# Madame de Staël/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V.
MADAME DE STAËL IS COURAGEOUS FOR HER FRIENDS.
Necker's victory over the rage of the populace was a fleeting one. He had, indeed, overstepped the prerogatives of a Minister in asking for the amnesty. Misled by the elation of his gratified vanity, and the impulse of his benevolent heart, he, an ardent defender of order, forgot that in placing himself between the Assembly and King on the one hand, and the people on the other, he practically recognised the right of a faction to act without the consent of the Government. It was for the latter to reverse the decree of the Commune and not for the electors of Paris.
His dream of smiling peace installed by his hand on the ruins of the Revolution was rudely and rapidly dispelled. Madame de Staël sorrowfully records that on the very evening of that glorious day the amnesty was retracted, and ascribes this result in great part to the influence of Mirabeau. But, in truth, a very little reflection must have sufficed to convince anybody that the utopian demands of Necker were singularly misplaced. The very electors who had acceded to them asserted that all they had ever intended was to ​shield the arrested royalists from the fury of the populace, but in no sense from the action of justice. The Assembly confirmed this view, and from that moment Necker's influence was practically gone. It was proved to be a bubble; and his triumph, respectable as were some of the motives which had urged him to invoke it, became ludicrous when contrasted with the stern and tragic realities of the moment. This Madame de Staël did not, could not see. She was fain to console herself with the compassionate reflection that, after all, De Besenval—an old man—was saved.
She narrates with dolorous pride the efforts honestly, courageously, and to a certain degree successfully, made by her father, during fifteen months, to avert the disaster of famine; and innocently appeals to them against the failure as a statesman to which she resolutely shuts her eyes.
One measure after another opposed by Necker was voted: the confiscation of the property of the clergy, the suppression of titles of nobility, and the emission of assignats. No popularity could have resisted such successive blows; and Necker was popular no longer. Still, Madame de Staël touchingly begs the world, in her writings, not to allow itself to be turned from the paths of virtue by the spectacle of a good man so persecuted by fate. She claims our admiration for a series of quixotic acts, and is perpetually insisting on the amazing magnanimity which would not allow her father to become base because he had ceased to be useful.
Thoroughly discouraged at last—perhaps partly convinced that to preach kindness to savages, and selfabnegation to the vile, was a task to be resumed in better times—Necker tendered his resignation, and ​had the mortification of seeing it accepted with perfect indifference both by the Assembly and the King.
Before leaving Paris for ever, he deposited in the royal treasury two millions of his own property. The exact object of this munificence is not clear: even Madame de Staël failed to explain it on any practical grounds. But she admired it extremely, and so may we.
The journey with the terrified and suffering Madame Necker to Switzerland was a great contrast to the return in the previous year to Paris. Then it had been "roses, roses all the way"; now it was nothing but insults. At Arcis-sur-Aube the carriage was stopped by an infuriated crowd, who accused M. Necker of having betrayed the cause of the people in the interests of the emigrant nobles. The accusation was an absurd one, since he had only endeavoured to be superhumanly kind to everybody. He had wished to preserve the people from crimes and starvation, the clergy from ruin, and the emigrant nobles from detection, and this was the result. It was hard but inevitable, and as there were many worse fates than M. Necker's in those days, one cannot quite free oneself from a feeling of impatience at Madame de Staël's perpetual lamentations over the inconceivable hardships of her parent's lot.
We now approach an episode in Madame de Staël's life which it is necessary to touch on with discretion. This is her connection with the Count Louis de Narbonne. The stories circulated in regard to them are familiar to all readers of Madame d'Arblay's memoirs. Dr. Burney thought himself in duty bound to warn his little Fanny against her growing adoration for Necker's great, but, according to him, not blameless daughter, who, ​during her stay at Mickleham, exerted herself to win the friendship of the authoress of Cecilia. Fanny, as we know, was at first greatly shocked, and completely incredulous. She described Madame de Staël as loving M. de Narbonne tenderly, but so openly, and in a manner so devoid of coquetry, that friendship between two men, in her opinion, could hardly be differently manifested. But the seed of suspicion once cast in the little prude's mind, quickly germinated, and led eventually to a total cessation of her acquaintance with the woman whose brilliancy and goodness had so fascinated her. This is not the place in which to discuss Fanny's conduct; but was the information on which she based it correct? Who shall say? Madame de Staël was extremely imprudent, and she seems to have been dangerously near to loving a number of men.
Miss Berry, in her memoirs, accuses her of a "passion" for Talleyrand, and spoke as though concluding it to be a theme of common gossip. She certainly liked to absorb a great deal of her friends' affections, and was avowedly displeased when they married. Her sentiments towards Baron de Staël, full of a sweet and fresh cordiality at first, seems rapidly to have changed to aversion. As far as it is possible to judge, she unhesitatingly sacrificed him on all occasions to her filial love or her intellectual aims. When he was in Paris she left him in order to console M. Necker in his mournful retirement at Coppet. When he was at Coppet she remained in Paris, there to form and electrify a constitutional salon. Various anecdotes ⟨attest⟩ to the scandal uttered about her, and the truth ⟨of some⟩ of these stories admits of little doubt. But, ⟨on the⟩ other hand, it must be remembered that ⟨detraction⟩ is ever busiest with the greatest names; ​that Madame de Staël, always preoccupied with her subject and never with herself, irritated the nerves and stirred the bile of inferior people who were proportionately gratified to hear her attacked; and that she lived in the midst of a society where conjugal fidelity was rare enough to be hardly believed in. Countless passages in her writings prove how exalted was her ideal of family life; and if they also prove her constant, restless yearning after some unattained, unattainable good, there is at least no sign of the satiety of exhausted emotion in them. Let us be content, then, that in many instances a veil should hide from us the deeper recesses of Madame de Staël's heart. Grant that there were two Germaines—one her father's daughter, lofty-minded, pure, catching the infection of exalted feelings, and incapable of error; the other her husband's wife, thrust into the fiery circle of human passion, thence to emerge a little scorched and harmed. The hidden centre of that dual self cannot be revealed to us; but what we do know is sometimes so grand and always so great that we can afford to be indulgent when reduced to conjecture.
In 1791, after having paid a visit of condolence to her father at Coppet, Madame de Staël had returned to Paris, and made her salon the rallying-point for the most distinguished Constitutionels. Conspicuous among these, in principles although not in name, was De Narbonne, described by Madame de Staël herself as "Grand seigneur, homme d'esprit, courtisan et philosophe." He was a brilliant, an enlightened, a generous, and charming man. His sympathies ⟨were⟩ liberal; it would have been too much to expect ⟨from⟩ him that they should be subversive. He ⟨had been⟩ brought up in the enervating atmosphere of ⟨the Court,⟩ ​yet had adopted many of the new ideas. After having accomplished the difficult and perilous enterprise of escorting the King's aunts to Rome, and establishing them under the roof of the Cardinal de Bernis, he returned to Paris and ranged himself on the side of the Constitution. His soldier-soul (he was an extremely gallant officer) would not allow of his going any farther along the facile descent of change. The King's abortive attempt at escape and subsequent imprisonment in the Tuileries restored to Narbonne all the fervour which his allegiance as a courtier might originally have lacked. But he was a very intelligent man; so much so, that Napoleon himself years later rendered justice to his sagacity. He had serious tastes and a great love of knowledge, and was almost as witty as Talleyrand himself. He was made Minister of War in December 1791, and the general impression prevailed that Madame de Staël's influence had contributed to his appointment. He was young and full of hope, and proposed to himself the impossible task of encouraging the action of the Assembly at the same time as he sought to reconstruct the popularity of the King. He also exerted himself to prepare France for resistance to the armies of foreign invaders; visited the frontier; reported the state of things there to the Assembly; provisioned the forts; re-established garrisons, and organized three armies. But what he could not do was to inspire anybody with confidence in himself. "Too black for heaven, too white for hell," he could neither rise to the sublime ineptitude of deluded royalism nor sink to the brutal logic of facts. Curtly dismissed by the King, at the end of three months, on resigning the portfolio he resumed the sword.
​To defend his ungrateful sovereign was his religion, since, in spite of his talents, he did not reach the point of perceiving that there is a moment in the history of every nation when individuals must be sacrificed to principles. Perhaps this preoccupation of minds, naturally enlightened, with merely personal issues is the real key to all that was tragically mysterious in the Revolution. Madame de Staël herself deplored the fate of the King and Queen with precisely the same wealth of compassion that she would have expressed on the occasion of some catastrophe involving hundreds of obscure lives. It seemed as though only such sanguinary monomaniacs as Robespierre or St. Just, only such corrupt and colossal natures as Mirabeau or Danton, could look below the accidental circumstances of an event to its enduring elements. All that was morally and vitally, as distinguished from mentally and potentially, best in France threw itself into passionate defence of persons; while all that was strong, original, consistent, was drawn into the fatal policy of blood.
A few months after Narbonne's fall, Madame de Staël endeavoured to associate him in a plan which her pity had suggested to her for the escape of the Royal Family. She wished to buy a property that was for sale near Dieppe. Thus furnished with a pretext for visiting the coast, she proposed to make three journeys thither. On the first two occasions she was to be accompanied by her eldest son, who was the age of the Dauphin, by a man resembling the King in height and general appearance, and by two women sufficiently like the Queen and Madame Elisabeth. In her third journey she would have left the original party behind and taken with her the whole ​of the Royal Family. But the King and Queen refused to co-operate in this romantic and courageous plan. Their motives were not unselfish. Louis XVI. objected to Narbonne's share in the scheme; and Marie Antoinette, who regarded the double representation of the Tiers État as the cause of all her woes, detested Necker's daughter.
When the Tuileries was invaded by the mob, M. Necker, who was already at Coppet, and knew that the Baron de Staël had been recalled to Sweden, wrote urging his daughter to join him. But she was chained to Paris, fascinated by the very scenes that revolted her, and anxious to intervene, if only to save. She assisted, with slender sympathy for the revolutionaries, at the celebration of the 14th July in the Champs de Mars, and was wrung with pity for the tear-stained countenance of the Queen, whose magnificent toilette and dignified bearing contrasted with the squalor of her cortège. Madame de Staël's eyes were fixed with longing compassion on the figure of the King as he ascended the steps of the altar, there to swear for the second time to preserve the Constitution. His powdered head, so lately desecrated by the bonnet rouge, and gold-embroidered coat struck her imagination painfully as the vain symbols of vanished ease and splendour.
Then came the terrible night of the 9th August, during which, from midnight to morning, the tocsins never ceased sounding. "I was at my window with some of my friends" (wrote Madame de Staël), "and every fifteen minutes the volunteer patrol of the Constitutionels brought us news. We were told that the faubourgs were advancing headed by Santerre the brewer and Westermann.... Nobody could foresee ​what would happen the next day, and nobody expected to survive it.... All at once (at 7 o'clock) came the terrible sound of cannon. In this first combat the Swiss Guards were victors."
The tidings—partly false, as afterwards proved—were brought her of the massacre of Lally Tollendal, Narbonne, Montmorency, and others of her friends; and at once, regardless of peril, she went out in her carriage to hear if the news were true. After two hours of fruitless efforts to pass, she learnt that all those in whom she was most interested were still alive, but in hiding; and, as soon as the evening came, she sallied forth once more to visit them in the obscure houses where they had taken refuge. Later, she came to have but one thought, which was to save as many as she could of her friends. They were unwilling at first to take shelter in her house as being too conspicuous; but she would listen to no such objections. Two yielded to her persuasions, and one of these was Narbonne. He was shut up with his companion in the safest room, while the intrepid hostess established herself in the front apartments, and there, in great anxiety, awaited a domiciliary visit from the authorities. They were not long in coming and in demanding M. de Narbonne. To permit a search was practically to deliver up the victim. Madame de Staël's whole mind was consequently bent on averting investigation.
The police agents were exceptionally ignorant, and of this fact she was quick to take advantage. She began by instilling alarm into them as to the violation of rights which they committed in invading the house of an ambassador, and she followed this up by informing them that Sweden, being on the frontier of France, ​would descend upon that offending land immediately. She next passed to pleasantries, and succeeded so well in cajoling her visitors that they finally allowed themselves to be gracefully bowed out. Four days later a false passport supplied by a friend of Madame de Staël allowed Narbonne to escape to England.
The Swedish ambassadress herself could easily have left France at any moment, but she lingered on from day to day, unwilling to quit the country while so many of her friends were in danger; and she was rewarded at last by the opportunity of interfering to save Jaucourt, who had been conveyed to the Abbaye—now aptly named "the Ante-chamber of Death." Madame de Staël knew none of the members of the Commune, but, with her unfailing presence of mind, she remembered that one of them, Manuel, the procureur, had some pretensions to be literary. These pretensions being greater than his talent, Madame de Staël rightly concluded that he possessed sufficient vanity to be moved by solicitation. She wrote to ask for an interview, which was accorded her for the next morning at 7 o'clock in the official's own house.
"The hour was democratic," she remarks, but she was careful to be punctual. Her eloquence achieved an easy victory over Manuel, who, unlike so many of his colleagues, was no fanatic; and on the 1st of September he made Madame de Staël happy by writing to inform her that, thanks to his good offices, Jaucourt had been set at liberty.
She now, at last, determined to quit France the next day, but not alone. Resolute to the end in risking her life for that of others, she consented to take the Abbé de Montesquion with her in the disguise of a domestic, and convey him safely into Switzerland. A ​passport obtained for one of her servants was given to one of his, and a place on the high road indicated as a rendezvous where the Abbé was to join her suite.
When the next morning dawned a fresh element of terror had invaded the public mind. The news of the fall of Longwy and Verdun had arrived and Paris was in effervescence. Again in all the sections the tocsin was sounding; and everybody whose own life was his chief preoccupation, kept as quiet as possible. But Madame de Staël could not keep quiet—that was impossible for her at all times—and at this moment the image paramount in her mind was that of the poor Abbé waiting anxiously at his rendezvous—perhaps only to be discovered if his generous deliverer delayed.
Turning a deaf ear to all remonstrance, she started in a travelling-carriage drawn by six horses, and accompanied by her servants in gala livery. This was an unfortunate inspiration. Instead of filling the minds of the vulgar with awe, as she had vainly hoped, it aroused their vigilant suspicions. The carriage had hardly passed under the portals of the hotel before it was surrounded by a furious crowd of old women, "risen from hell," as Madame de Staël energetically expressed it, who shrieked out that she was carrying away the gold of the nation. This intelligent outcry brought a new contingent of exasperated patriots of both sexes, who ordered the fugitive Ambassadress to be conveyed to the Assembly of the Section nearest at hand.
She did not lose her presence of mind, but on descending from the carriage found an opportunity of bidding the Abbé's servant rejoin his master, and tell him of what had happened. This step proved to be a ​very dangerous one. The President of the Section informed Madame de Staël that she was accused of seeking to take away proscribed royalists, and that he must proceed to a roll-call of her servants. One of them was missing, naturally; having been despatched to save his own master; and the consequence was a peremptory order to Madame de Staël to proceed to the Hôtel de Ville under charge of a gendarme. Such a command was not calculated to inspire her with any sentiment but fear. Several people had already been massacred on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; and although no woman had yet been sacrificed to popular fury, there was no guarantee for such immunity lasting; and, as a point of fact, the Princess de Lamballe fell the very next day.
Madame de Staël's passage from the Faubourg Saint Germain to the Hôtel de Ville lasted three hours. Her carriage was led at a foot-pace through an immense crowd, which greeted her with reiterated cries of "Death!" It was not herself they detested, she says, but the evidences of her luxury; for the news of the morning had brought more opprobrium than ever on the execrated name of aristocrat. Fortunately, the gendarme who was inside the carriage was touched by his prisoner's situation and her delicate condition of health, and her prayers, and promised to do what he could to defend her. By degrees her courage rose. She knew that the worse moment must be that in which she would reach the Place de Grève; but by the time she arrived there, aversion for the mob had almost overcome in her every feeling but disdain.
She mounted the steps of the Hôtel de Ville between a double row of pikes; and one man made a movement to strike her. Thanks to the prompt interposition of ​the friendly gendarme, she was able, however, to reach the presence of Robespierre in safety. The room in which she found him was full of an excited crowd of men, women, and children, all emulously shrieking, "Vive la Nation!"
The Swedish Ambassadress was just beginning to protest officially against the treatment she had met with, when Manuel arrived on the scene. Never was any apparition more opportune. Greatly astonished to see his late illustrious visitor in such a position, he promptly undertook to answer for her until the Commune had made up its mind what to do with her; and conveying her and her maid to his own house, shut them up in the same cabinet where Madame de Staël had pleaded for Jaucourt.
There they remained for six hours, "dying of hunger, thirst, and fear." The windows of the room looked out upon the Place de Grève, and consequently offered the spectacle of bands of yelling murderers returning from the prisons "with bare and bleeding arms."
Madame de Staël's travelling carriage had remained in the middle of the square. She expected to see it pillaged; but a man in the uniform of the National Guard came to the rescue, and passed two hours in successfully defending the luggage.
This individual turned out to be the redoubtable Santerre. He introduced himself later in the day to Madame de Staël, and took credit for his conduct on the ground of the respect with which M. Necker had inspired him when distributing corn to the starving population of Paris.
In the evening Manuel, pallid with horror at the events of that awful day, took Madame de Staël back ​to her own house, through streets of which the obscurity was only relieved at moments by the lurid glare of torches. He told her that he had procured a new passport for herself and her maid alone; and that she was to be escorted to the frontier by a gendarme.
The next day Tallien arrived, appointed by the Commune to accompany her to the barriers. Several suspected aristocrats were present when he was announced. Most people under such circumstances would have taken care to be found alone; but Madame de Staël remained undaunted to the end. She simply begged Tallien to be discreet, and he fortunately proved so. A few more difficulties had to be encountered before she was fairly in safety; but at last she reached the pure air and peaceful scenes of the Jura.