Madame de Staël. Bella Duffy
to the custom of the time, passed under her father’s roof; and among her letters is a sweet and affectionate one, which she addressed to her mother on the last day of her sojourn with her parents.
“Perhaps I have not always acted rightly towards you, Mamma,” she writes. “At this moment, as in that of death, all my deeds are present to my mind, and I fear that I may not leave in you the regret that I desire. But deign to believe that the phantoms of imagination have often fascinated my eyes, and often come between you and me so as to render me unrecognizable. But the very depth of my tenderness makes me feel at this moment that it has always been the same. It is part of my life, and I am entirely shaken and unhinged in this hour of separation from you. To-night … I shall not have in my house the angel that guaranteed it from thunder and fire. I shall not have her who would protect me if I were dying, and would enfold me, before God, with the rays of her sublime soul. I shall not have at every moment news of your health. I foresee regrets at every instant. … I pray that I may be worthy of you. Happiness may come later, at intervals or never. The end of life terminates everything, and you are so sure that there is another life as to leave no doubt in my heart. … Accept, Mamma, my dear Mamma, my profound respect and boundless tenderness.”
Perhaps when Madame Necker read this letter she felt in part consoled for the real or fancied pain which her brilliant and unaccountable daughter had given her.
And in spite of passing dissensions with her mother, Germaine’s twenty years of girlhood had been essentially happy, for they had been tenderly and watchfully sheltered from blight or harm.
CHAPTER IV.
NECKER’S SHORT-LIVED TRIUMPH.
Some spiteful ridicule awaited the young ambassadress on her first entrance into official life, and, strangely enough, among these detractors was Madame de Boufflers herself, who wrote to Gustavus III.: “She has been virtuously brought up, but has no knowledge of the world or its usages … and has a degree of assurance that I never saw equalled at her age, or in any position. If she were less spoilt by the incense offered up to her, I should have tried to give her a little advice.” Another courtier’s soul was vexed because Madame de Staël, when presented on her marriage, tore her flounce, and thus spoilt her third curtsey. As much scandal was caused by this gaucherie as if it had been some newly-invented sin; but the delinquent herself, when the heinousness of her conduct was communicated to her, simply laughed. She could, indeed, afford to despise all such censure, for, if too obstreperously intellectual and ardent for artificial circles, she soon attained to immense influence among all the thinking and quasi-thinking minds of France.
Politics were now beginning to be the one absorbing subject whose paramount importance dwarfed every other; and Madame de Staël, always in the vanguard of ideas, threw herself with characteristic enthusiasm into the questions of the day. To talk about the glorious future of humanity was the fashionable cant of the hour, but Madame de Staël really believed in the regeneration about which others affectedly maundered; and at all social gatherings in the Rue Bergère, or at St. Ouen (where her presence was as frequent as of yore), she held forth on this subject to the crowd of dazzled listeners, whom she partially convinced and wholly overpowered.
She had been married but little more than a year when the first shadow of coming events dimmed the lustre of her new existence. In a speech pronounced at the Assembly of Notables in April 1787, M. de Calonne impugned the accuracy of the famous Compte Rendu. M. Necker indignantly demanded from the King the permission to hold a public debate on the subject, in the presence of the Assembly before which he had been accused. Louis XVI. refused; and M. Necker then immediately published a memoir of self-justification. The result was a lettre de cachet which exiled him to within forty leagues of Paris. The order, conveyed by Le Noir, the Minister of Police, reached M. Necker in the evening, when he was sitting in his wife’s salon, surrounded by his daughter and some friends. The liveliness of Madame de Staël’s indignation may be imagined. She has described it herself in her Considérations sur la Révolution Française, and declared that the King’s decision appeared to her an unexampled act of despotism. Its parallel would not have been far to seek, and acts a thousand times worse disgrace every page of the annals of France. But Madame de Staël, always incapable of judging where the “pure and noble” interests of her father were concerned, can be pardoned for her exaggeration in this instance, as she had half France to share it. “All Paris,” she says, “came to visit M. Necker in the twenty-four hours that preceded his departure. Even the Archbishop of Toulouse, already practically designated for M. de Calonne’s successor, was not afraid to make his bow.”
Offers of shelter poured in upon M. Necker, and the best châteaux in France were placed at his disposal. He finally elected the Châteaux de Marolles, near Fontainebleau, although not, as he naïvely confesses in a letter to his daughter, without some secret misgivings as to “the decided taste in all things good and bad of dear mamma.”
Thither Madame de Staël hastened to join him, and to console by her unfailing sympathy, her constant applause, and inexhaustible admiration, a misfortune which, after all, had been singularly mitigated. M. Necker accepted all this homage as his due, and his magnanimous wish, that the Archbishop of Toulouse might serve the State and King better than he would have done, is recorded by his daughter with the unction of a true devotee. There is something adorably simple and genuine in all her utterances about this time. In a letter to her husband (who apparently never objected to play second fiddle to M. and Madame Necker) she directs him exactly how to behave at Court, so as to bring home with dignity, yet force, to their Majesties the wickedness of their conduct towards so great and good a man; and she adds that but for her position as Ambassadress she would never again set foot within the precincts of Versailles. This she wrote even after the lettre de cachet was cancelled. A few months later a reparation was offered to her father with which even his own sense of his worth and the idolatry of his family should have been satisfied; for he was recalled to power—unwillingly recalled, it is true. The King’s hand was forced. His present sentiments to M. Necker, if not hostile, were cold; while those of the Queen had changed to aversion. But the Marquis de Mirabeau had defined the position of France as “a game of blind-man’s buff which must lead to a general upset”; consternation had invaded even the densest intelligences; and the voice of the public clamored for its savior. This time, again, the title given to M. Necker was Director-General of Finance; but, on the other hand, the coveted entry into the Royal Council was accorded him. It was the first instance, since the days of Sully, of such an honor being granted to a Protestant; it was given at a moment when the suggestion to restore civil rights to those of alien faith had been bitterly resented by the French clergy; and it was one of the many signs (for those who had eyes to see) that the last hour of the old régime had struck.
The nomination was hailed with a burst of applause from one end of France to the other. Madame de Staël hurried to St. Ouen with the news, but she found her father the reverse of elated. Fifteen months previously—the fifteen months wasted by the ineptitude of Brienne—he said he might have done something; now it was too late.
Madame de Staël was far from sharing these feelings. When anything had to be accomplished by her father, she was of the opinion of Calonne, in his celebrated answer to Marie Antoinette—“Si c’est possible, c’est fait; si c’est impossible, cela se fera.” And undoubtedly M. Necker did his best on returning to power; but, in spite of his honesty, good faith, and unquestionable abilities, he was not the man for the hour.
Very likely, as his friends, and especially his daughter, asserted, no Minister, however gifted, could have succeeded entirely in such a crisis; and doubtless he was as far as any merely pure-minded man could be from deserving the storm of execration with which the Court party eventually overwhelmed him. We have said that he did his best; his mistake was that he did his best for everybody. In a moment, when an unhesitating choice had become imperative, he was divided between sympathy with the people and pity for the King.
He returned to power without any plan of his own; but finding Louis XVI. was pledged to assemble