[1]The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:—"Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has suppressed the girl of sixteen."'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I! I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts, of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we can make something out of you.'"In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance, this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our famous writers of fiction."The intelligent, refined Madame Émile de Girardin defended Balzac, answering very justly: "Is it Balzac's fault that thirty is now the age of love? Balzac is obliged to paint passion where he finds it, and nowadays it is not to be found in the heart of sixteen."
[1]The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:—
"Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has suppressed the girl of sixteen.
"'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I! I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts, of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we can make something out of you.'
"In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance, this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our famous writers of fiction."
The intelligent, refined Madame Émile de Girardin defended Balzac, answering very justly: "Is it Balzac's fault that thirty is now the age of love? Balzac is obliged to paint passion where he finds it, and nowadays it is not to be found in the heart of sixteen."
In one of his letters Byron writes ofAdolphe: "The book contains some melancholy truths, though I believe that it is too triste a work ever to have been popular. The first time I ever read it was at the desire of Mme. de Staël." Mme. de Staël herself says somewhere: "I do not believe all men resemble Adolphe, but only vain men." Simple as the observation is, we feel that it is written by a woman in self-defence; forAdolphehad struck home to Necker's daughter personally, had bared her deepest heart wound.
Anne Marie Germaine Necker was born in Paris in 1766. Her father, the great Genevese financier, became First Minister of France shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and his name was at that time the watchword of liberal France. Her mother was a highly gifted woman, but stiff, reserved, and the slave of duty; she believed that education did everything, nature little, and she laid pedantic stress upon trifles, being of opinion that nothing is trifling from the moral point of view. To this lady Rousseau's educational theories were naturally highly antipathetic, and the consequence was that Rousseau, with his belief in nature and in innate virtues, became her daughter's ideal. This daughter, a frank, lively child, developed into a bright, intelligent brunette, whose dark eyes sparkled with wit and beamed with kind-heartedness. While Mme. Necker chiefly appreciated common sense and the habit of self-examination, the daughter, who suffered from the strict control under which she was kept, and whose great gifts roused her mother's jealousy, grew to love all the qualities and virtues which spring without cultivation from Nature's own health and wealth. In her father's house she was from childhood brought into contact with the most famous men of the day, who were amused and attracted by her quick repartee and surprising originality. The lively, marvellously intelligent child was her father's pride, and she returned his affection with a boundless love and admiration which lasted all her life and can be traced in most of her writings.
At fifteen years of age she began to write essays, novels, and tragedies. One of her tragedies, entitledMontmorency, marks the time when she began to feel attracted by the young Vicomte Mathieu de Montmorency, who had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence. Her parents being opposed to her marriage with a Catholic, she was obliged to refuse his hand, but to the end of their lives they remained faithful friends. Yielding to her mother's wishes, Germaine Necker married in 1786 the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, Baron Erik Magnus Staël Holstein, a favourite of Gustavus the Third. In order to assist him to this wealthy and influential connection, Gustavus confirmed the Baron in his post of ambassador in Paris for a certain number of years. The bridegroom, who was double the age of his bride, promised her parents that he would never take her to Sweden against her will. He seems to have been the ordinary northern nobleman of the period, very simple, polished in manner, but only half educated, a spendthrift and a gambler. It was said of him that he would never have found out how to boil a potato, much less have invented gunpowder. Curiously enough, he sympathised with the Revolution.
Mme. de Staël's first book,Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was published immediately before the Revolution. It is a panegyric and a defence. At the close of the third letter she seeks to interweave Rousseau's fame with that of her father, who, at the time she wrote, had just been called to the head of affairs; at the end of the fourth she hails the assembling of the States-General with youthful enthusiasm, and expresses the hope that the great French nation will attain by the path of enlightenment, reason, and peace, to the possession of those blessings which other peoples had gained by the shedding of streams of blood. She calls upon the nation to make it a matter of honour not to go beyond the point which all are united in regarding as their aim, and she closes with an apostrophe to Rousseau, in which she laments that he did not live long enough to see the approaching awe-inspiring spectacle, nor to encourage that patriot, Necker, who merited a judge, admirer, and fellow-citizen such as he.
MADAME DE STAËL
MADAME DE STAËL
The Revolution broke out, and would not be stayed in its career at what was the limit of her hopes and wishes, i.e. the acquisition of a constitution after the English pattern. Necker was soon compelled to flee, but his daughter remained in Paris, and, protected by her husband's position, rescued many an innocent victim of the Reign of Terror. With the assistance of the courageous German, Justus Erich Bollmann, she saved the life of the man who was her lover at that time, Narbonne, the former Minister of War. Bollmann got him safely to London in 1792.[1]She had even laid a plan for the flight of the royal family. The hatred of the revolutionary leaders was roused by her behaviour; and it was with difficulty she escaped the mob's thirst for revenge. She fled to Coppet, accompanied by her friend Montmorency, who, as an aristocrat, was also in danger, and who disguised himself as her lackey. Afterwards she went to England, where she published a pamphlet in defence of Marie Antoinette, whom she did not know personally, but by whose fate she had been deeply affected. This pamphlet was soon followed by another, also called forth by current events, entitledDe l'Influence des Passions sur le Bonheur des Individus et des Nations, a piece of declamatory writing, in which the authoress exhibits no knowledge of life except when she treats of love, and no political acumen except when she is writing of the Revolution. There is a hollow, insincere ring in what she says on the subject of ambition.
Though not formally banished by the Directory, Mme. de Staël was placed under the surveillance of the police, and would have been arrested if she had entered France without permission. As soon, however, as Sweden had acknowledged the French Republic, she returned to Paris and busied herself actively with politics. Her aim was a Parliamentary constitution and peace with Europe. It was through her influence that Talleyrand was made Foreign Minister. Her house was a great political rendezvous, more especially of the Moderates, and it was not long before Benjamin Constant played the leading part among the politicians who assembled there, as well as occupied the first place in the good graces of the mistress of the house.
When Bonaparte came to Paris as a conqueror towards the end of 1797, after the campaign in Italy, he made an extraordinary impression upon Madame de Staël. She sought every opportunity of approaching him, felt herself alike attracted and overpowered by him. Whenever she tried to interest him, it seemed as if she were struck dumb, she, the incessant talker. The feeling of his unapproachableness tortured her. There is no doubt that for a short time she nourished the hope of becoming the friend of this Caesar, and it was a grievous disappointment to have to relinquish the idea. From the moment she did so, she joined the ranks of his political adversaries, continuing, however, for a time to display a sort of coquetry as far as he was personally concerned. Not till she was definitely repulsed, did her feeling change to pure hatred. In the book which she published in the intermediate stage, we have satirical allusions to Bonaparte's government along with flattering allusions to himself personally. In conversation she openly and constantly expressed her desire that he (and consequently the army of her country under his command) might suffer defeat, in order that a stop might be put to his tyranny.
It was in the year 1800 that she published her first large book,De la Littérature, considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales, a work which, from its general purport, must be classified as belonging to that great body of writings in which, ever since the days of the Renaissance, the relative merits of ancient and modern literature have been discussed. Chateaubriand dealt with the same problem very soon afterwards in hisGénie du Christianisme. Mme. de Staël and he both declare themselves in favour of the modern literatures, but upon different grounds. He bases their superiority upon the fact that they deal with Christian themes, of which the ancient authors had no knowledge; Mme. de Staël bases it upon progressing civilisation. She believes in the capacity of humanity to improve, and in the gradual perfecting of social institutions, and on this belief grounds her assurance that literature will contain a steadily increasing treasure of experience and insight. At this stage of her development there is no question of any profound and systematic literary psychology; she calmly, for instance, excludes imagination from the list of faculties which are capable of development—why?—because in spite of all her enthusiasm for Ossian, she cannot deny that Homer's is the fuller, richer, poetry. The merit of her book, however, does not depend upon what it proves, but upon what it proclaims and urges, namely the necessity for a new literature, new science, and a new religion. She draws attention to the literatures of England and Germany, to the Icelandic sagas, and the old Scandinavian epics; but Ossian is to her the great type of all that is splendid in the poetry of the North. She loves his seriousness and melancholy, for, she says, "melancholy poetry is the poetry which accords best with philosophy."[2]Writing of the Germans, she remarks: "The most important book the Germans possess, and the only one that can compare with the masterpieces of other languages, isWerther. Because it calls itself a novel, many do not realise that it is a truly great work.... The author ofWertherhas been reproached for making his hero suffer from other sorrows besides those of love, for allowing him to be made so unhappy by a humiliation, and so resentful by the social inequalities which were the cause of the humiliation; but to my mind the author shows his genius in this quite as much as in anything else in the book."
The fundamental idea of her book is, that free social conditions must inevitably lead to a new development of literature, that it would be absurd if a society which had won political liberty for itself were to own only a literature shackled by rules. "Oh, if we could but find," she cries with youthful ardour, "a system of philosophy, an enthusiasm for all that is good, a strong and righteous code of laws, which should be to us what the Christian religion has been to the past!"
Jealous of her growing fame, and on the alert as the champion of religion, Chateaubriand reviewed her book. Other critics had twitted her with her enthusiasm for everything melancholy, and had inquired what she thought of the Greeks, who were certainly not melancholy. Chateaubriand seized the opportunity to strike a blow on behalf of revealed religion. "Mme. de Staël," he says, "attributes that to philosophy which I attribute to religion "; and addressing her, he continues: "Your talent is but half developed; it is smothered by philosophy. You seem to be unhappy, and how, indeed, should philosophy heal the sorrow of your soul? Is it possible to fertilise one desert by means of another desert?" He exhausts himself in mere phrases.
It was about this time that antagonism to Bonaparte, who was soon to banish her again, this time for ten years, became the ruling idea in Mme. de Staël's life. After the Italian campaign she had seen in him the champion of freedom, had written him enthusiastic letters, and had prevailed upon him to erase her father's name from the list of exiles. But in the First Consul she saw only "a Robespierre on horseback," and Bonaparte complained with reason that she inflamed men's minds against him.
Her former enthusiasm had turned into passionate hatred. From her salon she carried on a regular war against him. She and Constant were unwearied in their satire of his associates, his person, his behaviour. She scoffed at his little body and big head, at his arrogance and his awkwardness. He was thebourgeois gentilhommeon the throne, annoyed by the wit of cultivated women, incapable of expressing himself coherently, eloquent only when abusive. His genius was mere charlatanism. He was not even a great general, for at Marengo he had lost his head, and might have lost the battle if Desaix had not come to his aid. There was something essentially vulgar about the man, which even his tremendous power of imagination could not always conceal.
She entered into all sorts of intrigues with the generals who were opposed to Bonaparte, either from principle, like Moreau, or from pure envy, like Bernadotte. So far did she carry her hatred, that she was beside herself with rage when she heard of the humiliation of England by the Peace of Amiens, and kept away from Paris at the time of the festivities held in honour of this peace.
The foreign diplomatists in Paris, to use Madame de Staël's own words, "spent their lives with her." She conversed every day with numbers of influential people, conversation being her greatest pleasure; and Bonaparte is reported to have said that every one thought less of him after having talked with her. He sent to inquire what it was she really wanted, and if she would be satisfied if he paid her the two millions which Necker had given in trust to the Treasury, and which were being wrongfully kept back; she only answered that it was not a question of what she wanted, but of what she thought. From the day when Benjamin Constant first raised his voice in the Tribunate against one of Bonaparte's proposals, her house in Paris was deserted, and all her invitations were declined; and immediately after the publication of her father's book,Les dernières Vues de Politique et de Finances, she was banished from Paris by express command of the First Consul.
No heavier blow could have fallen upon Mme. de Staël. She herself likened the sentence to one of death; for to her, who only really lived when she was in the capital, and who could so ill dispense with friends, intellectual intercourse, and a certain participation in the great events of the day, it was misery to be thus torn from home and country. "Every step the post-horses took caused me suffering, and when the postillions inquired if they had not done well, I could not refrain from bursting into tears at the thought of the sorry service they had rendered me."[3]She was accompanied by Benjamin Constant; but when she heard of her husband's illness she went to him, and nursed him till he died.
In the following year, 1803, she published Delphine, a tale written in five parts and in the form of letters, after the pattern ofLa Nouvelle Héloïse. It is easy to trace the personal impressions and reminiscences which form the groundwork of this novel. The story is the story of a woman's dutiful renunciation of a happy marriage, and for this the authoress's own refusal of Montmorency supplied a background of fact. But the real theme of the book is the loving woman's conflict with society, and the cruel, cold destruction by society of the happiness of the individual. Looking at it in this light, we feel that it was the fresh impressions of her later years, her relations with her husband and Benjamin Constant, that gave the book its tone. Her reputation had been injured by her separation from her husband, her relations with Constant were no secret, and he was undoubtedly the father of her daughter Albertine, born in 1797, the future Duchesse de Broglie. When Mme. de Staël wroteDelphineit had never occurred to her to doubt that Constant would legitimise this daughter by a speedy marriage; but, in spite of the great allowance always made by public opinion for people of wealth and position, and her consequent comparative independence of action, she bitterly felt both the covert persecution of slander and the deliberate attempts at defamation made by the pharisaical.
The spiritless, resigned motto ofDelphine: "A man should be able to defy public opinion, a woman to submit to it," almost betrays its authoress, Madame de Staël's mother. The actual story harmonises with the motto, but the spirit of the book and the very fact of its publication contradict it. For the book is a justification of divorce, and it appeared in the same year that Napoleon concluded the Concordat with the Pope; it attacked indissoluble wedlock and the religious sacrament of marriage, at the very moment when the marriage laws were being made more stringent, and a portion of its old power was being restored to the Church.
The book answers to its motto in so far that it teaches, through the fate of its heroine, that if a woman, even after a generous and prolonged sacrifice of her own well-being, transgress the rules of society, though it may be only to prevent the ruin of her lover, she is lost. It contradicts its motto in so far that the crying injustice of such a fate speaks more powerfully than any declamation, of the imperfection of the social organism and of the preposterousness of that power to coerce and make unhappy, which man's short-sightedness and pusillanimity have entrusted to the antiquated institutions under the pressure of which Delphine is crushed. She is depicted from the very first as a superior being, pure, benevolent, spirited, elevated by the very fact of her purity above the pharisaical morality of society. Her character is nowhere more charmingly suggested than in the scene where an unfortunate and maligned woman enters the salon of the Tuileries, and the other ladies immediately rise from their seats and move away, leaving a great open space round the poor, marked creature; upon which Delphine walks across the room and seats herself by her at whom all the other women have vied in casting the first stone.
By a series of astoundingly base devices and intrigues, one of the principal characters of the book, a female Talleyrand, succeeds in separating Delphine from her lover, and uniting him to her antipodes, the cold, orthodoxly pious Mathilde, who privately accepts from the deserted Delphine the enormous dowry without which the marriage cannot be arranged. By the time all the various deceptions are detected, the totally unsuitable, unnatural pair, Mathilde and Léonce, are united. Other equally odious marriages and equally unhappy love affairs are grouped round this central couple, in order that the main idea of the book may be made sufficiently clear. Henri de Lebensei, who is an embellished edition of Constant, cannot be united to the woman he loves until she has obtained a divorce from her husband, with whom she cannot live, she declares, without destroying all that is good and noble in her nature. M. de Serbeliane stands in the same hopeless position to Thérèse d'Ervins as Delphine does to Mathilde's husband.
Delphine is represented as of so pure and self-sacrificing a nature that she not only peremptorily rejects the idea of a union with Léonce, which would necessarily destroy his wife's happiness, but will not permit him to dwell upon the thought. She calms him; she points him to a profounder morality and religion than that in which he, as a child of the eighteenth century, has been brought up: "Léonce, I did not expect to find such an indifference to religious ideas in you. I take it upon me to reproach you for it. Your morality is only based upon honour; you would have been much happier if you had given your homage to those simple and true principles which teach us to submit our actions to the dictates of our conscience, and free us from all other yokes. You know that my education, far from enslaving my mind, has made it if anything too independent. It is possible that superstition is as yet more suitable for a woman than freedom of thought; weak and wavering beings that we are, we need support on every side, and love is a kind of credulity which is perhaps apt to ally itself with all the other kinds of credulity and superstition. But the noble guardian of my youth esteemed my character sufficiently to wish to develop my reason, and never did he require of me to accept any opinion without examining into it. I can therefore speak to you of the religion I love, as I can speak on any other subject which my heart and mind have freely tested, and you cannot attribute what I say to you to inculcated habit or the unweighed impressions of childhood.... Do not, Léonce, refuse the comfort which is offered to us by natural religion." We distinguish an echo of Rousseau, and the influence of the reaction against Voltaire, in this sermon which Necker's daughter places in the mouth of her second self.
The plot develops; soon it becomes impossible any longer to maintain the unnatural union, to endure the unnatural misery. Henri de Lebensei writes the letter advising a divorce, which brought ill-fortune to the book, and which fell like a firebrand into the clerical camp. He writes to Délphine: "The man you love is worthy of you, madame, but neither his nor your feeling is of any avail to alter the situation in which an unhappy destiny has placed you. One thing alone can restore your reputation and procure your happiness. Collect all your strength to hear me. Léonce is not irrevocably bound to Mathilde; he can still become your husband; in a month from now divorce will be legalised by the Legislative Assembly." We must remember that the book appeared just at the time of the reinstitution of Catholic marriage in France.
Here are more extracts from his letter: "You, who reprobate divorce, believe your view to be the more moral. If it were so, it ought to be the view taken by all sincere thinkers; for the first aim of thinking man is to determine his duties to their full extent. But let us go into the matter together; let us inquire whether the principles which induce me to approve of divorce do not harmonise with the nature of man and with the beneficent intentions which we ought to attribute to the Divinity. The indissolubility of unhappy marriages makes life one long succession of hopeless miseries. Some men say, indeed, that it is only necessary to repress youthful inclinations, but they forget that the repressed inclinations of youth become the lasting griefs of age. I do not deny all the disadvantages connected with divorce, or rather, the imperfections of human nature which make divorce necessary; but in a civilised society which urges nothing against marriages of convenience, or against marriages at an age when it is impossible to foretell the future, a society whose law can neither punish the parents who misuse their authority, nor the husband or wife who behaves badly—in such a society the law which prohibits divorce is only harsh towards the victims whose fetters it takes upon itself to rivet more firmly, without in the least affecting the circumstances which make these fetters easy or terrible to bear. It seems to say: 'I cannot ensure your happiness, but I can at least vouch for the continuance of your unhappiness'."
In such involved and eloquent periods is couched what has been called Mme. de Staël's attack upon marriage. In reality it is, as we see, only an attack upon the binding, oppressing power with which society (itself first moulded into shape by the Church in the days when the Church was the only spiritual power) has invested the first attachment of youth—in Catholic countries by legislation, in Protestant by means of public opinion, which metes out as stern justice as any marriage laws. Her argument is based on the assumption that marriage can only be considered that which it is maintained to be, namely an ideally moral relation, when the two beings, who at a given moment of their lives promise to live together and be faithful to one another for the rest of their days, really know and love one another, and she points out how exceedingly difficult it is for any human being thoroughly to know himself and another human being. If marriage requires this mutual knowledge as its foundation, then a union in which it is lacking is not marriage. What kind of life can be based upon a sudden fancy, or upon a lie, or upon a Yes wrung from a woman by fear? In every case in which marriage does not rest upon a better foundation, its sanctity is imaginary, is derived from a confusion of the real relation with the ideal.
Delphine does not allow herself to be persuaded. Faithful to the motto of the book, that a woman must bow to public opinion, she even determines to place another obstacle between herself and Léonce. By the time his wife dies, Delphine has taken the veil. Once more, though in another form, we have strong opposition to a vow generally regarded as sacred. Again it is Henri who is spokesman, but this time he appeals to Léonce: "Are you able to listen to bold, salutary advice, the following of which would save you from an abyss of misery? Are you capable of taking a step which would offend what you have been accustomed all your life to defer to, public opinion and established custom, but which would be consonant with morality, reason, and humanity? I was born a Protestant, and have, I grant, not been brought up in awe of those insane and barbarous institutions of society which demand of so many innocent beings the sacrifice of all natural inclinations; but ought you to have less confidence in my judgment because it is uninfluenced by prejudice? A proud and high-minded man should only obey the dictates of universal morality. Of what signification are those duties which are merely the outcome of accidental circumstances, and depend upon the caprices of law or the will of a priest? duties that subject a man's conscience to the judgment of other men, of men, too, who have long bent their necks under the yoke of the prejudices and self-interest of their order? The laws of France will release Delphine from the vows unhappy circumstances have forced from her. Come and live with her upon our native soil! What is it that keeps you apart? A vow she has made to God? Believe me, the Supreme Being knows our nature too well ever to accept irrevocable vows from us. Possibly something in your heart rebels against profiting by laws which are the outcome of a Revolution to which you are antagonistic? My friend, this Revolution, which has unfortunately been soiled by so many violent deeds, will be extolled by posterity because of the freedom it has bestowed upon France. If it is followed only by fresh forms of slavery, this period of slavery will be the most ignominious period in the history of the world; but if freedom is its result, then happiness, honour, virtue, all that is noble in humanity, is so inseparably bound up with freedom, that centuries to come will be lenient in their judgment of the events which prepared the way for the age of freedom."
Besides attacking to this extent certain definite social institutions, the book makes protest throughout against the great mass of received opinions, the prejudices with which most men are clad as it were in a coat of triple mail, the beliefs which must not even be approached, because the very ground around them is holy within a circumference of so and so many square miles. It cannot be too plainly asserted that, in this particular,Delphineis a more vigorous, remarkable work than most of the other productions of the Emigrant Literature. For a nation has a literature in order that its horizon may be widened and its theories of life confronted with life. In his early youth society offers the individual an extraordinary, patched-together suit of prejudices which it expects him to wear. "Am I really obliged," asks the man, "to wear this tattered cloak? Can I not dispense with these old rags? Is it absolutely necessary for me either to blacken my face or hide it under this sheep's mask? Am I compelled to swear that Polichinelle has no hump, to believe that Pierrot is an eminently honourable, and Harlequin a particularly serious man? May I not look up into any of their faces, or write on any hand, 'I know you, fair mask!'? Is there no help?" There is no help, unless you are prepared to be beaten by Polichinelle, kicked by Pierrot, and whacked by Harlequin. But literature is, or should be, the territory where officialism ceases, established customs are disregarded, masks are torn off, and that terrible thing, the truth, is told.
Delphinemet with much disapprobation. The most famous critic of the day wrote: "One cannot conceive more dangerous and immoral doctrines than those which are disseminated by this book. The authoress would seem to have forgotten the ideas with which she, as Necker's daughter, was brought up. Regardless of the Protestant faith of her family, she expresses her contempt for revealed religion; and in this pernicious book, which, it must be confessed, is written with no small ability, she presents us with a long vindication of divorce. Delphine speaks of love like a Bacchante, of God like a Quakeress, of death like a grenadier, and of morality like a sophist." High-sounding words these, but just the high-sounding words which the future must always listen to from the toothless past, whose heavy artillery is charged to the muzzle with the wet powder of orthodox belief and the paper balls of narrow-mindedness.
Whereas Mme. de Staël's contemporaries lavishly praised the style of the book and the literary ability of its authoress, in order to be the better able to reprobate her views of life and her aims, the modern critic has little to say for the loose and diffuse style which the novel has in common with almost all others written in the form of letters; but, as regards the ideas of the book, they hold good to-day; they have actually not yet penetrated into all the countries of Europe, although the present century has striven to realise them ever more and more fully.
The breach between society and the individual depicted inDelphineis entirely in the spirit of the Emigrant Literature. The same bold revolt followed by the same despair in view of the uselessness of the struggle, is to be found throughout the whole group of writings. In the present case the revolt is a spirited, desperate attempt to hold fast one of the gains of the Revolution at the moment when it is being wrested away by the reaction. The despair is due to the sorrowful feeling that no remonstrance will avail, that the retrograde movement must run its course, must exceed all reasonable limits, before a better condition of things can be looked for. Was a woman's novel likely to prevail against an autocrat's compact with a Pope!
The "war with society" which she depicts is less a conflict with the state or the law than with the jumble of conventions and beliefs, old and new, artificial and natural, reasonable and unreasonable, hurtful and beneficial, which, fused together into a cohesive and apparently homogeneous mass, constitute the stuff whereof public opinion is made. Just as the so-called sound common sense, which is always ready to set itself in opposition to any new philosophy, is at any given time to a great extent simply the congealed remains of a philosophy of earlier date, so the rules of society and the verdicts pronounced by society in accordance with these rules, verdicts always unfavourable in the case of new ideas, are to a great extent founded upon ideas which in their day had a hard struggle to assert themselves in face of the opposition of the then prevailing public opinion. That which was once an original, living idea, stiffens in time into the corpse of an idea. Social laws are universal laws, the same for all, and, like everything that is universal, they in numberless cases victimise. No matter how singular the individual may be, he is treated like every one else. The genius is in much the position of the clever head-boy in a stupid class; he has to listen to the same old lessons over and over again because of the dunces who have not learned them and yet must learn them. The verdict of society is an irresponsible verdict; while the judgments of the individual, as such, must always to a certain extent be a natural product, those of society are in most cases a manufactured article, provided wholesale by those whose business it is to concoct public opinion; and no responsibility is felt by the individual in giving his adherence to them. The natural course would be for the individual to form his own views and principles, make his own rules of conduct, and, according to his powers, search for the truth with his own brains; but instead of this, in modern society the individual finds a ready-made religion, a different one in each country, the religion of his parents, with which he is inoculated long before he is capable of religious thought or feeling. The result is that his religion-producing powers are nipped in the bud, or if they are not, then woe be to him! His essays are a gauntlet flung in the face of society. And in the same way all originality of moral feeling is, in the majority of men, crushed or checked by the ready-made moral code of society and ready-made public opinion. The verdicts of society, which are the outcome of all the pious and moral doctrines accepted by it on trust, are necessarily untrustworthy, often extremely narrow-minded, not infrequently cruel.
It was Mme. de Staël's lot to be brought face to face with more prejudices than the generality of authors are. She was a Protestant in a Catholic country, and in sympathy with Catholics although brought up in a Protestant family. In France she was the daughter of a Swiss citizen, and in Switzerland she felt herself a Parisian. As a woman of intellect and strong passions, she was predestined to collision with public opinion, as the authoress, the woman of genius, to war, offensive and defensive, with a social order which relegates woman to the sphere of private life. But that she saw through the prejudices by which she was surrounded, more clearly than did any other contemporary writer, was principally due to the fact that, as a political refugee, she was obliged to travel in one foreign country after another; this gave her ever-active, inquiring mind the opportunity of comparing the spirit and the ideals of one people with those of another.
[1]Friedrich Kapp: "Justus Erich Bollmann."
[1]Friedrich Kapp: "Justus Erich Bollmann."
[2]De la Littérature, p. 257. Paris, 1820.
[2]De la Littérature, p. 257. Paris, 1820.
[3]Dix Années d'Exil, 1820, p. 84.
[3]Dix Années d'Exil, 1820, p. 84.
When the edict banishing Mme. de Staël from Paris was made known to her, she inquired through Joseph Bonaparte, who was among the number of her friends, whether she would be permitted to travel in Germany or would be brought back from there. After some delay a passport was sent her, and she set out for Weimar. There she made the acquaintance of the ducal family, had long conversations with Schiller on the reciprocal relations of French and German literature, and pestered Goethe with questions upon every subject in heaven and earth. The eager discussion of problematical questions was, he says, her special passion. But what surprised both Goethe and the other German celebrities most was, that she not only wished to make their acquaintance, but to influence affairs generally; she always talked as if the moment for action had come, and they must all be up and doing. She went on from Weimar to Berlin, made acquaintance with Prince Louis Ferdinand, was taken up by the Fichte, Jacobi, and Henriette Herz circles, and carried off A. W. Schlegel as tutor to her children.
The following year she travelled in Italy, studied its ancient monuments, its art, the southern manners and customs of its people, and absorbed impressions of Italian nature at every pore. Then she returned to Coppet and wroteCorinne, ou l'Italie.
Her longing for France, however, gave her no peace. She had been forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, but she took up her abode just outside that limit, first at Auxerre, then at Rouen. (The prefect of this latter town was suspended for having shown her some courteous attention.) She eventually received permission to superintend the publishing ofCorinnefrom a country house only twelve leagues from Paris. But the book was barely published before a new edict banished her from France altogether.Corinnewas a grand success, and Napoleon could not endure any success in which he had no share. Mme. de Staël returned to Coppet, and, like the Emperor, continued to extend her realm. It grew as her emotional nature expanded, her intellectual grasp widened, and the number of her friendships increased. She held a regular court at Coppet. Remarkable men from all parts of Europe gathered round her there. In her house were to be met statesmen like Constant—whom in her infatuation she calls the cleverest man in the world—historians like Sismondi, poets like Zacharias Werner and Oehlenschläger, German princes, Polish princes and princesses, the flower of the aristocracy of birth and of intellect. Since her visit to Germany she had steadily continued to study the German language and literature, but she found that it would be necessary for her to make another sojourn in that country if she desired to present to her countrymen a complete picture of the new world which had revealed itself to her. She had been in North Germany, now she spent a year in Vienna, and upon her return to Switzerland set to work upon her great three-volume book,De l'Allemagne. It was completed in 1810. The next thing was to get it published in Paris.
A law had been passed which forbade the publication of any book until it had been approved of by the Censors; on this followed another regulation, specially aimed at Mme. de Staël, which gave the Chief of the Police authority to suppress a book if he saw fit, even though it had been published with the approval of the Censors. This was a law which did away with all law. Having again received permission to take up her abode at a distance of forty leagues from Paris to superintend the publication of her book, Mme. de Staël went to Blois, lived first at the château of Chaumont-sur-Loire, then at Fossé, and afterwards at the country-houses of friends in the neighbourhood; she fluttered round her beloved Paris at the required distance, as a moth flutters round a candle. Once she even ventured into the capital. Meanwhile the Censors examined her book, corrected, deleted, and gave the mangled remains theirimprimatur. Ten thousand copies were printed. But on the day on which they were to be issued, the Chief of the Police sent his gendarmes into the publisher's shop, after placing a sentinel at every exit, and, by order of the Government, performed the heroic feat of hacking the ten thousand copies to pieces. The mass was kneaded into a dough, and the publisher received twenty louis d'or in compensation. Mme. de Staël was at the same time ordered to deliver up her manuscript (representing the labours and hopes of six years) and to leave France in the course of twenty-four hours. In the letter which she received from the Chief of the Police on this occasion occur the following sentences: "You are not to seek the reason of the command I have communicated to you in your omission of all reference to the Emperor in your last work; that would be a mistake; no place could be found for him in it that would be worthy of him: your banishment is the natural consequence of the course you have persistently pursued for some years past. It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you; as for us, we are, fortunately, not yet reduced to seeking models amongst the people you so much admire. Your last work is not French."
That was what doomed her—it wasnot French. And to think that it was the epoch-making book,De l'Allemagne, epoch-making in French literature, because, not accidentally but on principle, it broke with all antiquated literary traditions and indicated new sources of life—to think that it was this book which the spiritual policeman of the nation presumed to condemn asnot French! And the cruelly ironical attempt to assume a tone of gallantry! "It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you "—therefore be kind enough to betake yourself elsewhere! We seem to hear the intoxicated vanity of France itself speak: "Because you have ventured to love liberty even now, when the rest of us are happy under tyranny; because, whilst we have been sunning ourselves in the beams of Napoleon's glory, you have dared to depict in Corinne the sovereign independence of genius, and, yourself banished from Paris, have crowned your ideal at the Capitol; because, at the moment when the eagles of France are shining resplendent with the glory of a thousand victories, and foreign nations have become our lieges, you, a weak woman, have had the audacity to represent to us our sources of spiritual life as almost dried up, and to point us to the despised Germany as a land whose poetry far outshines our own, to hated England, perfidious Albion, as a country whose love of liberty is more persistent and genuine than ours, and to dying Italy, the subjugated province of France, as a country whose simple manners and customs and vast superiority in art are worthy of imitation—because of all these things, you shall be stigmatised as unpatriotic, the cockade of your country shall be torn from your brow, your books shall be destroyed, even your manuscripts shall be torn into fragments, and you yourself, with a couple of spies at your heels, shall be chased like a wild animal across the frontier of France before twenty-four hours have passed."
The Prefect of the department was sent to demand the manuscript of the book; Mme. de Staël succeeded in saving it by giving him a rough copy. But anxiety about her book was for the moment the least of her anxieties. She had hoped to cross to England, but, expressly to prevent this, the Chief of the Police had added a postscript to his letter, forbidding her to embark at any northern port. She was half inclined to sail in a French ship bound for America, on the chance of the ship being captured by the English, but abandoned this plan as too adventurous. Despondent and sorrowful, she retired once more to Coppet.
Here fresh persecutions of every description awaited her. The Prefect of Geneva, on the strength of the first order he received, gave her two sons to understand that they also were forbidden ever to return to France, and this merely because they had made a fruitless attempt to obtain an audience of Napoleon on behalf of their mother. A few days later Mme. de Staël received a letter from the Prefect, in which he, in the name of the Chief of the Police, demanded the proof-sheets of her book on Germany. It had been ascertained by means of spies that the proofs must be in existence, and the French Government had no intention of resting contented with half measures, with the destruction of the printed book; the work was to be completely annihilated, any future edition of it made impossible. The authoress replied that the proofs had already been sent abroad, but that she would willingly promise never again to print any of her works on the Continent of Europe. "There was no great merit in such a promise," she remarks in herDix Années d'Exil, "for of course no Continental government would have sanctioned the publication of a book which had been interdicted by Napoleon." Not long after this, the Prefect of Geneva, Barante, the father of the historian, was banished for having shown too great leniency towards Mme. de Staël. Her son falling ill, Mme. de Staël accompanied him by the advice of the doctors to the baths of Aix in Savoy, some twenty leagues from Coppet. Scarcely had she arrived there when she received, by special messenger, an intimation from the Prefect of the Department of Mont Blanc that she was not only forbidden to leave Switzerland on any pretext whatever, but even to travel in Switzerland itself; two leagues from Coppet was indicated as the distance beyond which she might not go. Not satisfied with transforming her sojourn upon her own estate into an imprisonment, the Government took care that she should suffer not only from the loss of freedom, but from that special curse of prison life, solitude—doubly painful to one of her peculiarly social disposition. Schlegel, who had lived in her house as tutor to her children for eight years, was ordered to leave, on the foolish pretext that he influenced her against France. To the inquiry how he did this, the answer was returned, that in the comparison which he, as literary critic, had instituted between Racine's Phèdre and the Phædra of Euripides, he had pronounced himself in favour of the latter. Montmorency was exiled for having spent a few days at Coppet, and Mme. Récamier, whom Mme. de Staël had not time to warn of the punishment attending even a brief visit, was forbidden to return to France, because on her way through Switzerland she had gone to cheer her old friend with a little conversation. Even a man of seventy-eight, St.-Priest, an old ministerial colleague of her father's, was exiled for having paid a polite call at Coppet.
The isolation which is the lot of those who set themselves in opposition to despotic power was not new to her. For long no man of rank or fame, no politician who wished to stand well with the Government, had dared to visit her at Coppet. They were all prevented by business or illness. "Ah!" she said once, "how weary I am of all this cowardice which calls itself consumption!" But now, to the pain of seeing herself abandoned by so many former friends was added that of seeing her real friends punished with exile for the slightest expression of good-will towards her. She complained that she spread misfortune round her like an infectious disease.
It stood in her power even now, after years of exile, persecution, and practical imprisonment, to obtain liberty, and permission once more to write and publish; it was privately intimated to her that a slight change of opinion or attitude would procure her the right to return to France; but she would not purchase liberty at this price. And when it was said to her later in more definite terms: "Speak or write one little word about the King of Rome, and all the capitals of Europe will be open to you;" all she replied was: "I wish him a good nurse."
Isolated and closely confined, she came to the decision to make a determined attempt to escape from Coppet. It was her desire to go to America, but that was impossible without a passport, and how was she to procure one? She feared, besides, that she might be arrested on her way to the port she must sail from, on the pretext that she intended to go to England, which was forbidden her under penalty of imprisonment. And she was well aware that when the first scandal had blown over, there would be nothing to prevent the Government quietly leaving her in prison; she would soon be completely forgotten. She contemplated the possibility of reaching Sweden by way of Russia, the whole of North Germany being under the control of the French. She believed she could manage to escape through the Tyrol without being delivered up by Austria, but a passport to Russia must be procured from St. Petersburg, and she feared that if she wrote for this from Coppet, she might be denounced to the French Ambassador; she must get to Vienna first and write from there. For six months she pored over the map of Europe, studying it to find a way of escape as eagerly as Napoleon studied it to find the paths by which he was to proceed on his conquest of the world. When, after a month's delay, a last petition for a passport to America was refused (although Mme. de Staël had pledged herself, if it were granted, to publish nothing there), the weak, brave woman determined upon a decisive attempt to escape. One day in 1812, she and her daughter drove away from Coppet, with their fans in their hands, and not a single box or package in the carriage. They arrived safely at Vienna, and wrote to St. Petersburg for Russian passports. But the Austrian Government was so anxious to avoid complications with France that Mme. de Staël was detained upon the frontier of Galicia, and was followed by spies through the whole of Austrian Poland. When she stopped on her journey to spend a single day at Prince Lubomirski's, the Prince was obliged to give an Austrian detective a seat at his table, and it was only by threats that Mme. de Staël's son prevented the man taking up his position at night in her bedroom. Not till she had passed the Russian frontier did she breathe freely again. But the feeling of freedom did not last long, for she had barely reached Moscow before rumours that the French army was approaching the city compelled her to take flight again, and it was not until she reached St. Petersburg that she could consider herself in safety.
The year before her flight from Coppet, Mme. de Staël, then forty-five years of age, had been privately married to a young French officer of twenty-three, Albert de Rocca, who had been severely wounded, and had come to Switzerland a complete invalid, exhausted by loss of blood. The sympathy which Mme. de Staël showed him roused a passionate devotion in the young soldier, and this led to a secret union. Rocca joined Mme. de Staël upon the Russian frontier.
Her intention was to travel to Constantinople and Greece, in search of the correct local colouring for a poem she was planning on Richard Coeur de Lion. Reading Byron seems to have inspired her with the idea of this poem, which was, she said, to be aLara, though not a reflection of Byron's. The fear, however, that the fatigues of the journey might be too great for her young daughter and De Rocca, decided her to go to Stockholm instead. There she renewed her friendship with Bernadotte and met her old friend, Schlegel, whom Bernadotte had made a Swedish noble and his own private secretary. Through Schlegel, Bernadotte also made the acquaintance of Constant, whom he created a Knight of the Northern Star, and whom he vainly attempted to persuade into concurrence in his ambitious designs on the French throne. As far as Bernadotte's character was concerned, Mme. de Staël was less keen-sighted than Constant; she always speaks of him with warmth; their common hatred of Napoleon was, doubtless, a bond of union. In her case it became a dumb hatred from the moment that the allied armies marched against France. She laments the necessity of wishing Napoleon success, but she can no longer separate his interests from those of France. Possessed of more strength of character than Constant, she rejected the overtures made to her by Napoleon during the Hundred Days. She survived his final downfall, and saw with sorrow the return of the Bourbons, more virulent enemies of freedom than the autocrat they displaced. She foregathered once more with Constant in Paris in 1816; and in the following year she died.
This brief summary of the life of a remarkable woman and of the life-conflict of her maturer years, is a sufficient groundwork for the elaboration of a complete picture of her character as a woman and a writer. Innate warmth of heart and intelligence were her original gifts; her warm-heartedness developed into broad-minded philanthropy, and her intelligence into a power of receptivity and reproduction which was akin to genius.
She possessed in a marked degree several of the characteristics of the eighteenth century—sociability, for instance, and love of conversation accompanied by remarkable conversational powers. Whereas George Sand, the great authoress of the nineteenth century, was reserved and silent in company, and only revealed her inner self when she wrote, Mme. de Staël was a lively improvisatrice. She possessed the gift of electrifying; her words shed a stream of light upon the subject of which she spoke. All who knew her personally said that her books were as nothing in comparison with her conversation. One of her critics ends a review thus: "When one listens to her, it is impossible not to agree with her; if she had said all this instead of writing it, I should not have been able to criticise;" and a great lady said jestingly: "If I were Queen I should command Mme. de Staël to talk to me constantly." The countless sayings which have been preserved give us, in spite of the chilling influence of print, some idea of the sparkle and originality of her conversation. One day when she was discoursing on the unnaturalness of parents arranging marriages instead of doing the only right thing, allowing the young girl to choose for herself, she cried laughingly: "I shallcompelmy daughter to marry for love." One of Napoleon's friends having informed her that the Emperor would pay her the two millions her father had entrusted to the Bank of France if he were certain of her attachment, she replied: "I knew that a certificate of birth would be required before I could obtain my money, but I did not expect to be asked for a declaration of love."
But behind the ready wit and the facility of expression which are the qualities developed by a social age, lay much of the fervour and the soul which the nineteenth century has not failed to appreciate. The much admired châtelaine of Coppet, the fêted, fascinating leader of society, was a genuine, natural woman. The want of sympathy between her and her mother had, as already noted, early strengthened her tendency to believe in and love human nature. The idea of duty as conflicting with nature rather than guiding it was repulsive to her. In her workDe l'Influence des Passions, she considers the passions in their relation, not to the idea of duty, but to the idea of happiness, investigating into the proportionate infringement of each upon our happiness. In Corinne she says: "Nothing is easier than to make a grand pretence of morality while condemning all that is noble and great. The idea of duty ... can be turned into a weapon of offence, which the mediocre, perfectly satisfied with their mediocrity and narrow-mindedness, employ to impose silence upon the gifted, and to rid themselves of enthusiasm, of genius, in short, of all their enemies."
The temperamental foundation upon which Mme. de Staël built was genuinely feminine. The final ideal of this undeniably ambitious woman was a purely personal, purely idyllic one—happiness in love. It is upon this that her two great novels,DelphineandCorinne, turn; the improbability of finding it in marriage as ordained by society, and the impossibility of finding it outside marriage, are her fundamental ideas; and the perpetual conflict between domestic happiness and noble ambitions or free love, is merely the expression of her constant complaint, that neither genius nor passion is compatible with that domestic happiness which is her heart's eternal desire. In her books the woman only seeks the path of fame when she has been disappointed in all her dearest hopes. To Mme. de Staël the heart is everything; even fame was to her only a means of conquering hearts. Corinne says: "When I sought glory, I always had the hope that it would make people love me," and Mme. de Staël herself exclaims: "Do not let us give our unjust enemies and our ungrateful friends the triumph of crushing, of suppressing our powers. It is they who force those who would so willingly have been content with feeling, to seek fame."
It is this warm-heartedness, one might almost say motherliness, which, in her case, gives the melancholy of the age a peculiar imprint. Hers is not only that universal human melancholy that arises from the certainty with which two human beings who love one another can say: "The day is coming when I shall lay you in the grave, or you me." Still less is it the egotistical despondency to be found in so many of the male writers of the day. It is a depression connected with the struggle for ideal equality and liberty of those revolutionary times, it is the sadness of the enthusiastic reformer.
From her youth she had been such an enthusiast on the subject of equality that even in the matter of ability she regarded all men as essentially equal, assuming only the most trifling difference between the genius and the ordinary man. From the time she sat upon her father's knee she had cherished the strongest faith in the power of liberty to make men happy and to call forth all that is good in them, and her faith did not waver even on the September day when she was compelled to flee from that Reign of Terror which was the result of an experiment in equality, or when, under the Consulate, she was banished by the dictatorship into which liberty had resolved itself. But it is small wonder that a veil woven of sadness and despondency early dimmed the brightness of her spirit. At the close of a letter to Talleyrand, whom in the days of her power she had saved from banishment, but who was not sufficiently grateful to attempt to make her any return, she writes: "Farewell! Are you happy? with so superior an intellect do you not penetrate to what is at the core of everything—unhappiness?" And inCorinnethe heroine repeats what Mme. de Staël herself often said: "Of all the capacities with which nature endowed me, the capacity of suffering is the only one I have developed to its full extent."
Healthy-minded as she was, she came in time to take a brighter view of life. A relative who knew her well writes: "Possibly there was a time when life, death, melancholy, and passionate self-sacrifice played too great a part in her conversation; but when these words spread like a contagion throughout her whole circle, and actually began to be heard amongst the servants, she took a deadly loathing to them."[1]She succeeded in advancing beyond the intellectual stage at which so many of her French contemporaries stopped short.
It is, indeed, one of the most noticeable things about her, this development of her critical faculty in the spirit and direction of the nineteenth century. Originally she was a true Parisian, with no real appreciation of the beauties of nature. When, after her first flight from Paris, she saw the Lake of Geneva for the first time, she exclaimed in her home-sickness: "How much more beautiful were the gutters of the Rue du Bac!" Not many years later she described the scenery of Italy, inCorinne, in truly glowing language. In her earlier years she was in love with, infatuated with, Paris, which to her represented civilisation, yet it was she who first taught the Frenchman to appreciate the characteristic and the good qualities of the other European nations. For she possessed the true critical gift, that is, she had the power of steadily enlarging her mind, increasing her receptivity, and destroying her prejudices in the bud, thereby holding herself in constant preparedness to understand.
It is to this we must ascribe her marvellous power of attraction; and this explains how, banished and disgraced as she was, she enjoyed the power and influence of a queen at Coppet. Although our countryman Oehlenschläger does not seem to have had any clear appreciation of the real greatness of the woman whose guest he was, he gives a very charming description of Mme. de Staël and his visit to her in 1808. "How intellectual, witty, and amiable Mme. de Staël was," he says, "the whole world knows. I have never met a woman possessed of so much genius; but, probably on that very account, there was something masculine about her. She was square built, with marked features. Pretty she was not, but there was something most attractive in her bright brown eyes, and she possessed in a very high degree the womanly gift of winning, subtly ruling, and bringing together men of the most different characters. That in matters of the heart she was the true woman, she has shown us inDelphineandCorinne. Rousseau himself has not depicted love with more fire. Wherever she appeared she collected round her all the men of intellect, drawing them away even from young and beautiful women. When one remembers that in addition to all this she was very rich and very hospitable, giving magnificent entertainments every day, one does not marvel that, like some queen or fairy, she drew men to her enchanted castle. One is almost tempted to believe that it was to indicate this dominion of hers that she always had a little leafy branch by her at meals, which she took in her hand and played with. The servants had to lay one beside her plate every day, for it was as necessary to her as knife, fork, and spoon."
Men made their way to Coppet, as some fifty years earlier they had made their way to the adjacent Ferney, where Voltaire, also an exile dwelling as close to the frontiers of France as possible, gathered the picked men of Europe round him in the last years of his life. One is irresistibly tempted to compare the influence which emanated from the aged man at Ferney with that exercised by the owner of Coppet. The years spent at Ferney are in every respect the most glorious period of Voltaire's life. It was from there that he, as the champion of justice and toleration, compassed achievements which no one could have believed to be within the power of a private individual whose only weapon was his pen.
Three years of his life at Ferney were devoted to litigation on behalf of Jean Calas. Calas was a merchant of Toulouse, aged sixty-eight, a Protestant. His youngest son had become converted to Catholicism, and was completely estranged from his family. The eldest son, a wild, dissipated young man, committed suicide. The Catholic clergy immediately spread a rumour among the people that the father had strangled his son out of hatred for the Romish faith, which the latter, it was said, had intended to embrace on the following day. The whole family was imprisoned. The suicide's corpse lay in state, and performed one miracle after another. The bi-centenary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew in Toulouse occurred at the time of the trial, and in their fanatical excitement, thirteen judges, despite all proofs of his innocence, and without a shadow of evidence of his guilt, condemned Calas to be broken on the wheel. The sentence was carried out, the old man protesting his innocence to the last. His children, under the pretext of a reprieve, were shut up in a monastery and forced to adopt the Catholic faith. Then Voltaire at Ferney wrote his celebrated treatise on tolerance, and moved heaven and earth to get the case tried over again. He appealed to the public opinion of the whole of Europe. He compelled the Council of State in Paris to demand the minutes of the trial from the Parliament of Toulouse. They were refused; there were delays of every kind; but in the end, after three years of unwearied fighting, Voltaire gained his point. The Toulouse sentence was pronounced unjust, the dead man's honour was cleared, and an indemnification was paid to his family. All who desire to be just to Voltaire ought to remember that it is during this period that the phrase,Écrasez l'infâme, perpetually recurs in his letters.
It was at Ferney that Voltaire gave shelter to the Sirven family. The father was a Calvinist, but one of his daughters had been forced into a convent. Upon her becoming insane, she was released, whereupon she drowned herself in a well not far from her father's house. The father, mother, and sister are accused of murdering the nun, are tried, and all condemned to death. The unhappy family, knowing of no sanctuary in the whole of Europe except Voltaire's house, escape to Ferney, the mother dying of grief upon the way. Voltaire, the banished man, by his eloquence and his ardour compels the French courts to try this case also again, and the family is acquitted.
Three years later Étalonde found refuge at Ferney. Two young men, De la Barre and Étalonde, were accused in 1765 of having passed a church procession without taking off their hats, which was a true accusation, and of having thrown a crucifix into the water, which was a false one. They were both examined under torture, and afterwards De la Barre was broken on the wheel. He went bravely to his death, his only words being: "I could not have believed that they would kill a young man for such a trifle." Étalonde, who was condemned to lose his right hand and have his tongue cut out, escaped to Ferney, and no one dared to lay hands on him in Voltaire's house.
Yet another human life did Voltaire succeed in saving while he lived at Ferney. A young married couple named Montbailli were condemned to death on a false accusation of murder. The man was first broken on the wheel and then burned, but the burning of the woman was deferred because she was pregnant. Voltaire hears of the case, sees through the infamous charge with his lightning glance, appeals to the French ministry, proves that an innocent man has been put to death, and saves the woman from the stake.
Besides protecting the life of the accused, he defended the honour of the dead. One of the last pieces of news that he received on his own deathbed was, that his appeal against the unjust sentence which had cost General Lally his life had been successful, that the sentence was reversed, the dead man acquitted. During these years Voltaire also found time to transform Ferney from a poor village into a prosperous town, to labour zealously for the abolition of serfdom in France, and to write a number of his most important books, in all of which his one aim was to undermine the dogmas of Christianity, which appeared to him to be at the root of the power of the priesthood and all the evils resulting therefrom. Nor did he neglect the claims of polite society; he built a private theatre, and engaged the best actors to play in it; and he was visited at Ferney by the most gifted and able men of the day.
The renown of Coppet cannot be compared with that of Ferney, but none the less it is a fair renown. From this place of banishment also, emanated the ardent desire for justice, the love of freedom and the love of truth.
Somewhat later in the nineteenth century each of the three principal countries of Europe sent its greatest author into exile; England sent Byron; Germany, Heinrich Heine; and France, Victor Hugo; and not one of these men lost any of his literary influence from the fact of his exile. But with the beginning of the century the time had gone by when men of letters were a great power. Even a genius of Voltaire's calibre would hardly have exercised the powerful, tangible influence in this century which he did in his own. And Mme. de Staël was far from being Voltaire's equal in genius. Moreover, her task was of an entirely different nature. The outward power of the Church was temporarily broken, and in any case her mind was far too religious ever to have permitted her following in Voltaire's steps. The political despotism was so pronounced, that merely to omit the French Emperor's name from a work on Germany was regarded as a political demonstration and punished accordingly. But there was a task left undone by the Revolution with all its great outward reforms, a task the doing of which could not be forbidden by Imperial edict, and that was, the undermining of the mountain of religious, moral, social, national, and artistic prejudices which weighed upon Europe with an even heavier pressure than did the dominion of Napoleon, and which indeed had alone made that dominion possible. Voltaire himself had been entangled in many of these prejudices, especially the artistic and national. From Coppet, Mme. de Staël waged war upon them all. And none the less she, like Voltaire, found time to fulfil all social duties; she too had her own theatre, and she both wrote plays for it, and acted in them. The châtelaine of Coppet was as untrammelled intellectually and as noble in her aims as was the philosopher of Ferney; she was less fortunate and less powerful, but on account of her sex and her sufferings she is even more interesting. Voltaire succeeded in doing much for others. Mme. de Staël barely succeeded in defending herself.