Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, and each time she was rounded up and sent packing once again.

  For Germaine de Staël, France represented civilization – and to her, civilization meant love, politics, art and, most of all, conversation. Conversation as talent, she wrote, exists only in France … In other countries, conversation provides politeness, discussion and friendship. In France it is an art … She added, German women rarely show the quick spirit which makes conversation live and ideas move. This kind of pleasure can only be found in the wittiest, most piquant Parisian society. You need the elite of a French capital for such rare entertainment.

  And the pleasure, the rare entertainment, was not empty or frivolous. When history’s most formidable politician, Talleyrand, returned from exile in America towards the end of the Revolution, he limped straight to Madame de Staël’s salon. Asked why he spent so much time with women instead of discussing politics, he replied, But women are politics. The pleasures that Germaine de Staël found in love, and Paris, and power, were, in a way, all part of the same project. The root word of politics is polis, the Greek word for city. Paris, to Germaine de Staël, was the center of civilization. To be political, in her world view, was to be civilized. And that was a pleasure.

  Today, this area remains one of the prettiest of the city, with its hidden gardens and fountains, antique shops and art galleries, rare-book sellers and interesting buildings. At one point rue du Bac narrows and becomes a cozy village with a little cluster of food shops. Perhaps it looked somewhat like this in Germaine de Staël’s day. My eyes roam the serene eighteenth-century architecture with pleasure – fine pediments, wrought-iron balconies, moulded archways. Here’s an elaborate Art Nouveau shopfront which, amid so much classical simplicity, seems astonishingly modern.

  It seems to me now, thinking about Germaine de Staël, that she was trying to steer her way through – more than this, to manage – one of history’s great transitions. She was probably the only person ever to have conversed on sympathetic terms both with Voltaire, grand old man of the Enlightened classical age, and Lord Byron, enfant terrible of the new Romantic era. Though she witnessed the abrupt demise of the old eighteenth-century order with its aristocrats and salons, witty women and enlightened philosophers, she did not overly mourn its passing. She was one of the few who took the glorious ideas behind the Age of Reason to their logical conclusion. She welcomed democracy. She rejoiced in the new aspirations towards liberty and equality. She wanted to be part of the new era, shaping it.

  But it seemed that Madame du Deffand’s rigorous defence of the old aristocratic system had not been without some justification. Successive Revolutionary administrations did not want to make room for accom-plished women. Napoleon actively tried to suppress them. Germaine de Staël understood the problem better than anyone. She wrote:

  Women annoyed Napoleon as rebels; they were of no use to his political desires on the one hand, and were less accessible than men to the hopes and fears dispensed by power on the other. As a result, he took pleasure in saying hurtful and vulgar things to women … From his early habits of Revolutionary days he also retained a certain Jacobin antipathy to brilliant Paris society, which was greatly influenced by women; he was afraid of the art of teasing which we must admit is characteristic of Frenchwomen. If Bonaparte had been willing to keep to the proud role of great general and first magistrate of the Republic, he would have floated with the height of genius above all the little stinging barbs of salon wit. Once he decided to become a parvenu king, however, the bourgeois gentleman on the throne, he was exposing himself to the kind of society satire which can only be repressed by the use of espionage and terror; and that is how, in fact, he repressed it.

  I have read a number of biographies of Napoleon, or double biographies of Napoleon and Josephine, and no comment on his psyche or his politics has struck me as so thoughtful, penetrating and plausible as this analysis by the woman he most disliked.

  I take a seat in a very modest café, remarkable only for its display of dozens of brands of cigarettes, and I take out Germaine de Staël’s second novel Corinne or Italy, published in 1807, during her period of exile. The novel concerns a half-Italian, half-English woman of genius and her relationship with a disenchanted Scottish Lord, Oswald Nevile. They commence a passionate love affair, but each has a secret and it tears the relationship apart. Lord Nevile ends up marrying Corinne’s half-sister, a woman of worth who lacks Corinne’s sublime genius. He is stricken with guilt and grief at leaving Corinne and his marriage suffers. Her heart broken by the rupture with Lord Nevile, Corinne slowly dies, but not before reuniting the married couple and ensuring that their future relationship will always be bound to her memory.

  Corinne or Italy is a flawed novel, but an astonishing work. Corinne is Germaine de Staël’s alter-ego. She has the same black turbaned hair, moulded arms, dark, expressive eyes and gift of magical eloquence. Indeed, to emphasize the close relationship between herself and her subject, Germaine de Staël had her portrait painted as Corinne, complete with lyre and Neapolitan background.

  From the beginning of the novel Germaine de Staël makes one thing clear: Corinne is uniquely superior. The first time we meet the celebrated lyric poet, she is about to be crowned festively at the Capitol in Rome:

  Corinne sat in the chariot built in the ancient style, and white-clad girls walked alongside. Wherever she passed, perfumes were lavishly flung into the air. Everyone came forward to see her from their windows which were decorated with potted plants and scarlet hanging. Everyone shouted: Long Live Corinne! Long live genius! Long live beauty!

  At the festival in her honor, Corinne’s gifts are extensively enumerated – her imagination, her artistic gifts, her intellectual brilliance, her profound virtue. Lord Nevile is openly amazed by her superiority. ‘Astonishing person, who are you?’ said Oswald. ‘Where did you get so many charms that would seem to be mutually exclusive – sensitivity, depth, gaiety, grace, spontaneity, modesty? Are you an illusion? Do you mean unearthly happiness for the whole life of the one who encounters you?’

  Even today, such a congratulatory self-portrait by a woman would be received with raised eyebrows. It’s a shock to encounter Germaine de Staël’s extravagant endorsement of herself. It’s uncomfortable and exciting.

  But there’s something very strange about this book. Contemporaries were aware that Germaine de Staël was no Corinne. Corinne is portrayed as graceful and poised: Germaine was clumsy and gauche. As a young girl she famously fell out of her carriage and tripped over her gown as she was presented to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Cor
inne is slender and elegant: President George Washington’s envoy to France, Gouverneur Morris, adored Germaine de Staël but thought she looked like a chambermaid. Corinne is socially refined: the terribly British Duke of Marlborough, confronted at a London dinner party by Germaine de Staël with her embarrassingly low-cut gowns and incessant talk, cried: ‘Let me out!’

  Most notable of all, where Corinne is pious, pure and romantically faithful, Germaine de Staël had many love affairs, most of them complex and tormented. Germaine de Staël’s relationship with Benjamin Constant, for example, began in 1794 and more or less continued until about 1810. In the early months and years, Constant was as passionately captivated as any of Germaine de Staël’s admirers: In a word, she is a being apart, a superior being, such as appears but once in a century, he raved.

  But like all the others, Constant eventually chafed at the complex emotional binds with which Germaine de Staël held him captive: Pursued by her incessant reproaches, always in the public view because of Germaine’s situation, and never holding the tiller of my own life, he lamented. He took to visiting brothels and writing compulsively about himself and Germaine in his diary. It is a terrible relationship, he wrote. A man who no longer loves and a woman who does not want to stop being loved. Each took other lovers – Benjamin even married another woman in secret – but he still felt tied to Germaine de Staël and was desperately unhappy about it.

  Finally Benjamin Constant purged the experience by writing a novel, Adolphe, about an affair between a clinging older woman and a confused young man. One spring night in Paris in 1816, Constant read Adolphe to a spellbound audience of fifteen people. It took more than three hours. A stunned listener noticed that towards the end of the reading Constant began to shudder and sob. The audience, infected by this emotion, began to rock and groan. It was an atmosphere of great intensity. All of a sudden Constant’s sobs took on a different quality: it became apparent that he was laughing hysterically. In his diary for that day Benjamin recorded, Read my novel. Hysterics.