Germaine de Staël

AT JUNIPER HALL

GERMAINE reached Coppet on September 7, 1792, and found her father and mother very glad to see her.

“ Switzerland,” wrote Suzanne¹ to Meister two days later, “is in mourning.  The Ambassadress came back the day before yesterday with the terrible news (of the massacres of September 2) and with an account of all her own sufferings.”

The good woman added that Jacques had just been reading a book in which he had found all his own views set forth.

“ If you happen to know the author,” she urged, “tell him that he has given us the purest essence of reason embellished by the graces of the mind.  Tell him that ideas so sweet and so inspired can still reach our spirits, just as the nightingale’s song can be heard in a forest in spite of the roarings of tigers and lions.”

It seemed to them, now, that the wind which had blown them out of France had not been so ill.  Necker, when Germaine arrived, was busy on a defence of the King which gave his daughter, when she read it, the liveliest delight.  Here was another nightingale’s song among the roarings and all the sweeter because the singer hinted “avec quelle délicatesse,” that Louis’ downfall was due to his failure to support Necker.  Necker could afford to be generous.  The King, he wrote, was a good man, “the only one, perhaps, among the heads of the French Empire, St. Louis always excepted, who has set the example of a blameless life.”

This precious apology was published in October 1792.  In November, Narbonne’s child was born.  It was a boy.  Germaine called it “Albert,” and Eric Magnus, assured that his debts would be paid, accepted responsibility.  He was still in Sweden but looked forward with confidence to a speedy return to Paris.  Jacques ventured to suggest that the time had come for a reconciliation between husband and wife, and hinted that he himself was no longer rich enough to finance any more escapades.  He and Suzanne then learned, with lively affliction, that Germaine intended to join Narbonne in England the moment she rose from her child-bed.  When they protested, they were told to mind their own business.

“ Love,” their daughter informed them, “is above laws and man-made opinion.  It is the truth, the flame, the essential stuff, the basal idea of the moral world.  Heaven itself has no right to condemn it.”

Suzanne appealed to her old friend Gibbon, who was then living at Lausanne, begging help, and the author of The Decline and Fall addressed remonstrances to the infatuated girl.  These had the effect of revealing that Germaine no longer felt sure of her lover.  She declared that she had an idea that if she didn’t go to him, “a gulf would open” between them.  Gibbon failed, apparently, to understand what she meant, for he repeated his exhortations.  What, did they expect her to pay with the laughter of Frenchwomen for the approval of Geneva ?  Everybody knew that Narbonne was hers.

“ There are feelings,” she wrote² to the man who had given her mother up to please his father, “which, uniting every aspect of love and friendship, become yourself . . . and more than yourself.  When unheardof conditions, such as have arisen in the Revolution, have welded together the minds and souls of two people during five years, when these conditions have produced mutual dependence, so that it is impossible for the two people to live apart, when, finally, everything known as propriety and worldly consideration and advantage has tumbled into a ridiculous heap of ruins, I can see no reason why he and I should go on living if we are to be separated.”

Coppet was too near the French frontier for Jacques’ taste.  When he heard that the Commune of Paris had sequestered his estates in France because of his apology for the King, he asked the Swiss Government for a guard of fifty soldiers to be supplied at his own expense.  That being refused, he moved inland to his other estate, Rolle.  From Rolle, on December 10, 1792, he wrote to Meister, who was then in London :³

“ My daughter is about to leave us to go and spend some months not indeed in London but in the English countryside, where several of her friends are now gathered.  Not from you, sir, whom I love and who loves us, would I seek to hide how much this journey saddens us.  I have done everything in my power to prevent it ;  but all to no purpose.  She will have to travel through France, and that is an added anxiety even though she won’t go through Paris.  Her confinement passed off excellently ;  but a journey undertaken so soon after it, at this season of the year, is necessarily a matter of distress.  One must be resigned to what one cannot help. . . .”

On January 2, 1793, Suzanne wrote to Gibbon :

“ After having exhausted uselessly all the resources of mind and reason in attempting to dissuade my daughter from her insensate project, we had an idea that a short stay at Geneva might, by bringing her under the influence of public opinion, make her more docile.  She profited by that freedom to set out on her journey sooner even than we had feared.  How badly she has begun the year and made us begin it !  I say no more.”

There was nothing more to be said.  Germaine had bolted to her lover.  She reached England safely and, before the end of January, 1793, had taken Juniper Hall, near Leatherhead in Surrey, and was living there with Narbonne.  Very soon the Kindergarten was in being once more in this desert place.  For Talleyrand came limping down from London, where he had been practising poverty ;  he brought Mathieu de Montmorency with him and Lally-Tollendal, stouter than ever, and Jaucourt and his mistress, Madame de Chatre.  Malouet also.  Germaine made them all welcome.  She was writing about “Happiness” and needed an audience.

But the disciples in this English January, with the east wind for comfort, proved less tractable than in Paris, even though all were dependent on their hostess, or rather on her father, for food and shelter.  Germaine read to them every evening, from her work on “Happiness,” and they endured it badly.  Talleyrand found her voice, which was sing-song, exceedingly irritating.  Neither Narbonne nor Mathieu felt much interest in her opinions, which both had begun to distrust.  Their minds were in Paris, where, as they gathered round the board which Necker’s hands had furnished, their King was making ready to die.  Liberty had lost her looks for them.

Liberty was losing her looks for most people.  By compelling the Girondists to put the King on his trial, the rulers of the Paris Commune had robbed them of their influence among moderate men outside of Paris.  By compelling most of them to vote for the King’s death, the Commune had broken their resistance to itself.  Liberalism, in short, which had destroyed Versailles, was now on its knees to Paris.  France had a new Richelieu, more autocratic, more ruthless, more bloodthirsty, than the old, a tyrant without a name, or rather with so many names—the Commune, the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Jacobin Club, the “Mountain”—that identification was impossible.  To no purpose did Germaine plead that calamity had befallen solely because Necker’s advice had not been taken.  Talleyrand, for one, realised that absolutism had replaced absolutism because France could not live without it in some form.  He saw, as Louis XVI and Mirabeau had seen long ago, that reform must be grafted on the stem of authority.  Narbonne was of the same opinion.  What, Germaine cried, a Royal democracy !  She harangued them, exhorted them, chastised them for their lack of faith, repeating Jacques’ arguments in favour of the English system till her bread grew sour in their mouths.  News of the King’s execution, on January 21, reached them and drove the blood from every face except hers.  Here, surely, was a challenge that they must accept.  She was full of schemes for the punishing of the Jacobins, but the melancholy men who surrounded her remained unresponsive.  What could they do ?  Mathieu made no secret of his belief that the King’s blood was upon all their heads.

And so thought their English neighbours.  Nobody called on them.  Did not the way of life of these revolutionaries eloquently proclaim their rascality.  The Royalist emigrants, mindful of Necker, spoke of them in the same breath with Danton and Robespierre.  Narbonne found ostracism, even at the hands of English vicars’ wives, an afflicting experience, and grew morose and difficult.  He began to quarrel, and rebuked Germaine for her lack of dignity.  But since they had nobody but each other, it was necessary to be friends again, and listen to a new chapter of “Happiness.”  They learned to know one another better every day.  Germaine began to suspect that Narbonne had no heart.  Her opinion of Talleyrand was still high, and in any case, she found his conversation irresistible.  But it was Mathieu who won the love of everybody.  In February Germaine paid a short visit to London.  Her father, informed about what was going on at Juniper Hall, was threatening to cut off supplies.  She visited Meister and begged his help.  The King’s death, she pleaded, had alienated her lover from her and she must have time to win him again.  Besides, all these people were dependent on her, and “I have a tremendous horror of the whole of Switzerland.”

March continued what January and February had begun.  Narbonne, nearing forty, staggered under the burden of a passion which gave him no rest.  He begged mercy and was chastised daily with scorpions.  Here is her own account of him from her novel Zulma, in which he is called Fernand.

“ I followed Fernand into the desert. . . . A woman surrounded him with all the tender joys of love.  In the desert, he was still a sovereign ;  he saw happiness and a whole existence hang on one look from him ;  power and glory were restored to him by my ardent and complete yielding.  My love was his shield from the injustice of man as it tried to attack him in his thoughts.  In my heart he read himself . . . he loved me . . . he lived. ... Fernand suggested an absence of a few days from me.  I opposed this project, I complained of it bitterly.  No, I did not demand rights from Fernand on the strength of my benefits to him.  It was the memory, the deep impression of my own feelings, which forced me to believe in my empire over him.  It seemed to me that I carried such a power and weight of love within me that it must dominate him, that a man loved with such a strength of passion could never dream that he was free.”

In fact, so long as the house-party lasted, nobody was free.  In the characters of all these men there was a childish streak which the maternal streak in Germaine’s character easily overrode.  They allowed her to feed them, mentally and morally as well as physically, and took comfort from her strength without shame.  And they bore her scourgings as boys bear the punishments of their mother.  That the party held together is remarkable when it is remembered that Mathieu’s mother had been Narbonne’s mistress and that Germaine, at one time or another, had bestowed her favours on them all.

The end came in May, at the hands of Jacques.  He sent his nephew and niece, Madame Necker de Saussure and her husband, to England ;  Germaine was told that she must return or fend for herself.  The decision is not surprising.  Eric Magnus had returned to the rue du Bac in February, and the Austrians and Prussians, driven back by Dumouriez at Valmy and Jemappes, were again, thanks to their victory at Neerwinden on March 18, 1793, approaching the capital.  Dumouriez himself, following the example of Lafayette, had gone over to the enemy rather than face the wrath of Paris.  It seemed probable in the highest degree that, within a few weeks, the nightmare of mob-rule would be over and the martyred King’s son happily restored to the throne, with the Queen as Regent.  Necker foresaw that if that happened, he would have great need of Germaine to plead his cause and recover his sequestered property, including the £100,000 he had lent to the Government.  The scandal of Juniper Hall was no longer to be endured.

Germaine hauled down her flag.  Weeping bitterly, speechless, she was led away, “dragged from all that is dear to me.”  The house-party continued without her.

¹ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 87.

² Gibbon :  Memories.

³ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 88.