Madame de Staël. Bella Duffy
on>
Bella Duffy
Madame de Staël
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066135201
Table of Contents
CHAPTER III. GIRLHOOD AND MARRIAGE.
CHAPTER IV. NECKER’S SHORT-LIVED TRIUMPH.
CHAPTER V. MADAME DE STAËL IS COURAGEOUS FOR HER FRIENDS.
CHAPTER VI. MADAME DE STAËL RETIRES TO COPPET.
CHAPTER VII. THE TRANSFORMED CAPITAL.
CHAPTER VIII. MADAME DE STAËL MEETS NAPOLEON.
CHAPTER IX. NEW FACES AT COPPET.
CHAPTER X. MADAME DE STAËL VISITS GERMANY.
CHAPTER XI. MADAME DE STAËL AND AUGUSTE SCHLEGEL AT ROME.
CHAPTER XII. MADAME DE STAËL’S SECOND MARRIAGE.
PREFACE.
Unpublished correspondence—that delight of the eager biographer—is not to be had in the case of Madame de Staël, for, as is well known, the De Broglie family either destroyed or successfully hid all the papers which might have revealed any facts not already in possession of the world.
The writer of the present brief memoir has, consequently, had to fall back upon the following well-known works:
The Correspondance of the Abbé Galiani, of Mme. Du Deffand, of Rahel Varnhagen, and of Schiller; the Memoirs of Marmontel, of Mme. D’Arblay, of Mme. de Rémusat, of Mme. d’Abrantè, of Bourrienne, and of the Comte de Montlosier; Ticknor’s Letters; Châteaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre Tombe; De Goncourt’s Histoire de la Société Française pendant la Révolution, and Histoire de la Société Française pendant le Directoire; Lacretelle’s Dix Années d’Épreuve; Michelet’s Le Directoire, Le Dix-huit Brumaire, and Jusqu’à Waterloo; Le Salon de Madame Necker, by Vicomte d’Haussonville; Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, by Vernon Lee; Byron’s Letters; Benjamin Constant’s Letters to Mme. Récamier; Coppet and Weimar; Les Correspondants de Joubert, by Paul Raynal; Les Causeries du Lundi, and other studies by Ste. Beuve; Droz’ Histoire du Règne de Louis XVI.; Villemain’s Cours de Littérature Française; the fragments from Constant’s Journals, recently published in the Revue Internationale; Sismondi’s Journals and letters; and sundry old articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes; besides various other volumes, of which the list would be long and wearisome to detail.
BELLA DUFFY.
MADAME DE STAËL.
CHAPTER I.
THE MOTHER.
“My dear friend having the same tastes as myself, would certainly wish always for my chair, and, like his little daughter, would beat me to make me give it up to him. To keep peace between our hearts, I send a chair for him also. The two are of suitable height and their lightness renders them easy to carry. They are made of the most simple material, and were bought at the sale of Philemon and Baucis.”
Thus wrote Madame Geoffrin to Madame Necker when the intimacy between them had reached such a pitch as to warrant the introduction into the Necker salons of the only sort of chair in which the little old lady cared to sit.
The “dear friend” was M. Necker, and the “little daughter” of the house must then have been about four or five years old, for it was in the very year of her birth (1766) that Madame Geoffrin took her celebrated journey to Poland, and it was some little time after her return that she became intimate with Germaine Necker’s parents.
They were still in the Rue de Cléry. M. Necker’s elevation to the Contrôle Général was in the future and had probably not been foreseen; it is possible that even the Éloge de Colbert, which betrayed his desire for power, had not yet appeared; nevertheless, he was already a great man. His controversy with the Abbé Morellet, on the subject of the East India Company, had brought him very much into notice; and, although his arguments in favor of that monopoly had not saved it from extinction, they had caused his name to be in everybody’s mouth.
His position as Minister for the Republic of Geneva gave him the entry to the Court of Versailles, and brought him into contact with illustrious personages, who otherwise might have disdained a mere wealthy foreigner, neither a noble nor a Catholic. His well-filled purse completed his popularity, for it was not seldom at the service of abject place-hunters and needy literati. Moreover, he had been fortunate in his choice of a wife.
By the time that the King of Poland’s bonne maman wrote that little note to Madame Necker, the wife of the Genevese banker had founded a salon as brilliant and crowded as Madame Geoffrin’s own. She had achieved this in a few years, whereas Madame Geoffrin for the same task, and in spite of her wealth and generosity, had required a quarter of a century.
But Madame Necker, besides being young, rich and handsome, was bitten with the prevailing craze for literature, could listen unweariedly for hours to the most labored portraits and éloges, and, although herself the purest and most austere of women, would open her salon to any reprobate, provided only he were witty.
Madame Necker, first known