Madame de Staël/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
CLOSING SCENES.
After Waterloo, Madame de Staël did not return to France. The thought of the second occupation by foreign troops was odious to her, and, besides this, she feared the outbreak of reactionary feelings, and foresaw a political condition in which her pure and ideal liberalism would be equally unwelcome to all parties.
Rocca's state of health finally induced her to go to Italy. From Milan she sent a letter to Madame Récamier, which is interesting as showing how little her fine mind and noble heart were in harmony just then with the condition of affairs in France.
"You are kind enough to say to me," she wrote, "that I should do better to be in Paris. But no, indeed, I should not care to see some forms of liberty (franchises) 'accorded' to the people, for it is my creed that nations are born free. I should say unfashionable things, and make enemies unnecessarily. When all is arranged for Albertine's marriage, I shall lead a solitary life in Paris; but at present I do well, believe me, to have myself represented by Auguste. Like you, I think well, and better than ever, of Victor de Broglie, and I shall be very glad of the marriage if nothing goes against it. I am also of your way of thinking in regard to Madame de Krüdener. She is the herald of a great oncoming religious epoch. Speak of me to her, I beg, as of a person quite devoted to her. . . . M. Rocca's health still gives me anxiety. I have never recovered any happiness since Bonaparte disembarked."
Madame de Staël had been very happy in her marriage with Rocca, and the tenderness with which she regarded him was manifest to all her acquaintances. Under such circumstances, it does seem strange that she should to the last have kept her marriage with him a secret.
The most plausible reason for such a course, fear of Napoleon's spite, existed no longer after Waterloo. Why, then, have gratuitously incurred the reproach of an illicit connection? Why, above all, separate herself for five years from her own and Rocca's child? Such conduct does not on the face of it seem quite consistent with the lofty ideal of duty which Madame de Staël professed.
Albertine's wedding took place in civil form at Leghorn on February 15th, 1815; and five days later in Pisa a double religious ceremony, one Catholic, the other Protestant, was performed.
All Madame de Staël's friends gave a charming picture of Albertine. Guizot, Lamartine, and Bonstetten were most enthusiastic about her. Their praises were also echoed by Byron, who, needless to say, was no mean judge; and Ticknor, seeing her in Paris about a year after her marriage, never mentioned her except in terms of admiration. She was both beautiful and clever, and, after her mother's death, became, in her turn, the queen of a cosmopolitan salon.
Accompanied by the bride and bridegroom, by Rocca, by Schlegel and Sismondi, Madame de Staël presently betook herself to Florence, and there renewed her acquaintance with the Countess of Albany. Alfieri was dead now, and Fabre reigned in his stead. Madame de Staël appears to have adopted him with the mingled enthusiasm and indulgence which she exhibited towards all the tastes of her friends.
The summer of 1816 was spent in Coppet. The newest and most interesting figure there on this occasion was Byron. He had shaken the dust of England from his feet, and was nursing his lyrical cynicism at Cologny near Geneva. Unfortunately, his reputation was so bad that the virtuous society of the place would not know him. Madame de Staël alone not only received but welcomed him. He was grateful; and so far yielded to the influence which this gratitude enabled her to exercise over him as actually to make an imperfect attempt at reconciliation with his wife, in order to please his eloquent and magnanimous hostess.
It is amusing to note the different impressions which Byron—the charming, reprehensible Byron—made upon the various guests at the Château. Bonstetten, as might be expected, was quite fascinated by him, and wrote to Malthasson of his musical voice and beautiful head; and of the "half-honest little demon" that darted in a lambent way through the sarcasm of his speech. Sismondi—the correct and censorious—dwells more especially on Byron's cynical contempt for appearances, and the conduct and companionship which had brought him into disrepute with the worthy Genevese.
Coppet had never been quite as brilliant, probably, as in this last summer that Madame de Staël was to reign there. The society was more varied in nationality than in the days when a brilliant but small band of intellects had gathered round to console her in her exile. Brougham, Bell, Lady Hamilton, Lord Breadalbane, Romilly, Stendahl, Schlegel, passed in rapid succession over the scene—talked, sparkled—and disappeared. They flashed like meteors, but Madame de Staël shone among them with a steady splendour. Wherever and with whomsoever she was, her powers remained always unquenchable. Nevertheless a great sadness possessed her. This was partly due to her anxiety concerning Rocca—partly to the disappointment inevitable in a spirit which broke impatiently against the limitations of life, the pettiness of human nature. "Ah happiness!" she exclaimed yearningly. Then added, "But at my age no trust is possible but in the goodness of God."
Bonstetten, parting with her, was struck with the profound melancholy of the glance which she gave him. He had been gay and content, as usual, yet the memory of her look dwelt with him; and unable to explain it, he at last, the dear, genial old man, arrived at the touching conclusion that she had been thinking how old he was, and that she would never see him again. The adieu was, indeed, a lasting one; but it was over Madame de Staël's radiant path that the shadows of death were to gather first.
Nevertheless, during the winter of 1816-17, and when she returned to Paris, her spirit showed no sign of failing. In her salon gathered Châteaubriand, Talleyrand, Wellington, Humboldt, Blucher, Lafayette, Schlegel and his brother, Canova, and crowds of English. Bonstetten averred that to her influence over Wellington alone was due the fact that the Army of Occupation was about this time diminished by 30,000 men.
Just before her death she removed from the Rue Royale to the Rue Neuve des Mathurins; and it was here that Châteaubriand again, after so many years, saw Madame Récamier, and commenced the romantic friendship which was to end only with his death. He had been invited to dine at Madame de Staël's; but, when he arrived there, found that she was too ill to entertain the guests. The dinner took place all the same—for Madame de Staël invariably insisted on this, and made her daughter do the honours. They must have been melancholy banquets; the little Duchess de Broglie presiding with a heavy heart, and all the guests being vividly conscious of the noble life slowly and painfully ebbing away in another room. It is with a certain relief, therefore, in the midst of so much sadness that one reads Châteaubriand's record of his meeting with Juliette. He was selfish and self-conscious and weak no doubt—his fretful uneasy vanity, indeed, pierces through the affected melancholy of the Mémoires d'Outre Tombe. They are sickly with a kind of faded perfume; and yet in the great void which is coming, one is glad to think that the blind Madame Récamier, the aged and feeble Châteaubriand, must often have remembered, perchance often talked of, that dinner where they met in the house of their dying friend.
Her interest in life remained undiminished to the last. Not only Châteaubriand, but Constant, Mathieu de Montmorency, Sismondi, all her old friends, were daily with her. She was even glad to welcome strangers, although frequently so ill that her physicians forbade such visits for several days at a time. It was after one of these intervals that Ticknor saw her. She received him in bed, and her weakness was already so great that she could hardly stretch out her hand to touch his. She alluded to her approaching end with a calmness infinitely pathetic and admirable in one who suffered none of that slow extinction of the faculties which blunts the anguish of the end for so many departing souls. Seeing that her words pained her daughter, she changed the subject to America, and spoke of the great future of that country with characteristic enthusiasm of belief. Of Europe, Ticknor said, "she despaired." She might well do so, for the era then beginning was one with which she could not have sympathised. Whatever its virtues, its force, its promise, the oracles by which it was inspired must have sounded strange in her ears. Herself, she had been a kind of priestess; through her some unknown God had spoken, and amid the thunder of great events her faith, for all its ideal grandeur, had hardly seemed too mighty. But that age had passed, and it was fit she should pass with it.
All witnesses except the captious Sismondi bear testimony to the devotion with which Rocca nursed his wife in her last illness. Silent, pallid, sad as a phantom itself, he sat day by day beside her bed. According to Madame d'Abrantes, she never looked long at him without feeling that she might still live. The sense that her existence was necessary to him seemed to inspire her for a moment with the courage to take up anew the increasing burden of her days. But at other times her thoughts turned with a grateful sense of coming rest to the great change, and to the thought of her father "waiting for her," as she said, "on the other shore." Constant passed the last night of her life by her bedside. She had seemed so much better that at eleven o'clock Mathieu de Montmorency left, convinced that in the morning he would find her revived. She suffered no pain during the concluding hours, and the brightness of her intellect was not even momentarily dimmed. Sleep visited her as usual; then at 5 o'clock she opened her eyes again, for the last time on the world. A few moments later she passed away, so quietly that her watchers did not note the precise moment in which her great soul was exhaled. The date of her death was 14th July 1817.
The news of it was the signal for, perhaps, the most widely-spread and most genuine outburst of grief ever known. Joubert, indeed, asserts the contrary, and not only declares that she was not regretted, but adds that Constant, meeting him casually the very day after the event, did not even allude to it. It never seems to have occurred to Joubert that Constant might have had some other and deeper cause for silence than indifference. From such a nature reserve was perhaps the only tribute that could be more eloquently expressive than the loud lamentations of other friends. These abounded, and even Châteaubriand, who, after all, had not been bound to the dead woman by such ties of constant friendship as attached Schlegel, Sismondi, and others—even he records with a sort of jealous care that in the last letter she ever wrote to Madame de Duras, a letter penned in "large, irregular characters like a child's," there was an affectionate allusion to "Francis."
Bonstetten and Sismondi have both left records of their grief at her funeral. The latter, writing immediately after it to his mother, said: "My life is painfully changed. I owe more to her than to any other person." Bonstetten's sorrow finds a more energetic expression: "I miss her as though she were a part of myself. I am maimed henceforward in thought."
She was buried at Coppet, and they laid her coffin at the foot of her father's. A crowd of friends, of humble mourners, and of official functionaries, assembled to do her homage; but Rocca was too ill to be present. He died, indeed, only seven months later, and the son whom Madame de Staël had borne him hardly reached early manhood before he also passed away. Auguste de Staël had preceded him along the road to eternity, and the Duchess de Broglie did not live to be old.
Twenty years had hardly elapsed before, with the sole exception of her faithful friend and cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, no near relative of Madame de Staël was still alive; but those who had known her did not need to be reminded of her. She was constantly present to them, a radiant, imperishable vision. "I wish I could see you asleep," Bonstetten had said one day to her. "I would like to feel sure that you sometimes close your eyes, and are not always thinking." She had remained so bright and full of life to the last, that even Death's inexorable hand could not for many long years efface the recollection of her vivid personality.
In a page of the Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, Châteaubriand has left a description of a visit paid by himself and Madame Récamier to the grave at Coppet. It was fifteen years after Madame de Staël's death. The Château was closed, the apartments deserted. Juliette, wandering through them, recognised one after another the spots where Madame de Staël had played the piano, had talked to those gathered round her, or had written.
The two friends went into the park where the autumn leaves already were reddening and falling. The wind subsided by degrees, and the sound of a millstream alone broke the stillness. Madame Récamier entered the wood in whose depths the grave is hidden, while Châteaubriand remained looking at the snowy line of the Alps, and at the glittering lake. Above the sombre heights of Jura the sky was covered with golden clouds "like a glory spreading above a bier." Suddenly Madame Récamier, pale and tearful, phantom-like among phantoms, emerged from the wood. And on her companion's melancholy spirit fell a sense of all the emptiness of glory, of all the sad reality of life. "Qu'est-ce que la gloire?" asked Madame de Staël. "Ce n'est qu'un deuil éclatant du bonheur." We could wish that the most famous of women might have held a less hopeless creed.