Madame de Staël/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
MADAME DE STAËL RETIRES TO COPPET.
Madame de Staël arrived at Coppet about the beginning of September 1792. The life there, after her recent experiences in Paris, so far from seeming to her one of welcome rest, fretted her ardent spirit, almost beyond endurance. She longed to be back in France, even under the shadow of the guillotine, anywhere but in front of the lake, with its inexorable beauty and maddening calm.
"The whole of Switzerland inspires me with magnificent horror," she wrote to her husband, who was still in Sweden. "Sometimes I think that if I were in Paris with a title which they would be forced to respect, I might be of use to a number of individuals, and with that hope I would brave everything. I perceive, with some pain, that the thing which least suits me in the world, is this peaceful and rustic life. I have put down my horses for economy's sake, and because I feel my solitude less when I do not see anybody."
By "anybody" it is to be presumed that she meant the good Swiss, whose expressions of horror, doubtless as monotonous as reiterated, must have been irritating to one whose single desire night and day, was to cast herself into the arena there to combat and to save. One outlet she found for her activity in perpetual plans for enabling her friends, and often her enemies, to escape from Paris.
The scheme which she projected was to find some man or woman, as the case might be, who would enter France with Swiss passports, certificates, &c., and after getting these properly visés, would hand them over to the person who was to be saved.
Nothing could be simpler, Madame de Staël averred; and as she provided money, time, thought, energy, and presumably infected her agents with a little of her own enthusiasm, her efforts were often successful. Among those who engaged her attention were Mathieu de Montmorency, François de Jaucourt, the Princess de Poix, and Madame de Simiane.
Among the people whom she saved, and whose rescue she records with the most complacency, is that of young Achille du Chayla. He was a nephew of De Jaucourt's, and was residing at Coppet under a Swedish name—(M. de Staël had lent himself to many friendly devices of that kind). The news came that Du Chayla, when trying to escape across the frontier under cover of a Swiss passport, had been arrested at a frontier town on suspicion of being what he truly was—a refugee Frenchman. Nevertheless, the authorities declared themselves willing to release him if the Lieutenant Baillival of Nyon would attest that he was Swiss. What was to be done? To bring M. Reverdil, the functionary aforesaid, to such a declaration seemed well-nigh hopeless, and Jaucourt was in despair. His nephew, if once his identity were discovered, had no chance of escape from death; for not only was his name on the list of the suspected ones, but his father actually held a command under Condé's banner. This was one of the opportunities in which Madame de Staël delighted. Her spirits rose at once in the face of such difficulties. Fortunately, M. Reverdil was an old friend of her family; she believed that she would be able to melt him, and she hurried away to try.
The task was more arduous than she had anticipated. M. Reverdil (by her own confession one of the most enlightened of Swiss magistrates) turned out to have a sturdy conscience and an uncomfortable amount of common sense. He represented to his ardent visitor, first, that he would be wrong in uttering a falsehood for any motive; next, that in his official position he might compromise his country by making a false attestation. "If the truth be discovered," he urged, "we shall no longer have the right of claiming our own compatriots when arrested in France; and thus I should jeopardise the interest of those who are confided to me for the sake of saving a man towards whom I have no duties." M. Reverdil's arguments had "a very plausible side," Madame de Staël allowed thus much herself; but the good man little knew with whom he had to deal if he thought that such cold justice would have the least effect on his petitioner. She swept all paltry considerations as to the remote danger of unknown unromantic Swiss burghers to the winds. Her object was to bring back to Jaucourt the assurance of his young nephew's safety; and from this no abstract principles could turn her.
She remained two hours with M. Reverdil, arguing, entreating, imploring. The task she proposed to herself was, in her own words, "to vanquish his conscience by his humanity." He remained inflexible for a long while, but his visitor reiterating to him, "If you say No, an only son, a man without reproach, will be assassinated within twenty-four hours, and your simple word will have killed him," he ultimately succumbed. Madame de Staël says it was his emotion that triumphed; it is just possible that it was sheer physical exhaustion. Madame de Staël was at no time a quiet person to deal with; when excited, as in the present instance, she must have been overpowering.
It was shortly after these events that Madame de Staël visited England, and, while there, went to Mickleham, there to be introduced to, and for a time to captivate, Fanny Burney. Except Talleyrand, she was the most illustrious of the brilliant band of exiles gathered together at Juniper Hall, and familiar to all readers of the memoirs of Madame d'Arblay and the journal of Mrs. Phillips. It is well known how Fanny withdrew from her intimacy with the future author of Corinne on learning the stories which connected the latter's name with Narbonne. Mrs. Phillips herself was much more indulgent, and Madame de Staël appears to have felt a grateful liking for her; but it is evident that she was deeply hurt at Fanny's coldness. The approbation of a nature so narrow could hardly have affected her much, one would think, and yet it is plain that she longed for it—she longed, indeed, all her life for such things as she possessed not. She could sacrifice her wishes at all times generously and unregretfully, but she never knew how to bear being denied one of them.
In all the glimpses one obtains of Madame de Staël in different countries and from different people, she never seems quite so womanly, so imperfect and yet so pathetic, as in these journals of Mrs. Phillips. Perhaps the reason of it is that one divines in her at this time a sentiment which, if erring, was simple and true, while many of her later sorrows gained a kind of factitious grandeur from the train of political circumstances attendant on them. Mrs. Phillips was present when Madame de Staël received the letter which summoned her to rejoin her husband at Coppet, and relates the effect produced upon her. She was most frankly inconsolable, spoke again and again of her sorrow at going, and made endless entreaties to Mrs. Phillips to attend to the wants, spirits, and affairs of the friends whom she was leaving. She even charged her with a message of forgiveness for the ungrateful Fanny, and fairly sobbed when parting with Mrs. Folk.
Madame de Staël did not leave Coppet again until after the Revolution. Her life seems to have passed with a monotony that the long drama of horror slowly culminating in Paris rendered tragically sombre. She continued her efforts—every day more difficult of accomplishment and sterile of results—to save her friends and foes; and when the Queen was arraigned, she wrote, in a few days, that eloquent and well-known defence of her which called down upon the writer the applause of every generous heart in Europe.
The Neckers during this period seem to have seen very little society. Gibbon was almost their only friend; and in 1794 he went to England, and a few months later died. The next to go was Madame Necker herself. She had long been ill, and her last few months of life were embittered by cruel pain. She had prepared for her end with the minute and morbid care that might have been expected from her. The tomb at Coppet in which she rests, together with her husband and daughter, was built in conformity with her wishes, and in great part under her eyes. She died on 6th May 1794. M. Necker felt her death acutely, and for months not even his daughter's sympathy could console him. Madame Necker had one of those selftormenting natures which poison the existence of others in embittering their own. Too noble to be slighted, and too exacting to be appeased, they work out the doom of unachieved desires; and when they go to be wrapt in eternal mystery, their parting gift to their loved ones is a vague remorse and doubting. Silent themselves when they might have spoken, they leave an unanswered question in the hearts of their survivors. Monsieur Necker, with his exaggerated consciousness, must have asked himself repeatedly if he had cared for his strange and loving wife enough. Madame de Staël mourned her mother sincerely, but it is clear that the keenest edge of her grief came from contemplation of her father's.
Three months had not elapsed after Madame Necker's death when the 9th Thermidor dawned, and at its close, all sanguinary as that appalling termination was, France drew one long sigh of inconceivable relief, for Robespierre had fallen. The Directory followed, and Baron de Staël having been re-nominated to his post, his wife lost no time in hurrying back to Paris. There, true to her indefatigable self, she immediately set about obtaining the eradication of her friends' names from the list of the proscribed émigrés. From this moment her opinions, and with them her character, underwent a certain change. She had been a moderate royalist; she became avowedly a republican. But her republicanism was of a strangely abstract and eclectic sort, and it was dashed with so many personal leanings towards monarchists, that it resulted in nothing better than a spirit of intrigue.
She could not understand that the law, whatever it may be, which governs circumstances, makes no account of individuals. She believed that, by causing Mathieu de Montmorency and Talleyrand to be recalled from exile, and inspiring Benjamin Constant with the loftiest ideals, she could obliterate the blood-stained past and reverse the logic of events. When everybody (everybody, that is, whom she cared about) should have been restored to peace, prosperity, and the air of France, she conceived that the study of metaphysical systems and the cultivation of the affections would alone be needed to re-model and perfect humanity.
With this in view she toiled and plotted unceasingly, clasping the hands of regicides like Barras, rubbing skirts with such women as Madame Tallien, and sacrificing her own pet ideal of womanly duty, which consisted, as she repeatedly proclaimed, in loving and being loved, and leaving the jarring strife of politics to men.
Had she remained in France, she must inevitably have been betrayed into greater inconsistencies still. But, fortunately for her fame, her intellect, and her character, the period was approaching in which Bonaparte's aversion was to condemn her to a decade of illustrious exile.