The Women of the French Salons by Amelia Ruth Gere Mason - HTML preview

leaders there--men sincere and ardent, though misguided, and unable to

cope with the storm they had raised, to be themselves swept away by

its pitiless rage. Robespierre, scheming and ambitious, came there,

listened, said little, appropriated for his own ends, and bided his

time. Mme. Roland had small taste for the light play of intellect and

wit that has no outcome beyond the meteoric display of the moment, and

she was impatient with the talk in which an evening was often passed

among these men without any definite results. As she measured their

strength, she became more outspoken. She communicated to them a spark

of her own energy. The most daring moves were made at her bidding. She

urged on her timid and conservative husband, she drew up his memorials,

she wrote his letters, she was at once his stimulus, and his helper.

Weak and vacillating men yielded to her rapid insight, her vigor, her

earnestness, and her persuasive eloquence. This was probably the period

of her greatest influence. Many of the swift changes of those first

months may be traced to her salon. The moves which were made in the

Assembly were concocted there, the orators who triumphed found their

inspiration there. Still, in spite of her energy, her strength, and

her courage, she prides herself upon maintaining always the reserve and

decorum of her sex.

If she assumed the favorite role of the French woman for a short time

while her husband was in the ministry, it was in a sternly republican

fashion. She gave dinners twice a week to her husband's political

friends. The fifteen or twenty men who met around her table at five

o'clock were linked by political interests only. The service was simple,

with no other luxury than a few flowers. There were no women to temper

the discussions or to lighten their seriousness. After dinner the guests

lingered for an hour or so in the drawing room, but by nine o'clock it

was deserted. She received on Friday, but what a contrast to the Fridays

of Mme. Necker in those same apartments! It was no longer a brilliant

company of wits, savants, and men of letters, enlivened by women of

beauty, esprit, rank, and fashion. There was none of the diversity of

taste and thought which lends such a charm to social life. Mme. Roland

tells us that she never had an extended circle at any time, and that,

while her husband was in power, she made and received no visits, and

invited no women to her house. She saw only her husband's colleagues,

or those who were interested in his tastes and pursuits, which were also

her own. The world of society wearied her. She was absorbed in a single

purpose. If she needed recreation, she sought it in serious studies.

It is always difficult to judge what a man or a woman might have been

under slightly altered conditions. But for some single circumstance that

converged and focused their talent, many a hero would have died unknown

and unsuspected. The key that unlocks the treasure house of the soul is

not always found, and its wealth is often scattered on unseen shores.

But it is clear that the part of Mme. Roland could never have been a

distinctively social one. She lived at a time when great events brought

out great qualities. Her clear intellect, her positive convictions,

her boundless energy, and her ardent enthusiasm, gave her a powerful

influence in those early days of the Revolution, that looked towards a

world reconstructed but not plunged into the dark depths of chaos, and

it is through this that she has left a name among the noted women of

France. In more peaceful times her peculiar talent would doubtless have

led her towards literature. In her best style she has rare vigor and

simplicity. She has moments of eloquent thought. There are flashes of it

in her early letters to Sophie, which she begs her friend not to burn,

though she does not hope to rival Mme. de Sevigne, whom she takes for

her model. She lacked the grace, the lightness, the wit, the humor of

this model, but she had an earnestness, a serious depth of thought, that

one does not find in Mme. de Sevigne. She had also a vein of sentiment

that was an underlying force in her character, though it was always

subject to her masculine intellect. She confesses that she should like

to be the annalist of her country, and longs for the pen of Tacitus,

for whom she has a veritable passion. When one reads her sharp, incisive

pen-portraits, drawn with such profound insight and masterly skill, one

feels that her true vocation was in the world of letters. At the close

she verges a little upon the theatrical, as sometimes in her young days.

But when she wrote her final records she felt her last hours slipping

away. Life, with its large possibilities undeveloped and its promises

unfulfilled, was behind her. Darkness was all around her, eternal

silence before her. And she had lived but thirty-nine years.

Mme. Roland does not really belong to the world of the salons, though

she has been included among them by some of her own cotemporaries. She

was of quite another genre. She represents a social reaction in which

old forms are adapted to new ideas and lose their essential quality

by the change. But she foreshadows a type of woman that has had great

influence since the salons have lost their prestige. She relied neither

upon the reflected light of a coterie, the arts of the courtier, nor the

subtle power of personal attraction; but, firm in her convictions, clear

in her purpose, and unselfish in her aims, she laid down her interests,

and, in the end, her life, upon the altar of liberty and humanity. She

could hardly be regarded, however, as herself a type.

She was cast in a

rare mold and lived under rare conditions. She was individual, as were

Hypatia, Joan of Arc, and Charlotte Corday--a woman fitted for a special

mission which brought her little but a martyr's crown and a permanent

fame.

CHAPTER XVIII. MADAME DE STAEL

_Supremacy of Her Genius--Her Early Training--Her Sensibility--a Mariage

de Convenance--Her Salon--Anecdote of Benjamin Constant-

-Her Exile--Life

at Coppet--Secret Marriage--Close of a Stormy Life._

The fame of all other French women is more or less overshadowed by that

of one who was not only supreme in her own world, but who stands on

a pinnacle so high that time and distance only serve to throw into

stronger relief the grand outlines of her many-sided genius. Without the

simplicity and naturalness of Mme. de Sevigne, the poise and judgment

of Mme. de Lafayette, or the calm foresight and diplomacy of Mme. de

Maintenon, Mme. de Stael had a brilliancy of imagination, a force of

passion, a grasp of intellect, and a diversity of gifts that belonged

to none of these women. It is not possible within the limits of a brief

chapter to touch even lightly upon the various phases of a character so

complex and talents so versatile. One can only gather a few scattered

traits and indicate a few salient points in a life of which the details

are already familiar. As woman, novelist, philosopher, litterateur,

and conversationist, she has marked, if not equal, claims upon our

attention. To speak of her as simply the leader of a salon is to merge

the greater talent into the less, but her brilliant social qualities

in a measure brought out and illuminated all the others.

It was not

the gift of reconciling diverse elements, and of calling out the best

thoughts of those who came within her radius, that distinguished her.

Her personality was too dominant not to disturb sometimes the measure

and harmony which fashion had established. She did not listen well,

but her gift was that of the orator, and, taking whatever subject was

uppermost into her own hands, she talked with an irresistible eloquence

that held her auditors silent and enchained. Living as she did in the

world of wit and talent which had so fascinated her mother, she ruled it

as an autocrat.

The mental coloring of Mme. de Stael was not taken in the shade, as that

of Mme. Roland had been. She was reared in the atmosphere of the great

world. That which her eager mind gathered in solitude was subject always

to the modification which contact with vigorous living minds is sure to

give. The little Germaine Necker who sat on a low stool at her mother's

side, charming the cleverest men of her time by her precocious wit; who

wrote extracts from the dramas she heard, and opinions upon the authors

she read; who made pen-portraits of her friends, and cut out paper kings

and queens to play in the tragedies she composed; whose heart was always

overflowing with love for those around her, and who had supreme need

for an outlet to her sensibilities, was a fresh type in that age of keen

analysis, cold skepticism, and rigid forms. The serious utterances of

her childhood were always suffused with feeling. She loved that which

made her weep. Her sympathies were full and overflowing, and when her

vigorous and masculine intellect took the ascendency it directed them,

but only partly held them in check. It never dulled nor subdued them.

The source of her power, as also of her weakness, lay perhaps in

her vast capacity for love. It gave color and force to her rich and

versatile character. It animated all she did and gave point to all she

wrote. It found expression in the eloquence of her conversation, in the

exaltation and passionate intensity of her affections, in the fervor of

her patriotism, in the self-forgetful generosity that brought her very

near the verge of the scaffold. Here was the source of that indefinable

quality we call genius--not genius of the sort which Buffon has defined

as patience, but the divine flame that crowns with life the dead

materials which patience has gathered.

It was impossible that a child so eager, so sympathetic, so full

of intellect and esprit, should not have developed rapidly in the

atmosphere of her mother's salon. Whether it was the best school for a

young girl may be a question, but a character like that of Mme. de Stael

is apt to go its own way in whatever circumstances it finds itself.

She was the despair of Mme. Necker, whose educational theories were

altogether upset by this precocious daughter who refused to be cast in

a mold. But she was habituated to a high altitude of thought. Men like

Marmontel, La Harpe, Grimm, Thomas, and the Abbe Raynal delighted in

calling out her ready wit, her brilliant repartee, and her precocious

ideas. Surrounded thus from childhood with all the appointments as

well as the talent and esprit that made the life of the salons so

fascinating; inheriting the philosophic insight of her father, the

literary gifts of her mother, to which she added a genius all her own;

heir also to the spirit of conversation, the facility, the enthusiasm,

the love of pleasing which are the Gallic birthright, she took her place

in the social world as a queen by virtue of her position, her gifts, and

her heritage. Already, before her marriage, she had changed the tone

of her mother's salon. She brought into it an element of freshness and

originality which the dignified and rather precise character of Mme.

Necker had failed to impart. She gave it also a strong political

coloring. This influence was more marked after she became the wife

of the Swedish ambassador, as she continued for some time to pass her

evenings in her mother's drawing room, where she became more and more

a central figure. Her temperament and her tastes were of the world in

which she lived, but her reason and her expansive sympathies led her to

ally herself with the popular cause; hence she was, to some extent, a

link between two conflicting interests.

It was in 1786 that Mme. de Stael entered the world as a married woman.

This marriage was arranged for her after the fashion of the time, and

she accepted it as she would have accepted anything tolerable that

pleased her idolized father and revered mother. When only ten years

of age, she observed that they took great pleasure in the society of

Gibbon, and she gravely proposed to marry him, that they might always

have this happiness. The full significance of this singular proposition

is not apparent until one remembers that the learned historian was not

only rather old, but so short and fat as to call out from one of his

friends the remark that when he needed a little exercise he had only to

take a turn of three times around M. Gibbon. The Baron de Stael had an

exalted position, fine manners, a good figure, and a handsome face, but

he lacked the one thing that Mme. de Stael most considered, a commanding

talent. She did not see him through the prism of a strong affection

which transfigures all things, even the most commonplace. What this

must have meant to a woman of her genius and temperament whose ideal of

happiness was a sympathetic marriage, it is not difficult to divine. It

may account, in some degree, for her restlessness, her perpetual need of

movement, of excitement, of society. But, whatever her domestic troubles

may have been, they were of limited duration. She was quietly separated

from her husband in 1798. Four years later she decided to return to

Coppet with him, as he was unhappy and longed to see his children. He

died en route.

The period of this marriage was one of the most memorable of France, the

period when noble and generous spirits rallied in a spontaneous movement

for national regeneration. Mme. De Stael was in the flush of hope and

enthusiasm, fresh from the study of Rousseau and her own dreams of human

perfectibility; radiant, too, with the reflection of her youthful fame.

Among those who surrounded her were the Montmorencys, Lafayette, and

Count Louis de Narbonne, whose brilliant intellect and charming manners

touched her perhaps too deeply for her peace of mind.

There were also

Barnave, Chenier, Talleyrand, Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and many others of

the active leaders of the Revolution. A few woman mingled in her more

intimate circle, which was still of the old society. Of these were the

ill-fated Duchesse de Gramont, Mme. de Lauzun, the Princesse de Poix,

and the witty, lovable Marechale de Beauvau. As a rule, though devoted

to her friends and kind to those who sought her aid, Mme. de Stael did

not like the society of women. Perhaps they did not always respond to

her elevated and swiftly flowing thoughts; or it may be that she

wounded the vanity of those who were cast into the shade by talents

so conspicuous and conversation so eloquent, and who felt the lack of

sympathetic rapport. Society is au fond republican, and is apt to resent

autocracy, even the autocracy of genius, when it takes the form of

monologue. It is contrary to the social spirit. The salon of Mme. de

Stael not only took its tone from herself, but it was a reflection of

herself. She was not beautiful, and she dressed badly; indeed, she seems

to have been singularly free from that personal consciousness which

leads people to give themselves the advantages of an artistic setting,

even if the taste is not inborn. She was too intent upon what

she thought and felt, to give heed to minor details. But in her

conversation, which was a sort of improvisation, her eloquent face

was aglow, her dark eyes flashed with inspiration, her superb form and

finely poised head seemed to respond to the rhythmic flow of thoughts

that were emphasized by the graceful gestures of an exquisitely molded

hand, in which she usually held a sprig of laurel. "If I were queen,"

said Mme. de Tesse, "I would order Mme. de Stael to talk to me always."

But this center in which the more thoughtful spirits of the old regime

met the brilliant and active leaders of the new was broken up by the

storm which swept away so many of its leaders, and Mme.

de Stael, after

lingering in the face of dangers to save her friends, barely escaped

with her life on the eve of the September massacres of 1792. "She is an

excellent woman," said one of her contemporaries, "who drowns all her

friends in order to have the pleasure of angling for them."

Mme. de Stael resumed her place and organized her salon anew in 1795.

But it was her fate to live always in an atmosphere surcharged with

storms. She was too republican for the aristocrats, and too aristocratic

for the republicans. Distrusted by both parties and feared by the

Directoire, she found it advisable after a few months to retire to

Coppet. Less than two years later she was again in Paris. Her friends

were then in power, notably Talleyrand. "If I remain here another year

I shall die," he had written her from America, and she had generously

secured the repeal of the decree that exiled him, a kindness which

he promptly forgot. Though her enthusiasm for the republic was much

moderated, and though she had been so far dazzled by the genius of

Napoleon as to hail him as a restorer of order, her illusions regarding

him were very short-lived. She had no sympathy with his aims at personal

power. Her drawing room soon became the rallying point for his enemies

and the center of a powerful opposition. But she had a natural love for

all forms of intellectual distinction, and her genius and fame still

attracted a circle more or less cosmopolitan. Ministers of state and

editors of leading journals were among her guests.

Joseph and Lucien

Bonaparte were her devoted friends. The small remnant of the noblesse

that had any inclination to return to a world which had lost its

charm for them found there a trace of the old politeness. Mathieu de

Montmorency, devout and charitable; his brother Adrien, delicate in

spirit and gentle in manners; Narbonne, still devoted and diplomatic,

and the Chevalier de Boufflers, gay, witty, and brilliant, were of those

who brought into it something of the tone of the past regime. There

were also the men of the new generation, men who were saturated with the

principles of the Revolution though regretting its methods. Among these

were Chebnier, Regnault, and Benjamin Constant.

The influence of Mme. de Stael was at its height during this period.

Her talent, her liberal opinions, and her persuasive eloquence gave

her great power over the constitutional leaders. The measures of the

Government were freely discussed and criticized in her salon, and men

went out with positions well defined and speeches well considered. The

Duchesse d'Abrantes relates an incident which aptly illustrates this

power and its reaction upon herself. Benjamin Constant had prepared a

brilliant address. The evening before it was to be delivered, Mme. de

Stael was surrounded by a large and distinguished company. After tea was

served he said to her:

"Your salon is filled with people who please you; if I speak tomorrow,

it will be deserted. Think of it."

"One must follow one's convictions," she replied, after a moment's

hesitation.

She admitted afterward that she would never have refused his offer not

to compromise her, if she could have foreseen all that would follow.

The next day she invited her friends to celebrate his triumph. At four

o'clock a note of excuse; in an hour, ten. From this time her fortunes

waned. Many ceased to visit her salon. Even Talleyrand, who owed her so

much, came there no more.

In later years she confessed that the three men she had most loved were

Narbonne, Talleyrand, and Mathieu de Montmorency. Her friendship for the

first of these reached a passionate exaltation, which had a profound and

not altogether wholesome influence upon her life. How completely she was

disenchanted is shown in a remark she made long afterward of a loyal and

distinguished man: "He has the manners of Narbonne and a heart." It is

a character in a sentence. Mathieu de Montmorency was a man of pure

motives, who proved a refuge of consolation in many storms, but her

regard for him was evidently a gentler flame that never burned to

extinction. Whatever illusions she may have had as to Talleyrand--and

they seem to have been little more than an enthusiastic appreciation of

his talent--were certainly broken by his treacherous desertion in her

hour of need. Not the least among her many sorrows was the bitter taste

of ingratitude.

But Napoleon, who, like Louis XIV, sought to draw all influences and

merge all power in himself, could not tolerate a woman whom he felt to

be in some sense a rival. He thought he detected her hand in the address

of Benjamin Constant which lost her so many friends. He feared the wit

that flashed in her salon, the satire that wounded the criticism that

measured his motives and his actions. He recognized the power of a

coterie of brilliant intellects led by a genius so inspiring. His

brothers, knowing her vulnerable point and the will with which she had

to deal, gave her a word of caution. But the advice and intercession of

her friends were alike without avail. The blow which she so much feared

fell at last, and she found herself an exile and a wanderer from the

scenes she most loved.

We have many pleasant glimpses of her life at Coppet, but a shadow

always rests upon it. A few friends still cling to her through the

bitter and relentless persecutions that form one of the most singular

chapters in history, and offer the most remarkable tribute to her genius

and her power. We find here Schlegel, Sismondi, Mathieu de Montmorency,

Prince Augustus, Monti, Mme. Recamier, and many other distinguished

visitors of various nationalities. The most prominent figure perhaps was

Benjamin Constant, brilliant, gifted, eloquent, passionate, vain, and

capricious, the torturing consolation and the stormy problem of her

saddest years. She revived the old literary diversions.

At eleven

o'clock, we are told, the guests assembled at breakfast, and the

conversations took a high literary tone. They were resumed at dinner,

and continued often until midnight. Here, as elsewhere, Mme. de Stael

was queen, holding her guests entranced by the magic of her words. "Life

is for me like a ball after the music has ceased," said Sismondi when

her voice was silent. She was a veritable Corinne in her esprit, her

sentiment, her gift of improvisation, and her underlying melancholy. But

in this choice company hers was not the only voice, though it was heard

above all the others. Thought and wit flashed and sparkled. Dramas were

played--the "Zaire" and "Tancred" of Voltaire, and tragedies written by

herself. Mme. Recamier acted the Aricie to Mme. de Stael's Phedre. This

life that seems to us so fascinating, has been described too often

to need repetition. It had its tumultuous elements, its passionate

undercurrents, its romantic episodes. But in spite of its attractions

Mme. de Stael fretted under the peaceful shades of Coppet. Its limited

horizon pressed upon her. The silence of the snowcapped mountains

chilled her. She looked upon their solitary grandeur with "magnificent

horror." The repose of nature was an "infernal peace"

which plunged her

into gloomier depths of ennui and despair. To some one who was admiring

the beauties of Lake Leman she replied; "I should like better the

gutters of the Rue du Bac." It was people, always people, who interested

her. "French conversation exists only in Paris," she said, "and

conversation has been from infancy my greatest pleasure." Restlessly

she sought distraction in travel, but wherever she went the iron hand

pressed upon her still. Italy fostered her melancholy.

She loved