Madame de Stael: The Dangerous Exile

M A D A M E D E S T A E¨ L

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MADAME DE STAE¨ L the dangerous exile

ANGELICA GOODDEN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Angelica Goodden 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923809–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements

My first debt, as always, is to my joint employers, St Hilda’s College and the University of Oxford, for their generosity in granting me the periods of sabbatical leave that made researching and writing this study possible. I owe thanks too to the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford for help with covering the cost of research travel abroad, and to the libraries in Oxford, London, and Paris at which I read many of the works on which the book draws. A commission from Grant & Cutler for a short study on Delphine and Corinne in their sadly now defunct series of Critical Guides to French Texts was an early spur to writing, while the opportunity to discuss Stae¨l and her times with a number of scholars, students, and friends has been a constant stimulus (even when they forced me to think about the subject with more rigour than I—like Stae¨l herself, perhaps, in this faint unease—found altogether congenial). I am grateful too to the colleague who unwittingly helped to ‘unblock’ my thoughts at a critical time, and to my college for always providing, voluntarily and approvingly or not, an environment propitious to thinking about strong women and their struggle to be heard. The editors of Cahiers Stae¨liens and Forum for Modern Language Studies, finally, have kindly permitted me to reuse material from articles of mine originally published in their journals. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

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Contents

Introduction

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1. Juniper Hall

32

2. Passions Before Literature

65

3. Delphine and its Aftermath

89

4. On Germany

125

5. Corinne or Italy

153

6. From Ennui to Enterprise

181

7. A Quick Trip from Coppet

203

8. Lionized in London

222

9. Eternal Recurrence

266

Conclusion

292

Select Bibliography Index

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Introduction

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ow does writing beget exile, and exile writing? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it? What geography may be traced by desire when absence separates the writer from what she most desires? ‘Exile made me lose the ties that bound me to Paris,’ Germaine de Stae¨l remarked in 1814, ‘and I became European.’1 She wrote this towards the end of her third and Wnal stay in England, feeling that it summed up the paradoxes of her exile—loss that had become gain, pain become pleasure, and punishment reward. Being banished from the city of her heart’s desire may have spurred her creative imagination, but it also made her suVer as though she had been driven from paradise:2 her reply to a friend who attempted to console her for being conWned to the family chateau at Coppet was ‘I prefer the gutter of the rue du Bac’, the street in Paris where she had begun her married life.3 The French capital was and remained for her the centre of the civilized world, and she was, as she remarks in Dix anne´es d’exil, ‘vulnerable because of my taste for society. Montaigne once said:‘‘I am French because of Paris’’; and if he could think that three centuries ago, what would [the thought] have become since, when we have seen so many people of wit gathered in the same city, using this wit for the purposes of conversing?’4 Never mind that Napoleon constantly refused to grant her French citizenship, despite her endless petitions; she knew she was more French,

1 Letter to Karoline von Berg, 5 May 1814, quoted in A. Goetze, ‘Sechs unvero¨Ventlichte Briefe der Frau von Stae¨l an Frau von Berg und Gra¨Wn Voss’, Archiv fu¨r das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 202 ( June 1965), 42–52, at 51; see also Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, ed. Simone Balaye´ and Mariella Vianello Bonifacio (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 7. 2 It is perhaps signiWcant that Milton was her Wrst model when she began to learn English, as she conWded to Fanny Burney: see Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, ed. Be´atrice Jasinski, 6 vols. (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1962–93), II.2.387 (7–13 Feb. 1793), n. 79. 3 Madame Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice sur le caracte`re et les e´crits de Madame de Stae¨l’, in Stae¨l, Œuvres comple`tes, 17 vols. (Paris: Treuttel and Wu¨rtz, 1820–1), vol. I, pp. i–ccclxxii, at ccxcviii. 4 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 85.

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despite her Swiss parentage, than any Corsican. ‘I would be happy living in Paris on 100 louis a year,’ she also said, ‘and lodging on the fourth Xoor.’5 Napoleon was perfectly aware of this sentiment. To oVer her anything else, he knew, was to oVer her nothing. According to Las Cases, Madame de Stae¨l, in her disgrace, fought with one hand and begged with the other. The First Consul [Napoleon] let it be known that he left her the entire universe to exploit, abandoned the rest of the earth to her and only reserved for himself Paris, which he forbade her to approach. But Paris was precisely the object of all Madame de Stae¨l’s desires. No matter: the Consul was obdurate.6

As it happened, she made full use of such territorial leeway as Napoleon was willing to grant her (as well as much that he was not), which is what turned her into a European. But she was by nature a capitalist, and one of a very speciWc kind: if she found Vienna stuVy, Berlin cold, Rome initially uninspiring, and London only moderately agreeable, Paris was sans pareil. The ten years or so of exile she describes in Dix anne´es d’exil, which gave her an entire continent to explore, generated writings that were forms of dissent as provocative as the actions and intentions for which she had been banished. Therefore, as she must have foreseen, they invited further punishment. Yet constantly moving her on, forever increasing the distance at which she must live from Paris, putting her under virtual house arrest in Switzerland, was never quite the answer the authorities sought: what she called her e´clat,7 her brilliance, always guaranteed her an audience or a readership, and being the victim of a despot made her positively glow. Even so, she felt that she suVered twice over for whatever alleged oVences she committed, banished both for political daring and for daring as a woman to be political. The Duke of Wellington, whom she greatly respected, said that Stae¨l was a most agreeable creature if one only kept her light, and away from politics; but that was not easy, as she was always trying to come to matters of state. When the Duke told her, ‘I detest talking politics’, she simply responded: ‘To talk politics, for me, is to be alive.’8 Besides, to her 5 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, loc. cit. 6 Comte de Las Cases, Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne, ed. Andre´ Fugier, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1961), I.175. 7 Jean Mistler (ed.), B. Constant et Madame de Stae¨l: Lettres a` un ami (Neuchaˆtel: Baconnier, 1949), 46: to Claude Hochet, 3 Mar. 1803. 8 Henry, Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington (London: Prion, 1998), 162; see also Victor de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l and her English Correspondents’, D. Phil. thesis, 2 vols., University of Oxford (1955), I.197, and id., Madame de Stae¨l et le duc de Wellington (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

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enemies it seemed that she did far more than merely talk. In Dix anne´es d’exil she openly challenges Napoleon’s repression of her sex, approvingly reporting the rejoinder of a woman ‘well known in France for her beauty, her wit, and the vivacity of her opinions’, Madame Condorcet, when Bonaparte announced that he did not like women becoming involved in politics: ‘In a country where women’s heads are cut oV, it is natural that they should want to know why.’9 But the leader gave every sign of liking the opposite sex for one thing only, routinely and coarsely ordering young women: ‘Make me some conscripts’, like a lion asking a mother sheep to produce some lambs for it to eat. He seemed, Stae¨l writes, to think it legitimate and normal to insult women in this manner, to tell some that they were looking old, to ask others if they were virtuous, and so on. Indeed, Dix anne´es d’exil speculates, he would probably have tried to wipe their sex oV the face of the globe if they had not been needed as breeding-machines for future soldiers. In this spirit he asked Stae¨l on one occasion, staring pointedly at her ample bosom: ‘No doubt you suckled your own children?’,10 which left her uncharacteristically speechless. His autocratic and misogynistic nature, according to her, meant that he was unwilling to acknowledge female superiority even in areas that were on any rational interpretation closed to males, hating, for example, to hear that Madame Re´camier was the most beautiful woman in Paris, and in fact disliking any mortal, man or woman, being Wrst at anything.11 In his eyes such daring constituted a challenge to his own supremacy. The prevailing ideology of propriety had grave consequences for the female sex. Most importantly, it debarred women from open involvement in the world of public aVairs. For a woman writer to protest, as Stae¨l might have done, that she was living in a time of ferment which made every work of literature a necessary expression of its moment in social history was simply to invite the retort that subordination was a necessary part of womanliness, entailing rigorous conWnement within the private world of domesticity. It made no diVerence that Stae¨l declared, and to a degree believed in, her own political innocence; the establishment took the half-formulated or tacitly acknowledged will for the act and dealt with her accordingly. Nor did it help that she had never been what was called a ‘proper lady’, one who conformed to an accepted pattern of femininity;12 she was known as an 9 Stae¨l, Dix Anne´es d’exil, 51–2. 10 Ibid. 106, n. 5. 11 Ibid. 111. 12 On this general theme see Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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argumentative and assertive creature whose actions and writings belied the social paradigm of female decorum and male authority. They were, indeed, what made her the most famous, and perhaps most dangerous, woman in Europe. In her life she successfully challenged the patriarchal norms that were intended to ensure woman’s social subordination, from controlling the large fortune she inherited from her father and freeing herself from an unsuitable husband to having the last laugh over the archetypal misogynist Napoleon as he moodily read her books on St Helena and conceded, bitterly, that she would last. Yet she also periodically manifested a resigned, reluctant allegiance to patriarchal tradition, transposing it into the plots of her novels Delphine and Corinne and explicitly doubting, there and elsewhere, that her sex could ever Wnd happiness outside this entrenched order. Particularly as an inexperienced young woman, she had readily accepted the notion that a separate sphere13 was reserved for her sex, acquiescing in the passive domesticity it implied and agreeing that to be catapulted into the public arena would deWle the essential modesty of womanhood. Even as late as De l’Allemagne (1812)—published at the very time she was telling Wellington of her need to talk politics—she observed that: ‘It is right to exclude women from political and civil business, nothing is more contrary to their natural vocation than anything that would put them in the position of rivalry with men . . . But if the destiny of woman must consist in a continual act of devotion to conjugal love, the reward for this devotion is the scrupulous Wdelity of the man who is its object.’14 In other words, a mere Wve years before her death Stae¨l still apparently thought that no woman should be guilty of drawing attention to herself as an active, thinking being, even though she herself constantly did precisely that. This is far more dispiriting for the supporter of women’s rights than the diary entry for 10 August 1785, written when she was still a young woman naive about the nature of male and female sexuality, in which she attacks any member of her sex who upsets the ‘natural’ order according to which female satisfaction resides uniquely in pleasing a male.15 Even if nature had endowed woman with talents ‘superior to her sex’, this journal entry continues, she should still derive all her satisfaction from displaying them only to her husband, and 13 Any modern discussion of these matters must start from Ju¨rgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 14 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, ed. comtesse Jean de Pange and Simone Balaye´, 5 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1958–60), IV.369–70. 15 Stae¨l, Journal de jeunesse, Occident et Cahiers Stae¨liens, 1 (1930–3), 75–81, 157–60, 235–42, at 236.

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refrain from seeking any wider audience. How sweet, she wrote, this statement would then sound: ‘I could have shone on the world’s stage, I could have received men’s applause, but only you interest me on earth.’ Yet what, at the same time, could be more retrograde? As to why she seemed so ready to be relegated to an ignominious secondary rank when from her childhood on she had been used to shining, her family circumstances suggest a likely answer. The journal entry for 11 August records, ‘I regret not having bound my destiny, not binding my destiny, to a great man; it is the only glory for a woman on earth’.16 This assumes that the woman of glory is married to a man like her father Jacques Necker, a world hero to his daughter and thus an incontrovertible argument in favour of wives retaining the traditional virtues (though Stae¨l reXects that she could not have endured a ‘brilliant’ marriage to William Pitt the Younger, something her parents had once imagined for her, because it would have meant living outside her adored France). Any other kind of glory for women, according to De l’Allemagne, is ‘a dazzling mourning for happiness’,17 since female happiness is entirely dependent on subordination and duty. Yet Stae¨l herself would react furiously against the notion that the restrictive private sphere was the only proper locus of woman’s fulWlment when it curbed her freedom in ways she simply found unacceptable. It is no accident, in the light of this, that her two novels, Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), show their heroines denied the happiness of lasting romantic love as it is conventionally Wgured in marriage, so lacking the aesthetic and emotional closure this pattern gives to traditional narrative Wction. The lives of exceptional women, she thought, were more complicated than that. As she was the celebrant, outcast, and Wnally nemesis of Napoleon, so Stae¨l’s writings map a corresponding shift from images of female subordination to female self-assertion, a move from the (negative) inXuence of passion, whose mastery of female fate is described in De l’inXuence des passions (1795) and illustrated in Delphine and Corinne (both so undeceived about the destiny of women in a world of unreliable men), via De la litte´rature’s presentation of women as incapable of writing great literature, to the works of geographical, social, and intellectual otherness that are perhaps Stae¨l’s strongest claim to fame, De l’Allemagne and the posthumous Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise (1818) and Dix anne´es d’exil (1821). She wrote 16 Ibid. 237.

17 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, IV.369.

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incessantly, at her toilette, as she entertained company, as she travelled from Switzerland towards the plains of Russia; but she could not help knowing that writing was not doing, and that it merely Wlled the gaps created by her sex’s enforced inactivity on the world stage—in which respect it might seem a form of exclusion as unendurable as the other, geographical, exile she herself suVered. Happily, however, the imagination was far less easy to constrain than the body (and even Stae¨l’s body, however much it was disparaged for its heaviness and inelegance, remained impressively active throughout her life): the more she wrote and the further away she was sent, the more ingenious the strategies she adopted to overcome the restrictions imposed on her. Even censorship could be evaded, as she showed by triumphantly publishing De l’Allemagne in London after Napoleon had it pulped in Paris; even gagging could be made to appear pointless, the wouldbe gagger made to look ridiculous. Stae¨l’s writing, especially her extensive private correspondence, is saturated with the signs of absence become presence. She eVectively broke exile by exchanging letters with countless Wgures distant from her; friends, lovers, artistic and cultural icons, sovereigns, politicians, statesmen, and many more. In that epistolary age she unfolded herself in a stream of declarations, accusations, arguments, descriptions, challenges, and responses that laid bare a subjectivity vulnerable as well as triumphant, but always articulate and articulated. Thus she herself and her dissenting message became actual across the entire continent, a constant threat to Napoleonic order and a form of permanence contrasting with the temporariness of political systems and regimes: an abiding force that both matched the robustness of national culture (De l’Allemagne, Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise, and Dix anne´es d’exil ) and reXected the fragility of military conquest (Corinne). Her preoccupation with tradition and change expressed an eVective desire to reposition woman in the European world, however unkindly these eVorts were sometimes greeted even in cultures, such as the English, that she regarded as more Xexible than the French. (Stae¨l held contradictory views on the freedom women enjoyed across the Channel, however.) Devoting formidable energy in life and literature to showing how the sex usually thought weaker might challenge male hegemony, she underlined a philosophy of the sexes that saw woman as both gifted with moral and artistic powers granting her transcendence above man and cursed with a subjectivity that society exploited, and which signiWed subordination and inwardness (reductively called domesticity). Yet her novels do not suggest

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that it is always easier for men than women to survive the confrontation between individuality and social order, private and public worlds, sometimes precisely because of the male’s ‘feminine’ sensitivity. If Delphine implies that man (Le´once) should act imperiously in the face of social disapproval—the force which crushes woman—the fact that Stae¨l simply borrowed the idea from her detested mother’s Me´langes perhaps qualiWes it, as does her later assertion that Delphine makes its moral points too forcefully. Her Wctional men, like many of the men in her life, are too ambiguous to be easily aligned with the ruling forces of politics and society. Indeed, they sometimes face the same threat of expulsion from it as women, with Delphine’s Le´once Wrst bundled from France with the royalist troops, then dispatched to death at the hands of the Republican army; or Corinne’s Oswald Xeeing his conscience in Italy, living the native culture under Corinne’s tutelage, retreating to the hollow traditions of England, then escaping to Italy again when it is too late to save either her or himself. Stae¨l shows the weakness of the unreliable, rulebound male at the same time as the sensitivity of men who are being freed, sometimes painfully, from the old ethos of masculinity. Is woman’s destiny morally superior because she is more self-sacriWcial? The familiar stereotype of femininity might suggest as much, but Stae¨l also elevates her sex by both demonstrating its greater moral strength in practical ways and showing how fragile many of the boundaries between the sexes actually are. She deprecates the hostility manifested by (some) societies towards the bold, ‘irregular’ female or the autonomous heroine,18 and celebrates the authenticating power of imagination that may release women from the bondage of convention. The Stae¨lian heroine maintains an integrity that sets her above and apart from the traditional model so insultingly invoked by Napoleon when he told the author that the greatest member of her sex was simply the one who had had the most children. He may have silenced her on that occasion, but the force of the intended contrast—with her kind of woman, illicitly and haphazardly conceiving, randomly mothering, endlessly travelling, recounting, conversing, haranguing, politicking, and furiously writing—was quite other than he supposed. The new woman Stae¨l presented and embodied was a principled female governed by diVerent demands from those simply of propriety, her person more diverse than a man’s, an individual who was no longer just a 18 See also English Showalter, ‘Corinne as Autonomous Heroine’, in Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo (eds.), Germaine de Stae¨l: Crossing the Borders (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 188–92.

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compendium of domestic virtues or a creature imprisoned by, and within, purely emotional responses, but a sexual and imaginative being with reserves of inner strength that few men possessed. This hybrid character was, of necessity, largely developed away from the centre in which Stae¨l could most happily have displayed her own self as multiple but still focused, in her beloved Paris. It was precisely because of her personal richness that she was able to continue demystifying and attacking the slighting Napoleonic view of femininity as merely reproductive rather than productive, and insist on its rich complexity: while never denying the imperatives of biological reproduction, she refused to let them stand in the way of other demands, however transgressive these may have appeared to a society that still wanted woman conWned to the world of maternity and domesticity. Her actions over a short life (she died at the age of 51) and a remarkably public career constituted a re-presentation of the female perspective on woman’s place in the world and the attempt to reposition her vis-a`-vis the community. As her words in De l’Allemagne suggest, however, she was unable to resolve all the diYculties arising from her simultaneous allegiance to a doctrine of femininity that entailed privacy and conWnement. All her writings bear the mark of this contradiction, but it is perhaps most clearly shown in the frustration and Wnal unhappiness of Delphine and Corinne. The diVerent cultures in which Stae¨l travelled and lived during her banishment showed her the varied logics according to which humans could exist; indeed, they are partly expressed in the word she herself is commonly thought to have coined, ‘nationality’.19 Thus the punishment meted out to her by her political enemies helped her discover and reveal the way identities may be divergent but uniWed, as she saw entire peoples actually or potentially being split and yet converging during her travels abroad. Pushkin remarked that she rendered full justice to the people of Russia in Dix anne´es d’exil, where she comments on the many forms Russianness can take; De l’Allemagne argues the coherence-in-variety of Romanticism and of the German nation; and so on. The rational and synthetic intelligence that describes this global coherence, clearly, no longer belongs exclusively to the male of the species (‘in me, thought is male’, she once remarked),20 though critics like Byron always denied that she 19 It is possible that the word simply translates the German Nationalita¨t, and may therefore have Wrst been used in Stae¨l’s circle by the French-speaking German August Wilhelm Schlegel. 20 Gustav von Brinkman, ‘Lettre sur l’auteur de Corinne’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 39 (1987–8), 139–81, at 181 (3 May 1813).

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possessed the allegedly male power of reason. Stae¨l’s ability to perceive unity in multiplicity, permanence in change, is what makes her embracing of cultural diVerence over the range of her writings so enlightening. Her revolt against tyranny, whether the murderousness of the Revolutionary Terror or the cruel authoritarianism of Napoleonic France,21 belongs within a familiar pattern of contestation and militancy. What was virtually unknown until the Revolution, however, was for women to Wgure in this pattern, and for the existing order of female dependency to be challenged by it. Such a reordering of sexual roles is now associated with Wgures like Olympe de Gouges, the author of a De´claration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791) who also proposed the establishing of a National Assembly for women; with Manon Roland; with Stae¨l herself; and with Mary Wollstonecraft, who was in France when the Bastille fell, and whose own Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was published soon thereafter. All these writers regarded the subordination of their sex as part of a repressive ideology that must be challenged and undone. True, women had been politically active since before the Bastille fell, and the gatherings held by the most politicized among them became a true debating ground for radicals:22 the Girondist party was born in Roland’s salon, while the Orle´anist party had its focal point in the drawing-room of Madame de Genlis.23 Women were prominent too in the political clubs founded at this time, with activists such as The´roigne de Me´ricourt (a leader in the female insurrection that led to the King and Queen being marched back from Versailles to Paris) making their names as orators as well as salonnie`res. Yet the advances their sex had made did not last. In 1793 the Convention Nationale suppressed women’s clubs and societies, closed salons, and otherwise removed the privileges—including, eVectively, political privileges—they had won;24 under the ancien re´gime, by contrast, women who had enjoyed certain property rights were entitled to vote and even sit in the provincial assemblies. As Madame Vige´e Le Brun lamented in her Souvenirs,25 and the Goncourt brothers conWrmed in La 21 See Michel Delon, ‘Un exil moderne’, Magazine litte´raire, 221 (1985), 18–19, at 19. 22 On this question see Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). 23 See Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes (London: Faber, 1970), 100. 24 See Linda Zerilli, ‘Motionless Idols and Virtuous Mothers: Women, Art and Politics in France 1789–1848’, in The Ladies’ Room, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 27 (1982), 89–126, at 95. 25 Elisabeth Vige´e-Lebrun [sic], Souvenirs, ed. Claudine Herrmann, 2 vols. (Paris: Des femmes, 1984), I.122.

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Femme au dix-huitie`me sie`cle, the eighteenth century had been the age of women; it was the post-Revolutionary years that set their cause back. The resulting split between between public and private life,26 the Wrst belonging to men and the second to women, essentially explains the feminist movement of the last hundred years, and Stae¨l is emblematic of its contradictions. Yet she appears often uncompromising in proclaiming her sex’s ability to transcend its lowly ‘natural’ existence and march towards a higher cultural one.27 Her position as writer and salonnie`re was exceptional in this respect, however, because it permitted her to use the actual as well as symbolic forms of conWnement women endured as a liberating space in which to declaim against political authoritarianism. Not everyone who saw her in the course of her European travels acknowledged the force of the protest, it is true: Rahel Levin, who met her in Berlin, thought her blind to the cultural and political situations she encountered, and dismissed her determined information-gathering as ignorant and intellectually barren. Yet there were many who acknowledged her positive strengths as a source of voluble Europeanism and intimate nationalism: she radiated an energy that refreshed and empowered democratic activists, even if they were almost exclusively men. Clearly, however, the combination of political anger, indignant femininity, and gendered repression she embodied was an unstable mixture that needed careful surveillance. Here woman’s traditional settledness might have been a positive advantage, had Stae¨l possessed any of it. Napoleon and his acolytes seemed to her to demonstrate that power corrupted, which perhaps suggested that downtrodden woman should propose a counter-culture abjuring such corruption and instead basing itself on the force of reason traditionally denied her, but linked with her sex’s characteristic emotion. This may, indeed, explain the kind of argumentativeness Stae¨l displayed in the drawing-rooms of Austria, England, Russia, and Sweden, although to some observers it simply and damagingly revealed the frustrations of a female intellect that was no longer prepared ‘properly’ to submit. Perhaps, too, it might partially excuse her manifest preference for male company over female (often commented on when she was in England), since in measuring herself against men in word as well as action she appeared to be rejecting the traditional submissive feminine 26 See also Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), and Rene´ Forycki, ‘Mme de Stae¨l et l’espace public moderne’, in Le Groupe de Coppet et le monde moderne: conceptions, images, de´bats. Actes du 6e Colloque de Coppet, 1997 (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 47–57. 27 See also Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 124–5.

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type, the droopingly pathetic vessel of propriety and feeling she occasionally met and excoriated in England and elsewhere. What is certain is that this independent attitude sold Stae¨l’s own sex short, suggesting as it did an inherent hostility towards the virtues of collectedness and discretion, and raising energetic declaration and externalization to the rank of virtues. She undoubtedly appeared to many of those who met her during her exile crudely strident and overbearing. Perhaps, though, her aggressiveness was no diVerent in origin from that of a contemporary Wgure of Wction, the cerebral marquise de Merteuil in Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, a chilling creature who claims to be Wghting the cause of women against men, but in fact simply wants to assert her own power over men and women alike.28 May Stae¨l’s activity similarly have been a personal refashioning of the social fabric rather than a considered contribution to the historical process, to be complete only when the gender bias of the Western world had eVectively been corrected? It is diYcult to decide. Her words to Wellington at least make clear her determination not to be positioned, as women almost invariably were, outside the zone of active political discourse (as against political action or decision). The male–female opposition that dictates this exclusion is often seen as the primary dualism in Western thought,29 but it provokes or appears to legitimize other, equally familiar, contrasts such as those of public and private, mind and body, reason and passion, in each of which the Wrst-mentioned is invariably seen as the dominant (and male) principle. Woman, according to this logic, is properly inferior and subjected, being a creature of natural impulses which must always be subordinate to higher male powers. Even in cases where she has fought for and apparently won equality, it is granted only on sexualized terms which result in her being disparaged—as Stae¨l often was—for having forsworn certain essential characteristics of femininity. To be thus emancipated is, according to the prevailing wisdom of Stae¨l’s day, eVectively to have gained an improper kind of autonomy, a freedom unbeWtting to her sex: it makes women brisk, peremptory, unemotional mothers (if they conceive children at all), who rear their oVspring (if they bother to do so) in a spirit of civic duty that belies their true essence and destiny. Such unnatural creatures, it seemed to follow, 28 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, in Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), Letter LXXXI, esp. p. 170. 29 See Dianah Cook, Women in Political Theory (Hemel Hempstead and Boulder, CO: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 1.

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inevitably transmitted unhappiness and upset by insisting on doing as Stae¨l did, reneging on their essential social duties, briskly discarding their babies to pursue a goal they wrongly regard as transcending their God-given one, pursuing lovers to foreign countries, or setting out on immense journeys to the edge of the civilized world for the sheer purpose of discovery. For Rousseau, whose voice may be heard in this disapproving catalogue, such a Xight merely underlined the primary fact of irregularity. Woman, he thought (and thought inXuentially), must be made to understand the diVerent kinds of virtue proper to the two sexes: if virtue for males means acting in accordance with the demands of citizenship, for females it simply signiWes uxorious maternity. On these terms, Stae¨l certainly looks culpable. Or was she simply pragmatic as well as imaginative, deploying the reserves of strategic cunning and subtle manoeuvring that had always been acknowledged in her sex? Whatever the case, the various public as well as undercover activities she engaged in throughout her adult life revealed that from the woman’s point of view little had changed: open political activism was still a male prerogative and a form of female transgression. One might ask how this conservatism could be explained in the age of ferment and revision Stae¨l herself lived through, given that the French Revolution is rightly seen as a key moment in the articulation of modern notions of equality and autonomy. SigniWcantly, one of the forms this articulation took was the discussion in the political assemblies of educational matters, in particular issues relating to women. Rousseau’s prescriptions in his pedagogical Wction Emile (1762) had barely touched on them, since the education of Emile’s intended wife Sophie is solely concerned with developing such skills as will keep her husband happy by ensuring that she runs a household eYciently, remains attractive to him, and behaves chastely. In fact, according to the unWnished sequel to the novel, her upbringing fails miserably in all these areas, in which respect it ironically anticipates the situation a quarter of a century later when, for all the political debates, little or nothing was done to promote the cause of female enlightenment. In a milieu where it was often proclaimed that there was no essential diVerence between man and woman ‘apart’, as E´mile had said, ‘from that of sex’ (a massive exception),30 it could still be aYrmed that woman was inferior to 30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95), IV.692.

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man in the size of her brain, her skull, and other ‘pertinent features’ that apparently predisposed her towards untrammelled feeling and against developed rationality. Most women, indeed, were never taught to be rational. When Byron complained that Stae¨l lacked the advantages of a mathematical education31 he was far from sympathizing with her predicament, simply oVering the remark in the spirit of male hostility towards female thought processes when women tried to intervene in matters that were regarded as properly the preserve of men. Worse than this, contemporary discourse on the inalienable rights of the citizen and the promotion of republican virtue assumed, as though inevitably, that the model of proper action was to be found in the sex that sternly defended the res publica rather than the domain of home and hearth. The human thus became, or rather remained, the man. Rousseau’s responsibility for this state of aVairs was a matter of some concern for women writers after his death in 1778. Wollstonecraft may have deplored E´mile’s sexism,32 but Rousseau was prouder of this book than of anything else he wrote, perhaps precisely because of the way in which it combined the themes of politics and sexuality.33 To an extent it did this by showing how politics, though a departure from the primordial state of nature, schools and fruitfully channels nature’s impulses by substituting justice for instinct and so introducing morality into the realm of action.34 This ‘civilized’ sexuality is political because it enables man and woman to rule each other in sharply diVerentiated ways. Woman’s power, as Rousseau had already stated in the Discours sur l’origine de l’ine´galite´ of 1755, should be exercised purely within marriage, whereas man’s, the product of his superior strength, is properly expressed in the world of public action and governance. This sexual interdependence is often seen as crucial in certain conventional patterns of social living that permit the female to inXuence the political realm from inside, that is, from the world of domestic intimacy that sustains the male. Opposed to it, of course, is the alleged fact of the ‘disorder of women’,35 a tendency towards upset and anarchy that inevitably (or so it is 31 See Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 23–4. 32 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 156–73. 33 See Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1. 34 Ibid. 16, 41. 35 See Pateman, Disorder of Women, 4.

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contended) results in their threatening political order and therefore necessitates their exclusion from the public sphere. Women cannot transcend their bodily natures and sexual urges, according to this argument, and hence cannot develop political morality. This may be extremely unjust, but Stae¨l’s own writing often seems to conWrm the historical and evolutionary bias on which it is predicated. Paradoxically, such an account risked reducing woman to a state of uncreative tranquillity that set her outside the sociological process altogether, because, in Lacan’s formulation, she was seen as lacking lack. Her ontological otherness might thus be translated, as De la litte´rature suggests it is, into the capacity simply to replicate rather than originate.36 In Stae¨l this conXict—between a modern state of womanhood tormented by its exclusion from the world of action and a traditional state consisting in contented inwardness, partnership, and maternity—became translated into two divergent experiences of exile, one the energetic creation of an alternative ‘male’ world of foreign discovery and celebrity, the other a homesickness for the lost paradise of Parisian life (or the ‘mother’ country). Neither, ironically, was suYcient: not the endless enforced travelling which, however enriching in other ways, emphasized her rootlessness, nor the brief re-experiencing of Paris from time to time that always tempted her to outstay her allotted period there and thus accentuated the grief of loss. Whatever is transitory— fame, Paris life—becomes incapable of fulWlling, and so constitutes a double paradigm of longing for the quintessentially feminine property of stability. Yet Stae¨l manifestly possessed a countervailing, and powerful, sense of identity as an explorer and broadcaster of alternative cultures (Germany, Italy, Russia, England) as well as a producer of innovative art and discourse. This compound sensibility, which destroys the heroine Corinne, did not destroy her creator, since her role as creator—the Wrst female literary critic, the founder of comparative literature studies—gave her adequate means of sustenance. How could she have allowed herself to be broken by what her enemy Napoleon wrongly saw as an absolute (and, for woman, crippling) necessity, that of maintaining a watertight separation between the male and female spheres that made womanliness a part of modern society only at the price of denying its right to ‘male’ autonomy? His relentless hostility towards Stae¨l was an inevitable product of this conviction, and hers towards him of its challenging. 36 See Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, part 3, ch. XIX: ‘De l’amour dans le mariage’.

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It was predictable that woman’s assertion of relative independence, however infrequent, should have resulted in a corresponding crisis of male conWdence, though other historical causes for this ‘mal du sie`cle’ also exist.37 Stae¨l’s lover Louis de Narbonne seemed to Fanny Burney’s circle in 1793 a delicately feminine contrast to the strapping, opinionated Stae¨l, and Benjamin Constant likewise complained about being in thrall to a man-woman in his tortured relationship with her. Correspondingly, in the world of Wction Constant’s Adolphe shows the feminized product of a brutalizing patriarchy in the hero who can Wnd satisfaction neither in the proVered male world of action and power nor in the alternative female one of inwardness and inactivity (from which the promised consolations of intimacy are, however, absent). Stae¨l’s Wction, too, presents negative stereotypes of men who are not manly—the vacillating Le´once of Delphine, and in Corinne the bon viveur and butterXy d’Erfeuil, Oswald’s companion to Italy, or Oswald himself, whose virility periodically turns into ineVectualness. The word ‘eVeminate’, which came into general use in the second half of the eighteenth century, unsparingly designates the defectiveness of an originally heroic and chivalric ideal now internalized as a form of reticence and inactivity at odds with the world of practical achievement and military valour: thus Oswald can be heroic at Ancona as he rescues inmates from the blazing asylum, but is unable to sustain the impetus of manliness in both private and public life. IneVectual emotiveness then engulfs the bruised self that can no longer express itself in either thought or action. The demands of authorship, which made Sta¨e¨l the most famous woman in Europe, directly opposed those of feminine conformism, and the very range of her writing heightened this disparity. Manifestly, she did not conWne herself to writing the type of literature most readily associated with her sex: in her own time she was regarded as a historian and theoretician of culture, a literary activist, and a critic, as much as, if not more than, a novelist. If Napoleon eventually conceded that Stae¨l the author would last,38 he nonetheless thought authorship of any kind to be improper for her sex. Stae¨l thought so too, at least in early life. The ways in which she confronted the diYculty of needing to write, yet needing to observe conventional proprieties (such as appearing devoted and subordinate to a man), have already been touched on. Although by any standards a wealthy woman, 37 See e.g. Pierre Barbe´ris, Balzac et le mal du sie`cle (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). 38 Las Cases, Me´morial, II.450.

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she no more thought writing for money ill-bred than did her one-time friend and conWdante Fanny Burney; yet although both struck lucrative deals for publishing much of their work, this spared them little if anything of the anxiety of authorship. The prevailing restrictions of domestic obligation and social expectation ensured that any success they enjoyed as women writers would, if to diVerent degrees, be accompanied by foreboding, a besetting sense of guilt, or simply a generalized feeling that to be a femmeauteur was somehow improper; and this even though writing, along with governessing, was generally regarded as the only paid job decently available to women, at least in the middle classes. The tensions created by such a situation could not easily be resolved. Stae¨l’s father, who not altogether jokingly called her ‘Monsieur de Sainte-E´critoire’ in her girlhood,39 did not like what he called her scribbling, and she managed without a desk of her own until he died.40 Fear of incurring his displeasure led to other kinds of subterfuge—the habit of writing wherever she was, for example, and perhaps even of making the act of writing inWnitely interruptable, by chance company as well as invited guests (a Xexibility she preserved all her life). Albertine Necker de Saussure conWrms that the claims of sociability always appeared stronger to her cousin than the need to write, or at least not inimical to it. Indeed, disturbances may even have stimulated her inventiveness. ‘[H]er friends were forever guilty of turning her away from what she was doing, because she always made them feel welcome. There was never an instance of her showing anything but pleasure when she saw those she loved come in, even when she was writing with the greatest intensity and rapidity.’41 This disponibilite´ did, it is true, represent a kind of freedom and autonomy, but hardly the sort male authors enjoyed. Stae¨l’s youthful diaries discuss the fate that met her mother in this respect, married as she was to a man with such decided views on women authors: ‘Maman was very fond of writing, she sacriWced it to him.’ ‘Imagine my worry,’ Jacques Necker would say to his daughter, ‘I did not dare to enter her apartment for fear of tearing her away from an occupation that was more pleasant to her than my presence. I saw her, though in my arms, still pursuing an idea.’ Oh, how right he was, Stae¨l disappointingly continues; how little are women made for chasing after the

39 Stae¨l, Journal de jeunesse, 236 (10 Aug. 1785). 40 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. cccxix.

41 Ibid., p. cccxviii.

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same career as men, Wghting against them, arousing in them a jealousy that is so diVerent from the sort love inspires in their hearts.42 Burney, similarly, had to steal the moments she needed to write her bestselling novel Evelina, hiding her activity from a father who would certainly have disapproved of her project, and with so aVrighting a persuasion that what she scribbled, if seen, would but expose her to ridicule, that her pen, though her greatest, was only her clandestine delight; and at the age of Wfteen she made a bonWre out of everything she had written. It was as a slave to Charles Burney, whose books she copied out for publication, that she transcribed Evelina in a disguised hand so that her anonymity should not be breached.

The terror of discovery, she wrote, ‘or of suspicion in the house, made the copying extremely laborious to me; for in the daytime I could only take odd moments, so that I was obliged to sit up the greatest part of many nights in order to get it ready’.43 For the same reason, she had the manuscript delivered to the publisher by her brother. Yet Dr Charles Burney drove her into writing her second novel, Cecilia, at speed, apparently so that his own work on the history of music could beneWt from the press attention his daughter’s novel would inevitably attract by being published at the same time. Perhaps Fanny, perversely, was happier working under the old constraints; Cecilia, which Stae¨l’s Essai sur les Wctions praises, is in many ways inferior to Evelina, and it is quite likely that anonymity suited her better than avowed authorship because it gave her greater freedom of expression and characterization. Women’s writing was often fertilized by darkness, subterfuge, and concealment. Jane Austen, whom Stae¨l narrowly missed meeting on her third trip to England, also took care that none but her family should suspect what her occupation was, hiding her manuscript when company was present, while the Bronte¨ sisters, as though stimulated by this climate of concealment, had only to blow out the candles to become creative. The drive for self-expression no doubt came more painfully in Burney’s case than Stae¨l’s, because Stae¨l was so much freer in every respect, but the two women grew up with the same assumption that in writing they were Xouting essential conventions of femininity. The notion that women, good primarily for the purposes of reproduction, were incapable of ‘genuine’ 42 Stae¨l, Journal de jeunesse, 236. 43 Frances Burney, Early Journals and Letters, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988–94), II.231.

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creation was connected with a similarly polarized deWnition of the two sexes according to which woman represents generosity and altruism, man the driving egoism that alone produces art. (One might object that the greatness of woman, on the contrary, has been to produce art despite living domestic lives that presuppose self-abnegation and acceptance of irksome social duty.) As Stae¨l herself demonstrated, neither drive nor egoism was suYcient, though she had an abundance of both; the love of words—in her case, particularly words as tools of oral discourse44—came Wrst. The circularity of the argument that art was male, and therefore males produced art, clearly needed to be challenged. One of the ways Stae¨l did so was to write novels that themselves broke conventions—less the generically old-fashioned letter-novel Delphine than the sprawling Corinne, a work combining Wction with the histories of art, culture, and society to arrestingly new eVect. Another method was simply to adopt in writing the kind of theoretical, political, and philosophical position that was normally associated with male authors, as she did in De l’inXuence des passions, De la litte´rature, and De l’Allemagne, as well as in the posthumous Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise and Dix anne´es d’exil. The Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise explains that most novels by English women writers are primarily concerned with proper female behaviour in society because their authors generally lived retired and ‘proper’ lives.45 Yet the sexual behaviour of some female novelists in both cultures remained for readers and society at large as critical an issue as the correct conduct of their heroines. This is why revelations about Stae¨l’s relationship with Narbonne, her lover since 1788 and the father of her two sons, would cause the breakdown of her friendship with Burney, whose own father relayed to his shocked daughter the unsuspected story of their adulterous liaison. Given the preoccupation of Burney’s own work with honour and chastity successfully defended, and given too her delicate position as pensioner of the famously prudish Queen Charlotte, it could hardly have been otherwise. This tension was in Stae¨l’s case the origin of what psychoanalytical criticism calls the paradox of female authorship (a paradox contributing to her uneasy relationship with the political regime that eventually exiled her, Wrst from Paris and then from France): the eVective requirement that the 44 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. ccx. 45 Stae¨l, Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Tallandier, 1983), 556, 563.

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female novelist both be feminine and deny her femininity, both create within her Wctional universe a woman’s world and reject it herself through the act of writing. In other words, although she is obliged to work within a (symbolic) dominant order, she must constantly disrupt it. This is precisely what Stae¨l herself did. In entering into undertakings that invited censure because they were regarded as ‘properly’ male ones, lying outside the sphere of prescribed female mores, she disobeyed the commands of traditional femininity, and was consequently punished as often as, or more often than, praised for her eVorts. The pattern was repeated no matter what the area in which she had transgressed, whether private morality or public action. In the former case she had to endure the ostracism of the conservative establishment, in the latter more extensive persecution. Napoleon’s exiling her, to devastating eVect, brought the two together. Undoubtedly she courted the odium of the establishment, however much she protested her innocence of any intent to provoke or scandalize. She irritated Napoleon by feigning compliance with his commands—to stay at more or less the appointed distance from Paris, for example—then enraged him by Wnding both covert and overt ways of disobeying. The cloud of sedition that gathered wherever she was refused to dissipate. At Coppet she assembled a group of friends whose limited real power was belied by their ability to goad and incite; in Germany she put together an intellectual and artistic arsenal (later given literary form in De l’Allemagne) that seemed to threaten Bonaparte’s imperialist ambitions; and she turned Italy into a living denial of his hegemony. Only in England did she meet serious resistance to this politicking, in the form of Whiggish celebration of Napoleon (if not of his intention to invade England). The natives of whichever city she chose to inhabit abroad may often have sneered at her cultural and intellectual pretensions, but her determination to create a public platform of discourse, though not necessarily to use it for the purposes of rational argumentation, did not waver. This is why Napoleon punished her, for refusing to comply with the persona of ‘la France silencieuse’ to which she had dedicated Delphine. She embodied that underclass’s accession to speech, and the speech had to be curtailed. Bonaparte gagged her as Wellington, later, would temporarily silence her, but neither could really stem her eloquence. However diYcult it was to maintain steadfastness of purpose in such circumstances, she was not prepared to undergo the kind of self-destruction or self-limitation that ‘speaking to the feminine’ implied. (The female

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characters of her novels and novellas always show this archetypal response to be unsatisfactory.) The fact that her post-Revolutionary target was the excess of Napoleonic ambition justiWed such a risk, in the sense that her ‘masculine’ discourse was directed at unveiling and neutralizing the threat he posed and in that respect defusing the situation of potential conXict. To Wght the enemy with his own weapons, she believed, was not to compromise her integrity as a woman. The voice with which she spoke was as ‘male’ as her purpose of resistance and ultimate overthrow demanded, and meekness did not suit her anyway. She was, however, unable to transcend some sexual stereotypes. A reputation for being (like a woman) blurred, circular, ‘soft’, and wordy clung to her, more or less justiWably, though it is far from certain that she would have preferred to be (like a man?) terse, lean, dry, and clearly outlined, mastering literary matter as her long-term lover Constant did in his miraculously concise narrative Adolphe. Probably she would have wanted to escape these forms of categorization altogether, insisting that her unquestionably individual voice overrode all such oppositional and deWnitional traps. Had her work been ‘merely’ feminine in character, after all, it would not have seemed to Napoleon dangerous. Whatever reputation for irrationality attached to her and her sex, her power to persuade was obviously considerable enough for the man who exiled her also to have felt a need to suppress what she wrote. Nor was her Wctional, as opposed to theoretical, appeal limited to women readers alone. In exile on St Helena Napoleon read, and to a degree admired, both of Stae¨l’s novels. The seismic shocks she caused all over mainland and oVshore Europe were produced precisely by her failure—which was not always conscious— to toe the line of decorum that enjoined containment and passivity on her sex. She refused to yield and endure like the passive blondes of her two novels, foils to the active heroines; at least, she declined to be still if there was a chance that a quake might help world aVairs. So she lived on in her dramatic and emphatic way, never retreating when there was a chance that ingenuity, force of will, and intellectual and physical resource might gain the ends she desired. She watched other women, such as the very diVerent Burney, adopting strategies of understatement and biddableness to gain their point, but chose not to imitate them. Countless reports on her life, the accounts of her unchecked growth to adulthood, her stormy passionate aVairs, her self-declaration, what Byron called her fondness for extremity, her untrammelled imagination, drew

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attention to her unladylike demeanour and perennial disaVection with the negatives virtues of patience and docility. If she was to Wght oppressors, she reasoned, it could hardly be without asserting herself. Perhaps so; but her Xamboyant nature undoubtedly intensiWed her opponents’ hostility. However carefully she might occasionally try to shroud them in indirectness, her challenges seemed too obvious to be disregarded and hence left unpunished. At times, as both Constant and Byron suggest, she was either her own worst enemy or a traitor to the cause she apparently upheld. She challenged prevailing ideologies that signalled repression—sexual, social, or political—for any class to which she might belong, but also relished her uniqueness. Like Wollstonecraft, who mistrusted many of Stae¨l’s principles, she saw herself as an examplar of female resource and independence at odds with prevailing orthodoxies. The author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, however, was inWnitely more forthright and uncompromising in her feminism. Given that the loss of company or of the opportunity to be active could seem to Stae¨l as searing as being deprived of city or homeland, enforced separation from her social circle was bound to be agonizingly painful. The phantom of boredom had always stalked her, she announced in Dix anne´es d’exil,46 and this, combined with her longing for Paris, points to a great irony: fear of ennui might have made her yield in the face of tyranny, ‘if the example of my father had not pulled me back from this weakness’.47 This is an even more signiWcant proviso than it looks. Her idolizing of Jacques Necker, whom she regarded as a tragic victim of establishment jealousy, national ingratitude, and cosmic blindness, had many consequences throughout her life, but reconciling her to the prospect of vegetating in the Wefdom he had purchased in Coppet, with seigneurial rights that both he and his daughter jealously preserved, was one of the more remarkable. We must assume that when she remarks: ‘Staying forty leagues [the limit Napoleon had set] from the capital, in contrast to enjoying all the advantages gathered together in the most agreeable city in the world, eventually weakens most exiles, used since childhood to the charms of Paris life,’48 she is including herself in the number. All the same, during the period she nominally spent at Coppet between 1804 and 1810 she was actually in residence for only a matter of months.49 Travel, often undertaken for the purpose of book-researching, recurrently took her away. 46 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 313. 47 Ibid. 85. 48 Ibid. 86. 49 See J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to An Age: A Life of Madame de Stae¨l (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 281.

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Inwardness and solitude, on the other hand, while obviously crucial at some stage in the generation of the work of literature or the conduct of life, might threaten to hamper the kind of intellectual and emotional expansion she called real living. If Napoleon’s calculations were based on the premise that the exiled Stae¨l would be deprived of dangerous company, they badly misWred: it was always possible for a wealthy, sociable, interesting, and determined woman to gather people around her, even at such a time of dispersion as the Revolution and its aftermath. Yet there was a deeper need in this sociability, as she well knew. To be alone was to be brought to the edge of reXection, to the point where thought threatens to break free from life. It was a state whose dangerous extremes she investigated in a number of works—Mirza, the heroine of an early novella, killing Wrst her lover and then herself, Delphine wandering distraught through the French countryside, Corinne losing her grip on life in the moorland of northern Britain, Sappho pushing through the fringes of reality to nothingness.50 To turn lastingly inward is to risk devouring oneself, because it is impossible even for the egoist to be happy with, within, herself. Love, as Stae¨l’s Wction repeatedly demonstrates, gives woman an illusory sense of completeness whose precarious nature becomes evident as the Other inevitably recedes. (Constant paints the same picture in Adolphe, but from the man’s point of view.) Reciprocity can never be guaranteed. She still sought it throughout her life, but: ‘If one gives up one’s soul so utterly as to feel the imperiousness of reciprocity, repose ends and misfortune begins.’51 This was the tragedy of her existence as a woman on the one hand and a genius on the other, for the tradition of womanliness demands self-sacriWce and subordination that genius cannot tolerate. One is either a disappointed female, because too alive to inequality ever to be indiVerent to its manifestation, or a frustrated genius, living by extremes that make one vulnerable to life’s unpredictable rhythms. To be a happy woman and a shegenius at the same time is simply impossible. At least, it is in Stae¨l’s world of Wction. Could matters be diVerent in the real world? The fate Napoleon intended for her was in its way as abusive as the ancien re´gime’s recourse to the ‘lettre de cachet’, one of the arbitrary and unchallengeable manifestations of power that sparked the Revolution by denying its targets the opportunity to defend themselves or seek institutional justice. 50 See also Jean Starobinski, ‘Suicide et me´lancolie chez Madame de Stae¨l’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe: Colloque de Coppet (18–24 juillet 1966) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 242–64, at 242–3. 51 Stae¨l, De l’inXuence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (Paris: Rivages, 2000), 183.

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Exile worked in the same way, and in Napoleon’s hands brooked no appeal, though Stae¨l was the Wrst woman he banished. As though she had foreseen her fate all along, she let art preWgure life, experiencing the same desolation as her early Wctional character Mirza had done when she became amputated from the life principle through suspecting her lover Fernand’s inWdelity. Stae¨l also enacted this state before and during her second stay in England, some years ahead of Bonaparte’s actual exiling her, enduring her lover Narbonne’s withdrawal from her possessive presence. But she sustained an even more agonizing loss when her father died during her trip to Germany, for while exile could be foretold by the art that might also transmute it, death could never be anything but a non-negotiable absolute, a void of utter absence. When as a younger woman Stae¨l had argued in favour of suicide, it had been because of her conviction that some losses rob life of all meaning; yet she later revised the view, partly in response to what exile taught her about adapting, replacing, renewing, and regenerating. For the writer there was always an alternative reality to create, another being to bring into existence, new places to visit. Napoleon could never defeat her while she remained open to change: as long as she retained consciousness she would never, she said, ‘devour’ herself. Paris may have been her spiritual home, but smaller constellations could still support life. If she resembled Montaigne in seeing the epitome of Frenchness in Paris, she diVered from him in not liking travel for its own sake or because it was a version of the perpetual movement that inhered in life. She would not have travelled at all, she insisted, if she had not had to; and whatever intellectual or social riches she admitted to having gained through wandering Europe have to be evaluated in the light of that uncompromising statement.52 Just as she expected Europe’s other languages to bow before French (though she did try to learn English when she entered Fanny Burney’s circle in Surrey, and made some progress in German with the aid of her children’s tutor and Wilhelm von Humboldt), so she would have preferred London, Berlin, Vienna, and Stockholm somehow to be absorbed by Paris, if that had been possible. Henry Crabb Robinson reports her Wrm, kindly words to a country girl she met in London, a fevered enthusiast whose brain had been turned by reading Delphine and Corinne and who wanted to travel with her as her attendant and amanuensis:

52 See Simone Balaye´, ‘Absence, exil, voyage’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe, 227–41.

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You may think it is an enviable lot to travel all over Europe, and see all that is most beautiful and distinguished in the world; but the joys of home are more solid; domestic life aVords more permanent happiness than any that fame can give. You have a father—I have none. You have a home—I was made to travel because I was driven from mine. Be content with your lot; if you knew mine, you would not desire it.

The girl apparently returned to her father and silently proWted by her advice.53 Here and elsewhere there is a degree of imaginative licence in Stae¨l’s words, self-dramatizing and prompted by the needs of the narrative moment; but in essence she meant what she said. However worthwhile European integration and cosmopolitanism may have been in their own right, she could, given the appropriate circumstances, probably have done without them. Her travel writing was, of course, motivated in the same way as her words to the crazed girl had been. The diaries and notebooks she Wlled are not commonplace books that record for the sheer pleasure or interest of it, any more than her exile texts are merely stories or autobiographical reXections: all are contributions to a body of purposeful polemical work.54 Even so, the personal element is still paramount. Her friend August Wilhelm Schlegel’s essay on Corinne55 argues, as Benjamin Constant does,56 that narrative and travel record are inseparable in it, reXecting the fact that when Stae¨l originally went to Italy on a fact-Wnding mission to research the background to the novel her intention had been to inform herself practically as well as orient herself temperamentally. Sometimes the amount of information becomes intrusive, reXecting her determination to make the reader see just how thoroughly the homework had been done, or to Xaunt learning that was all too often denied to her sex, but on the whole the literary and the scholarly coexist comfortably. They have a joint purpose, after all: to advance an argument about the proper integrity of nations and highlight the suVerings of exceptional women by describing the ills inXicted on both by tyranny and patriarchy. 53 Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. (Weimar: H. Bo¨hlau, 1869), II.159–60. 54 See Ulrich J. Allstadt-Schmitz, ‘Erza¨hltes Exil: Untersuchungen zu Madame de Stae¨ls ‘‘Dix Anne´es d’exil’’ ’, doctoral thesis, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t Bonn (1987), 156. 55 August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Corinne ou l’Italie par Madame de Stae¨l-Holstein’, in Kritische Schriften, ed. Emil Staiger (Zurich and Stuttgart: Artemis-Verlag, 1962), 326–41, at 327. 56 Benjamin Constant, ‘Corinne de Madame de Stae¨l’, Le Publiciste, 12 May 1807, in id., Recueil d’articles 1795–1817, ed. Ephraı¨m Harpaz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976), 84.

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Writers throughout history have been exiled, or chosen to present themselves as exiles, on account of their political, civic, religious, or literary activities, and a natural consequence is always for them to idealize the culture they have left behind. Even if what they present as exile is pragmatic displacement rather than enforced departure, its artistic expression is often the show of melancholy. Yet if Stae¨l’s De la litte´rature is to be believed, melancholy may be an artistically fertile state. If it merely saddens rather than completely crushes the suVerer, it can spawn a kind of literature that supplants the grimness of reality. This seems to be one of its aspects in Rousseau, driven from one place after another for what he had written, and taking refuge wherever he could Wnd it—on the ˆIle de Saint-Pierre in Lake Bienne, in London (where George III granted him a pension), or in Wootton in Derbyshire, where he wrote much of the Confessions. Stae¨l’s sympathy with and admiration for the way he had almost deliberately invited persecution by championing personal integrity and issuing the fearless declarations it seemed to entail made her forgive him much, however strongly she took exception to his anti-feminism, and however unable she was to deny that he had tried, as she put it, to ‘prevent women from involving themselves in public aVairs [and] playing a brilliant role’.57 Where, though, does one draw the line between exile and emigration? The question of enforcement is obviously relevant. Stae¨l’s ‘ten years of exile’ do not include the period when she was voluntarily absent from France as a fugitive from Revolutionary events in 1792–3, retreating Wrst to Coppet and then, pursuing Narbonne, to England. Fanny Burney wrote to Alexandre d’Arblay from London, sometime in late February or early March 1793: I have talked so much at home about [Narbonne’s] good and estimable qualities of heart and mind that I have nearly converted my father, and placated my mother; but in society there is an absolute Wxation on this subject, and everywhere the cry is—‘She is neither an e´migre´ nor banished—it was Monsieur de Narbonne who seduced her away from her husband and children.’—It does no good for me to speak about the ways of his country; people may ever reply ‘She is a wife, she is a mother!’58

57 Stae¨l, Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caracte`re de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Œuvres de jeunesse, ed. Simone Balaye´ and John Isbell (Paris: Desjonque`res, 1997), 33–98, at 47. 58 Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Joyce Hemlow et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84), II.202.

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Politic withdrawal, which is one way of describing the French emigration, starts to look impolitic when the society the emigrant enters is as hostile as the one left behind. Pitt’s policy of neutrality meant, in theory, that French e´migre´s had little need to fear retribution or hostility from their hosts when they crossed the Channel; but as Burney’s words suggest, this could by no means be assumed in practice, particularly when social responses became infused with moral ones. (Her last novel, The Wanderer, would elaborate on this theme.) Other factors too tended to qualify the view that emigration, when politically induced, should be seen as a positive resort. Stae¨l’s Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise questioned its value in terms of its aftereVects. Far from maintaining the consideration enjoyed by the nobility, emigration has dealt it the severest of blows. A new generation grew up during their absence, and as this generation has grown prosperous and triumphant without the privileged class it still thinks it can exist on its own terms. Meanwhile the e´migre´s, always living in the same circles, have persuaded themselves that everything apart from their old habits was a form of rebellion; gradually they have assumed the same kind of inXexibility as priests did. All traditions have become in their eyes articles of faith, and they have made abuses into dogma. Their attachment to the royal family is most worthy of respect; but why make this attachment consist in hatred for free institutions and love of absolute power?59

In Delphine Mme de Lebensei disapprovingly mentions Le´once’s oversensitivity to the idea that staying in France, rather than Wghting its enemies—that is, the Revolutionaries—from outside, might be prudent. Her husband too argues that appealing to external forces weakens the French nation and compromises its independence. But Le´once, refusing to listen, goes oV to seek death in the royalist army. The opinion that one should emigrate to escape oppression is clearly more persuasive. What might weaken the exile’s moral case, on the other hand, was conduct that lessened sympathy for his or her plight by seeming inconsequential, lacking in seriousness, or otherwise improper. In this spirit Heine’s Gesta¨ndnisse (Confessions) justiWes its sarcastic account of Stae¨l’s wanderings over Europe by drawing attention to what it calls her mindless vanity, laid bare when she Wred questions at scholars without letting them properly explain whatever aspect of philosophy or culture she claimed to want clarifying.60 What was oVensive in such conduct, which inevitably, he 59 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 255.

60 See Allstadt, Exil, 184.

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thought, resulted in a falsifying vulgarization of the matter under discussion, was the self-preoccupation underpinning it. If for Napoleon the greatest woman was the mother who had had the most children,61 the greatest philosopher for Stae¨l was the one who had written the most books. It all seemed distressingly silly. Then there was sexual exile. Given the English disapproval of sexual licence ‘from outside’—which begged the question whether lewd, licentious behaviour was the norm only in foreign lands—it seemed natural for them to insist that home-grown deviants should remove themselves from their own society and go abroad when their conduct became public knowledge. (Indeed, since much behaviour considered sexually deviant was illegal in Britain, it became a positive necessity for those guilty of it to retreat elsewhere.) In 1816 Stae¨l probably had no suspicion that Byron, whom she had come to know on her third trip to England, might have left the country that year on suspicion of homosexual acts, or that his wife was intending to adduce buggery as part of her plea for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, but she was certainly aware of the poet’s dangerous fondness for his half-sister Augusta Leigh, a fact which had caused him to protest in a letter to Augusta about her meddling with their private aVairs. Yet when he and Stae¨l met again on the shores of Lake Geneva he positively welcomed her sympathy, even the active, though to his mind hopeless, attempt she made to mend his relationship with his wife. This kind of sexual exile, also suVered by Byron’s contemporary William Beckford (whom Stae¨l had got to know long before his social ostracism), was, of course, a strictly gendered aVair: women were not subject to it, there being no legal ban on, nor much understanding of, female homosexual acts. The attitude of the recipient country to the fugitives they sheltered varied. Whereas in England sodomy was punishable by execution, a fact that provides the single most compelling explanation for Byron’s sudden selfexile in 1816,62 in Italy buggery, in a neat reversal of the Anglo-Saxon attitude to ‘foreign’ antics, was simply regarded as an English disease, and the natives were tolerant of it. Winckelmann, the German founder of art history who settled in Rome and was eventually murdered by a homosexual pickup in Trieste, hardly bothered to conceal his sexual nature. In France, however, Astolphe de Custine, the son of Delphine de Sabran (after 61 See Las Cases, Me´morial, II.174. 62 See Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002), p. xiii.

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whom Stae¨l named her Wrst novel), was initially blackballed in society on account of his involvement in a homosexual scandal.63 Even the philosophes thought sodomy aberrant, although they disapproved of extreme punishment for it. Lesbianism was not to Stae¨l’s taste either, however impassioned (as Balzac noted) some of her letters to Juliette Re´camier sound. Heterosexual exile, on the other hand, was commonplace for women. It often took the form of enforced travel abroad as a result of transgression that left a wife with child, the prevailing view being that the exile woman endured was ‘just’ when she had breached the norms established by man, and speciWcally formulated so as not to apply to him. There was, of course, a long tradition, reXected in contemporary literature, of deporting lower-class women for various forms of sexual licence even when they were victims of male exploitation: thus the fate reserved for the heroine of Pre´vost’s novel Manon Lescaut, condemned as a prostitute, is deportation to Louisiana, a journey on which the aristocratic Des Grieux simply chooses to accompany her even though he has been as much her lover as she his. (Besides, he shot dead a prison warder in the course of helping Manon escape from jail; but his birth and sex oYcially exonerate him of criminal conduct.) Polly Baker, in Diderot’s Supple´ment au Voyage de Bougainville, is no less used by men in the New World than she had been in the old, yet it is she, not they, who is repeatedly punished for her ‘free’ loving—that is, providing sexual favours to men, probably under duress—until one of her lovers, a magistrate who had previously had her jailed, is shamed into marrying her. Unsurprisingly, the double standard was rarely questioned. Well-born women such as Stae¨l herself were generally spared such punishment, not least because their husbands wished to be spared the humiliation of publicity. Even so, without being explicitly sexual in origin Stae¨l’s exile resembled Manon’s and Polly’s deportation in resulting from what was regarded as a speciWcally female kind of transgression—in this case one that Napoleon regarded as particularly unpardonable. Let us return Wnally to Stae¨l’s equation of talking politics and living. Burney’s The Wanderer raised the same question as Delphine had done before it, a question that Stae¨l’s career recurrently posed: are women writers allowed to deal openly with political matters? If they are, should they be? Does Stae¨l connive at woman’s marginal status in civil society by qualifying 63 On this matter see George Rousseau and Caroline Warman, ‘Made From the StuV of Saints: Chateaubriand’s Rene´ and Custine’s Search for a Homosexual Identity’, GLQ 7: 1 (2001).

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the notion that her sex deserves the right to a public voice, and so connive at her own exclusion from the richness of human existence? When she writes in De la litte´rature that women have never composed superior works of literature, but have served humanity by creating the conditions in which men’s imagination and creativity have been able to Xourish, she seems to be selling the cause of her sex painfully short.64 How, one asks, could she of all people have been so easily satisWed with the notion that woman’s chief desire is to please (man), and that reason should always prompt her to seek the shadow? Stae¨l herself, after all, regularly grabbed the limelight; and if she took some pains to attract men—whether or not her physical appearance and self-assertiveness aided this eVort—she took very little trouble to please women. Obviously this casts some doubt on the degree to which she supported her sex. Probably, if unconvincingly, she saw herself as exemplary of womanhood in her strength and daring, but regarded the sex in general as crucially deWcient, unlikely and unwilling to Wght against its marginalization. On the other hand, she considered the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie in France to have greatly helped develop a female writing class through the institution of the salon, whose damaging absence from England she notes in the Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise: salons allowed Frenchwomen to appear, and be, publicly clever and cultivated, whereas their English counterparts lacked the incentive to develop the social skills of argumentation and discussion. As she noted with essential truth, English women of letters such as Burney and Maria Edgeworth lived ‘very retired lives’.65 Yet the salon remained an ineluctably private institution, whereas the woman who published her work gained an indisputably public audience. Madame Necker de Saussure refers to the type of literature Stae¨l was particularly associated with as being ‘more spoken than written’,66 an accurate reXection of the salon background against which much of it had been composed. Marc Fumaroli has described her Wrst salon in Paris as ‘an instrument of political work, the rival of the [Revolutionary] club’, and the later gatherings at Coppet as ‘work, action, determined eVorts at conversion’.67 Their oral emphasis was in keeping with the evening improvisations 64 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature conside´re´e dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, ed. Ge´rard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 171–2. 65 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 563. 66 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. ccx. 67 See Franc¸ois Rosset, Ecrire a` Coppet (Geneva: Slatkine, 2002), 35.

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she loved, deriving from and conveying an intimacy all the more powerful for its freedom from traditional (male) rhetorical constraints. But does Necker de Saussure damn her cousin with faint praise when she goes on to deWne her essence in terms of the emotions? ‘To form a just idea of Madame de Stae¨l, you have to observe her in her aVections. You have to have seen Madame de Stae¨l devoured by torment, heedless of her fame and always ready to sacriWce the fruit of her labours, to be sure that in her the loving being is central, and that her true life was that of the heart.’68 This seems like a bid to make Stae¨l into a typical sentimental woman, naturally subject to all the constraints traditional in her sex; whereas it is beyond question that she was never just the typical woman. Presumably it was the typical woman who in the Essai sur les Wctions ranked Burney’s Cecilia among the great recent examples of women’s writing, given that Cecilia connives at the furtherance of a patriarchal order in which heroines always submit to more powerful men and the embedded social structures they represent. Despite the novelistic twist caused by the fact that Cecilia Beverley’s fortune is Wxed to the preservation of the family name— which her lover Delvile, or rather Delvile’s proud parents, would never countenance substituting for their own—it is a traditional story in which the woman serves the essential economic function of transferring wealth to her partner, throughout preserving all the time-honoured female virtues in order to ensure that the integrity of the male line continues. In other words, woman is incorporated within her husband’s family as a function (largely, though not entirely, a reproductive function) divorced from the higher calling and endowments of the opposite sex. This calling and these endowments are essentially representative of reason, not passion, and the male association with them marks him out as a superior being. This was hardly the understanding of marital arrangements that Stae¨l and her parents brought to the search for a suitable Protestant husband for her, a search ending with the discovery of the highly unsuitable Eric de Stae¨lHolstein; nor would Stae¨l ever tolerate attempts to reduce her to membership of an underclass. This is one reason why her own Wction regularly shows outstanding heroines being drawn to and then destroyed by inferior men, and also why her heroines exhibit characteristics that run counter to the time-honoured female desiderata of chastity and passivity—at least, run counter to them until the weight of worldly circumstance forces a change. 68 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. ccxii.

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Nor was there anything devoted or sustained in the application Stae¨l brought to conjugal life and love; after a brief period of ‘regularity’ she simply ignored marital duty, as her husband also did. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that she, like Wollstonecraft, saw herself as the representative of a newer age of female freedom. As De la litte´rature remarks, the time should have passed when men found it unforgivable for a woman to draw attention to herself, even through the possession of superior talents;69 and it is a supreme irony that Napoleon should have both conceded this superiority in a woman such as Stae¨l and deprecated its visible eVects when they took the form of challenges to his authority. In him, however, revolution always meant a male revolution, and the Code Napole´on would silence the female from the period of the Revolution until well into the nineteenth century. Stae¨l herself, of course, could never be satisWed by such statutory limitation. After her separation from her husband she ran her household with all the acumen her father had brought to his banking and business dealings, and managed to maintain an oYcial silence about the paternity of her oVspring which her private correspondence, not to mention their physical appearance, did everything to challenge. Yet she never made common cause with other champions of women’s rights or associated herself with the kind of Wghting rhetoric manifested by some of her female contemporaries and compatriots. The conXict, by now thoroughly rehearsed, between the needs of writing and the demands of womanly propriety70 explains how someone like Stae¨l could have been guilty of such connivance, been prepared in theory to endure types of constraint which she attacked in practice. The strategies for surviving that she devised entailed suVering as well as compromise—her diVerent exiles conWrm as much—and the satisfaction she derived from surviving was always precarious. Yet without these strategies there would have been no Delphine and no Corinne, no De la litte´rature, no De l’Allemagne, and no Dix anne´es d’exil. With these works she set a benchmark for resistance that has also deWned the extent to which it is reasonable to demand compliance. As Napoleon saw, she was not a quitter. 69 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 335–8.

70 See in particular Poovey, Proper Lady.

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tae¨l would pay a high price for her determination to stay in the city of her heart. Put simply, it meant that an unsuitable husband, chosen because he was a Protestant and because of a guarantee that his diplomatic posting in Paris would continue in perpetuity, would have to do. She cannot be blamed for not having foreseen the political events that would imperil his position and hence their continued residence in the embassy on the rue du Bac; but perhaps, clever as she was, she might have suspected that she herself would one day become too oVensive to be allowed to remain there. She might also, for all her professed ignorance, have foreseen the possibility that she would not wish to stay with her husband forever. Eight years after she had married him, on 19 July 1793, she wrote to another man of whom she was a great deal fonder—Narbonne—that she loved her husband ‘with all the force of my reason’.1 Clearly it was far from enough. Her coldness had made Eric de Stae¨l jealous, but she had become indiVerent to everything except his periodic shows of reasonableness. By 1793, back from her sortie to England, she was prepared to draw close to him simply in order to obtain much-needed funds for her e´migre´ lover. But she had also become aware of the extent of Stae¨l’s debts, caused not by generosity but simply by wild personal extravagance. ‘Nothing could revolt me as much as seeing Monsieur de Stae¨l in a carriage while you were on foot’, she wrote to Narbonne on 2 June 1793.2 Perhaps this is a little unfair, but her patience was being sorely tested. Apart from anything, she was uncomfortably aware that Narbonne was slipping away from her, while Stae¨l, on the contrary, seemed to remain provokingly in love.3 It was a bad

1 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.142. 3 Ibid. 121–2 (10 June 1793).

2 Ibid. 114.

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business, given that she had married him only on the understanding that he would not be a nuisance. By 1793 her father, long fallen from political grace, had taken up permanent residence at Coppet, much to Suzanne Necker’s displeasure. (She had always been a lover of Paris, like her daughter; it was Jacques Necker who forever pined for Switzerland.) His political demise is one more piece in the jigsaw of Stae¨l’s exile, or her multiple exiles. Hostile commentators on his ministry repeated that he was a dull man who was good at making money, but unimpressive when he tried to do anything else, while astute observers perceived his mediocrity along with the extent of his self-deception. As late as 1791, according to a letter Horace Walpole sent Stae¨l’s later friend Mary Berry, Necker had drafted a new plan of Constitution and Finance, ‘both which he no doubt can more easily settle now that both are Wfty times more diYcult than he could at Wrst when he had all the powers of the Crown, or the second time when he was the idol of the people. Everybody has seen his incapacity but himself, and his restless vanity and ambition of a name will make his name a proverb of ridicule.’4 More charitable voices spoke of his religious sense of duty, which had taken the place of moneymaking. Yet he still committed catastrophic errors that saw him sink from governmental and royal favour. When that happened only Necker himself and those who were closest to him, chief among them his daughter, persisted in seeing him as one who was always, and unquestionably, right and therefore, in this case, a martyr to mistaken notions of the national cause. Being Swiss, Necker could never oYcially occupy more than a nominal position in the Ministry of Finance, but in truth he came to run France’s economy. His scaling these heights had been, if not stealthy, then steady (which is not to say that it had been uncontroversial). He had entered the lists by publishing in 1775 his Essai sur la le´gislation et le commerce des grains, which attacked Turgot’s liberal economy. As a result he succeeded Turgot as director of the royal treasury in 1776, and then, a year later, found himself in charge of the Ministry of Finance. He blenched at the relentless and thoughtless luxury of the court, deplored the bankruptcy into which Wghting the War of American Independence was dragging his adoptive country, and in 1781 published a Compte rendu au Roi which revealed the 4 Mary Berry, Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence, 2nd edn., ed. Lady Theresa Lewis, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1866), I.362 (5 Sept. 1791).

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parlous state of France’s Wnances along with the exorbitant pensions and privileges granted to courtiers. From then on, understandably, the latter loathed him, and he was forced by the King to resign. His successor as Comptroller-General of Finance was Calonne, who in a speech at the opening of the Assemble´e des Notables in 1787 implicitly called into question the exactness of Necker’s 1781 account. Calonne won favour by not interfering unduly with the court’s expensive pleasures, many of which he also permitted himself to enjoy: he became a great art collector, for example (and was accused of having an aVair with MarieAntoinette’s favourite portraitist Louise Vige´e Le Brun), though he was obliged to sell oV many of the masterpieces he had amassed when he was driven from oYce in 1787 after having to admit the state’s huge deWcit. MarieAntoinette was given the name ‘Madame De´Wcit’ at about this time because of the perceived relationship between her extravagant lifestyle and the faltering economy. Calonne was much more of a ladies’ man than Necker; women Xocked to his receptions, but he too cultivated their company, fully understanding what Suzanne Necker meant when she remarked in a moment of (probably prepared) wit on how women Wlled the hours of conversation and life like those bits of padding one put inside chests of china: one counted them for nothing, but everything would break without them. Her daughter rated the art of conversing even more highly than that, a fact that made exile from the world of French conviviality and talk particularly bitter to her. Necker had attacked Calonne in his three-volume work of 1784, De l’administration des Wnances de la France, and as Calonne’s inXuence waned he saw his chance to assert his own superior claims to Wnancial expertise, though there was little that was deft about his intervention. He was recalled as Minister of State in 1788, and in the teeth of aristocratic opposition managed to double the representation of the Third Estate at the States General. Louis sacked him again on 11 July 1789, but in so doing provoked a popular rebellion that, joined with others, led to the storming of the Bastille three days later. This in turn caused the immediate recall of Necker. He signally failed to improve the economy, however, and withdrew from public life in 1790. Even then, as Walpole’s caustic comment suggests, he hankered after the position and inXuence he had once enjoyed. Like many formerly powerful Wgures, he persuaded himself that all his ambitions were disinterested, and his daughter, at least, believed him. For such a staid character, Necker provoked intense passions. The privileged mostly loathed him for his attempt to curb their spendthrift

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ways, while the common people idolized him, at least for a time. It was thought that, being a banker, he must be able to perform Wnancial miracles; but what he could do with a bank he had founded at the age of 30 was very diVerent from what France’s enormous deWcit required, particularly as he was constantly hampered by the innate conservatism (rather than criminal negligence) of a king who paid only lip-service to the concept of reform. All the same, Necker is done a grave disservice by the determined and inXated eulogies he received from his wife (often) and daughter (always), for their long-term eVect has been the reverse of what was intended. The fact is that he never deserved the worship Stae¨l accorded him, being a far more ordinary Wgure than either she or her mother would allow. Nor, on the other hand, does he merit the opprobrium and derision that are commonly heaped on him. His judgement could be dismayingly poor, but demotion followed by exile as a consequence of his simple inability to conjure solvency out of ruin was a harsh punishment, particularly for a man imbued with the sense of public service; and his resentment and regret were natural enough. For a pompous but benevolent citizen who had given up business to devote himself to the public cause, rejection understandably felt both wounding and humiliating. Although her sex prevented her from being a politician, his daughter had lived a virtual political life through him. Having acquired a husband whom she regarded as so clearly inferior to Jacques Necker, she was perfectly aware that life as a married woman could hold no more for her politically than the opportunity to cultivate inXuential acquaintances by running a glittering salon. She probably also expected a lover or lovers to give her an entre´e into aVairs of state. Gouverneur Morris reported the general view when he remarked on Talleyrand’s being ‘well’ with Stae¨l in her early years at the Swedish embassy, but the question whether she was playing him oV against another man, Narbonne, was left unanswered, as was the equally scandalous matter of her possible intimacy with Talleyrand from much earlier on.5 At any rate, she was known to be Narbonne’s maıˆtresse en titre, hard though her mother had tried to warn her oV a man with such a rakish reputation.6 5 See Gouverneur Morris, Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrice Cary Davenport, 2 vols. (London: Harrap, 1939), II.354, and Berry, Journals, I.370. 6 See Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.vii.

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Stae¨l’s liaison with this alleged bastard son of Louis XV (or, according to other sources, of Louis XVI’s father)7 began late in 1788, when Narbonne was in Paris. He had accumulated ruinous debts that could be only partially defrayed by his patron—and possibly aunt—Mademoiselle Ade´laı¨de, the sister of Louis XV, by his wealthy mother, and by the portion of a rich wife with estates in St Domingue. His attraction for Stae¨l was a compound of his striking good looks and a personality that seemed to her ripe for political formation—that is, able to be groomed in a way that might allow her to regain the vicarious political footing in Paris that she feared losing with Necker’s retreat to Coppet. Initially Narbonne stood in the wrong camp for her purposes, as he was, or was believed to be, an anti-Neckerist; he became, however, or let it be believed that he had become, a staunch liberal, and thus someone potentially able to let her re-establish herself in the male world of political inXuence and intrigue. Converting Narbonne to a type that might have seemed alien to one of his caste—by making him a supporter of constitutional rather than absolutist monarchy—was in part the job of her salon, and when the job appeared to be done she could turn her attention to getting her lover a position in government. For someone with her persistence and contacts in high places this was not particularly diYcult. She lobbied so eVectively that in December 1791 he was appointed Minister of War, an achievement that prompted MarieAntoinette to remark bitchily to her lover Count Axel Fersen: ‘How glorious it must be for Madame de Stae¨l to have the entire army at her command!’8 Yet her apparent success was also her undoing. When Narbonne took up oYce it became evident that both the left and the right now detested him because he was, or claimed to be, a Constitutional. (Narbonne’s political career demands these constant qualiWcations for the simple reason that he was, if less Xagrantly than Talleyrand, a trimmer or turncoat, a man whose moves were dictated by expediency.) Even leading Constitutionalists such as Talleyrand hated him, though in Talleyrand’s case this was perhaps because Stae¨l’s preference for Narbonne seemed simply insulting. For the time being, though, preference translated smoothly into preferment, and Stae¨l may have had her Wrst indirect experience of political involvement helping Narbonne write speeches for the Assemble´e. According to one report at this time: ‘Madame de Stae¨l has run the whole engine of government since December,’ and another: ‘You can see her rushing to hand them 7 See Morris, Diary, II.299.

8 On 7 Dec. 1791.

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the oYcial material, the letters and reports she dictates to this dear lover.’9 It did not last. Though Narbonne worked hard for the cause of the constitutional monarchy, he could not long survive the tensions caused by having the immoderate Assemble´e on one side and the Conseil du Roi (most of whom were against him) on the other. On 9 March 1792 he resigned his post, having been minister for a mere three months. From then on his safety was compromised. The estate in St Domingue went up in Xames during the slave rebellion orchestrated under Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Narbonne was accused by enemies of embezzling money from the ministry coVers to pay his considerable debts. (In fact Stae¨l had settled them.) When he rejoined his regiment he was the subject of furious attacks by Jacobins in the Assemble´e, and Stae¨l feared for his safety. He returned to Paris, but hid during the murderous events of 10 August 1792, when the Tuileries were ransacked and royalty was suspended. Then he sailed to the safety of England. Stae¨l’s torments after this were expressed in a passionate and mistrustful correspondence that lasted until she joined him there, its abiding theme the suVering of women at the hands of irresolute or cruel men who do not deserve their selXess love. This would be a leitmotif in her Wction as well as theoretical works, and the divisions and tensions it engendered were aptly summed up in the recurrent Wgure of absence: geographical absence, but also absence of the heart, the state of being forced away from one’s centre. Exile would merely ground the metaphor in experience. At the end of 1792 Edward Gibbon wrote to Lord SheYeld about Stae¨l’s plans for the immediate future: ‘She talks wildly enough of visiting England this winter. Her friend the vicomte de Narbonne is somewhere about Dorking. If you could show him any civilities she would thank us both.’10 She was, of course, pursuing her lover. Her plan during the preceding months had been simply to live in his mind as a constant reproach for his evasion (which she had approved) and his silence (which she excoriated). Sometimes, but not always, she forbore to mention that her death, if she committed suicide, would entail a loss of vital funds: Narbonne’s weariness of his mistress never became so absolute as to stop him living oV her. 9 Correspondance politique, 18 Jan. 1792 and 25 Jan. 1792, in Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.2.310; see also John Isbell, ‘Narbonne, Madame de Stae¨l et le programme ‘‘anglais’’ de Coppet sous l’Assemble´e le´gislative’, SVEC 358 (1998), 203–15, at 203 and n. 1. Isbell is sceptical as to the real degree of Stae¨l’s involvement (204, 205). 10 Edward Gibbon, Private Letters, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1896), II.347; also quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.42–3.

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She had Wrst withdrawn to Coppet after a terrifying brush with mortality on 2 September, when the Paris mob had tried to massacre her in the Place de l’Hoˆtel de Ville.11 She too was Wnancially dependent, relying on her father to bankroll her while she considered what to do about her marriage. In November she had informed her parents of her intention to separate from Eric de Stae¨l and devote herself to Narbonne, whose child she was expecting. (Her 3-year-old son Auguste was also almost certainly his.) It had taken all of Jacques Necker’s persuasion to keep her in Switzerland until the birth, and all her patience to endure the tedium of her native land and her parents’ company in the interim. Her original intention had been more radical—to join Narbonne in September in the ‘terre de liberte´’ he now inhabited, pregnancy or no.12 But her parents’ reluctance to let her escape, tempered by their promise to sanction her separation from her husband if she waited three months to test the duration of her feelings for Narbonne,13 compounded by Eric de Stae¨l’s announcement of his imminent return to Paris, Narbonne’s own risky plan of doing the same, but with the additional intention of testifying in favour of Louis XVI at his trial—all these factors made her hesitate. Nothing, though, could stop her regarding Switzerland as a prison.14 Even France had lost its charm, now appearing the threatening country in which death and the massacre of Narbonne were not merely conceivable, but actually probable. For him to promise that he would return there if she would stay put, then, was to guarantee that she would leave. Auguste and the baby she was expecting would not be an encumbrance, since she planned to leave the infant with a wetnurse during her projected absence in England and deposit Auguste with his grandparents. As Narbonne continued not to write to her she tried moral blackmail, imagining herself dying as she gave birth15 and challenging him to survive the guilt and shame of having killed her. She had already become a living example of the type she would describe a few years later in De la litte´rature, the victim of ravaging emotion who, while absorbed in her destructive feelings, was still able to dissect and discuss them with seeming detachment, ‘[to] distract myself from a thousand and one pains’ by a process of reXection.16 In the intervals of

11 12 13 15

For details see Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 281–2. Stae¨l to Narbonne, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.2 (Coppet, 25 Aug. 1792). Ibid. 37 (Coppet, 19 Sept. 1792). 14 Ibid. 14 (Coppet, 31 Aug. 1792). Ibid. 23 (Coppet, 18 Sept. 1792). 16 Ibid. 28–9 (Coppet, 24 Sept. 1792).

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developing this theory she suVered regular convulsions at being disappointed by the postal delivery.17 Such a state could not last. There were, she told him, pressing reasons for her to leave Switzerland—not simply to be with him again, but also to avoid her husband’s becoming suspicious (the child she was expecting would eventually be born ten months after they had last lived together as man and wife).18 On the other hand, as her father drily observed to her, being reunited with Narbonne while she was still pregnant would eVectively be to tell the world who the baby’s real father was.19 Even she could see the diVerence between publishing her passion and proclaiming her irregularity.20 Her husband, in the meantime, quoted Rousseau at her—not from the torrid correspondence of the illicit lovers in La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, but from the Lettre a` d’Alembert sur les spectacles, according to which ‘The audacity of a woman is a certain sign of her shame: it is because she has too much to blush about that she blushes no longer.’21 Stae¨l, we remember, had been as critical of Rousseau’s misogyny as Wollstonecraft, but had not until now felt as personally implicated in it. After the birth of her second son on 20 November, she prepared to go to Narbonne in England. A letter from him Wnally arrived, containing nothing apart from the suggestion that her coming might be inconvenient.22 Jacques Necker then proposed to his daughter that her lover might join them in Lausanne, whose bailie had agreed to give him refuge out of love for her.23 But on 2 January 1793, seven days after she had announced this development to Narbonne, her mother wrote to Gibbon in sorrow: ‘after vainly trying all the resources of mind and reason to dissuade my daughter from following an insane course, we thought that a brief stay in Geneva might make her more amenable, through the inXuence of public opinion; she took advantage of this freedom and set oV earlier than she had led us to expect, and it was under such troubling auspices that she began the new year and made us begin it.’24 She had set oV, not for exile—that would occur only in 1795, when the Convention decided that she was anti-republican—but as the associate or consort of an emigrant, which was not an oVence. Nor had she committed any deeds that seemed to call for statutory punishment, though if the details 17 19 21 23

Ibid. 35 (Coppet, 2 Oct. 1792). Ibid. 44 (Rolle, 11 Oct. 1792). Ibid. 48 (Rolle, 16 Oct. 1792). Ibid. 95 (Rolle, 26 Dec. 1792).

18 Ibid. 36 (Coppet, 2 Oct. 1792). 20 Ibid. 47 (14 Oct. 1792). 22 Ibid. 93 (Rolle, 25 Dec. 1792). 24 Ibid. 98, to Edward Gibbon (Rolle, 2 Jan. 1793).

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of her rescuing aristocratic friends during the Terror had been more generally known it would have been diVerent. Emigration was a matter of choice (by 1793, admittedly, it was a necessity for many, as it clearly was for Narbonne), while exile was an imposition. Stae¨l’s exit from France was prompted by nothing other than jealous, frustrated desire. Yet what this, her second stay in England, would become was something more complex, a period for friendship as well as tormented and apparently unreciprocated love. It was also one in which the consequences of her audacity in love were impressed upon her in unexpected and unpleasant ways. For perhaps the Wrst time she was faced with the stark consequences of the female dilemma, the paradox of being required to preserve ‘womanly’ proprieties while also, and inevitably, needing to ‘live’ her feelings. The gender trap had rarely revealed itself to her so starkly. Narbonne’s refuge since the previous autumn was a former alehouse in Surrey, later converted into an elegant dwelling which in the course of the nineteenth century would continue to be extended. Today Juniper Hall is a centre for Weld studies and weekend courses in painting, but from the 1780s it was rented out to tenants. Since 1791 a group of high-born French refugees had been lodging there. The house, situated in the Surrey village of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking, is an attractive place that retains some charming period features, notably a dining-room decorated in the Adam style with Wedgwood panels and delicate mouldings; the magniWcent garden has tall cedars and extensive views (which in the 1790s would have been less obstructed than they are at present) of the Surrey Downs and, beyond them, the approaches to London. Stae¨l became passionately fond of the property over the four months she spent there, later reporting that she had failed to Wnd any place so agreeable to rent on Lake Geneva. Landed families living nearby supplied the Juniperians with a sympathetic and congenial audience for the very French salon gatherings they instituted, and Stae¨l was in her element. If she had hoped that a scandalous edge might be taken oV her presence by that of another female, the (only comparatively) reassuring comtesse de la Chaˆtre, she was disappointed.25 The Countess, an ardent democrat, had arrived on 4 October the previous year, separated by her political opinions from an ultra-royalist husband who belonged to the most ancient 25 Stae¨l to Narbonne, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.72 (Rolle, 25 Sept. 1792).

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aristocracy. Fanny Burney’s sister Susanna Phillips, who lived nearby and who had been educated in Paris, described the Countess and her family as ‘great favourers of the original Revolution—and even at this moment she declares herself unable to wish the restoring of the old regime—persecuted and ruined as she and thousands more have been by the unhappy consequences of the Revolution’.26 Despite her political sympathies, she Xed to England with her son when the Jacobins came to power. Susanna Phillips commented on her ‘great politeness—she is about thirty-three—an elegant Wgure, not pretty but with an animated and expressive countenance—very well read—pleine d’esprit, and I think lively and charming’.27 Louise Vige´e Le Brun had painted her in 1789, holding a book as though to conWrm the justice of at least one of these observations, and through a brilliant use of costume and hairstyle as well as a superb technique made her look almost beautiful, the epitome of Parisian aristocratic elegance just before the outbreak of revolution. She had been accompanied to England by her lover the chevalier de Jaucourt, himself freed from prison through an intervention of Stae¨l’s, and a member of the most liberal wing of the aristocracy. Susanna Phillips called him ‘a delightful man . . . of Wrst rate abilities—and of very uncommon Wrmness and integrity’.28 Despite the closeness of the Countess’s relationship with him, which was regularized when she divorced her husband and married the chevalier, a contemporary diarist described her as ‘very coquettish and by temperament rather lax in her morals’.29 She had been one of the most ardent Constitutionalists of Paris, holding court among the revolutionaries and ‘all the swells of the democratic party’, and appearing at the Assemble´e, in the public gardens and on the promenades with crowds of attendants. Since Stae¨l numbered her among her close friends, she was naturally upset at missing the Countess in Surrey despite the rather limited credibility she would have gained from her presence. In early January the Count arrived at Juniper Hall, missing his wife by a bare day. Susanna Phillips thought that he looked old enough to be her father (he was in fact seventeen years her senior), ‘very plain in face and Wgure—and very rough, though he seems goodhumoured—his appearance and manner would not ill suit Freeport in The English Merchant’.30 Before the Countess’s departure, Stae¨l had asked Narbonne to secure another woman, 26 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.xvi. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. xvii. 29 Comte d’Espinchal, Journal d’e´migration, ed. Ernest d’Hauterive (Paris: Perrin, 1912), 279. 30 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.xvi.

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to preserve appearances: ‘could you not seduce one, without growing too fond of her?—Madame de Damas, Madame Villiers, just a woman . . . ’31 Her de´sinvolture is unconvincing: propriety, she would discover, mattered a great deal to at least some of the friends she would make in Surrey, and her reputation as a woman of genius would never entirely silence the gossip that her unconventionality provoked. She did not, she told Narbonne, wish to be an ‘event’, yet it was scarcely ever in her power, and rarely to her taste, not to be one. After months of boredom in Switzerland she wanted life, though she claimed to want only some months of tranquillity to explore her passion for Narbonne, whose weariness of her she was not yet prepared to accept. Idealizing the English as her mother had done, not without reservation, but with an abiding conviction that the tradition of fair play and enlightenment would in most cases prevail over bigotry and unreason, she oVered her own deWnition of what constituted unreason, one that would often clash with the common-sense version of her host country. It was not, she thought, temperamental extravagance of the kind sober English people associated her with, but the sort of Xagrant prejudice even this enlightened people occasionally showed in its treatment of women—banishing them from the dinner table at the end of a meal, for instance, so that the men could drink their port undisturbed. Yet a tradition of Anglophilia had been Wrmly established in France in the Wrst third of the eighteenth century by writers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, Montesquieu most notably in De l’esprit des lois and Voltaire in the Lettres philosophiques (also entitled Lettres anglaises). To outsiders England seemed to have evolved an ideally temperate, liberal form of government that combined monarchical dignity with republican equity. Even under duress—as it manifestly was during the War of American Independence—it seemed fundamentally stable, and the nature of the parliamentary system impressed foreign observers with its measured fairness. Economically, too, it worked. The entrepreneurial spirit of the natives made their country appear the natural successor to seventeenth-century Holland, and it reaped the full rewards of expansionist policies and unashamed market-mindedness. England, in other words, combined the reassurance of tradition with the fearlessness of modernity, its industrial development perfectly balanced by its profound sense of history, its aristocracy uniting with an ambitious 31 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.72 (to Narbonne, Rolle, 25 Nov. 1792).

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middle class to promote wealth and preserve the treasures and traditions bequeathed by past ages.32 Of course this agreeable picture was often belied: the loss of the American colonies was keenly felt, as was the contrast between the bumbling monarchy of George III and the glorious reign of earlier kings and queens; and as if they were not humiliation enough, at the end of the century another rot would set in with naval mutiny and the threat of national insolvency. But neither in 1793 nor on her later visit in 1813–14 could Stae¨l’s positive view of England be seriously qualiWed. She naturally praised the prevailing freedom of speech and the liberty permitted to the British press, setting it against a French system where censorship had led to dangerous extremism, and repeating her conviction that the absence of political and institutional constraint ultimately ensured the triumph of truth. Equally naturally, she found the English position on divorce—comparatively free since the reign of Henry VIII—just and civilized, although she objected to the fact that husbands, when plaintiVs in cases of adultery, received damages from those who had seduced their wives.33 She did not consider the case of wives sinned against by adulterous husbands, either because she remained in some respects a sexual traditionalist or because it was less immediately relevant to her own case. She also enthused about English literature and English writers. Yet although she forged an initially close bond with Fanny Burney while she was in England, Burney’s reservations about Stae¨l highlighted the tensions that made her the double being she was: part free spirit, but part exile; part subordinate, domestic creature, but part artistic genius beyond the world of convention. Burney’s novel Cecilia is mentioned in the Essai sur les Wctions, together with Madame de Charrie`re’s Caliste (the second part of her Lettres e´crites de Lausanne) and Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cle` ves, among novels that present readers with ‘delicate principles of female conduct’.34 Stae¨l read Cecilia not on its Wrst publication in 1782, but probably in 1792, before her departure for England.35 Laclos had praised it (while criticizing the poor French translation) in a May 1784 review for the Mercure de France, his attention presumably caught by the scenario of a young woman’s 32 On these matters see e.g. Paul Langford, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9–10. 33 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 553. 34 Stae¨l, Essai sur les Wctions, in Œuvres de jeunesse, 131–56, at 152–3. 35 See Robert de Luppe´, Les Ide´es litte´raires de Madame de Stae¨l et l’he´ritage des Lumie` res (Paris: J. Vrin, 1969), 28.

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introduction to the world and exposure to the danger of liaisons that is also the central theme of Les Liaisons dangereuses. Stae¨l’s interest in Cecilia, by contrast, may seem merely the concern of someone not yet a novelist to discover what made a (female) Wctional best-seller, even though Cecilia made less of a stir among the reading public than Evelina had done. But her fondness for the book may also have been due to the author’s persistence in tracing the agonies of incomprehension and misunderstanding suVered by a duty-loving, well-intentioned inge´nue in a society full of people seeking to discomWt her, a potent theme in her own Wction. She might also have learned salutary lessons in readability from Burney, whose way with repartee and dialogue is much lighter than hers (as a formal writer, that is; few ever outdid Stae¨l as a conversationalist and speaker). The gulf between them would in this respect be unbridgeable, at least until Burney’s own touch faltered in later years. The two women met when Burney was spending some weeks with Susanna Phillips at Mickleham. The Juniperians were frequently invited to Norbury Park, the home of the liberal-minded William Locke and his Swiss wife Fredy, and it was at one such gathering that Stae¨l was introduced to Susanna Phillips and her sister. Having heard some local gossip that the Hall had been let to ‘French Papishes’ who were unlikely to pay their way,36 Locke immediately oVered to stand surety for the rent, and made a point of befriending the new tenants. Burney was both thrilled and frightened by them. She became a particular admirer of Talleyrand, who had made his headquarters in London but often came down to Mickleham, though even there he attracted the attention of press and government by the sheer force of his being. Initially, it is true, he inspired mistrust in her. ‘Madame de Stae¨l whispered me, ‘‘How do you like him?’’ ‘‘Not very much,’’ I answered, ‘‘but I do not know him.’’ ‘‘O, I assure you,’’ cried she, ‘‘he is the best of the men.’’ I was happy not to agree . . . ’37 But she quickly came round, writing to Mrs Locke: ‘it is inconceivable what a convert [he] has made of me; I think him now one of the Wrst members, and one of the most charming of this exquisite set, a man of admirable conversation, quick, terse, Wn and yet deep. They are a marvellous set for excess of agreeability.’38 On 14 February she described the happy state of conviviality in which she and her sister lived 36 Susanna Burney Phillips to Fanny Burney, Oct. 1792, in Diaries and Letters of Madame d’Arblay Edited by Her Niece, 6 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1842–6), V.116. 37 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.13 (to Mrs Locke, Mickleham, c.9 Feb. 1793). 38 Ibid. 19 (to Dr Burney, Mickleham, 16–19 Feb. 1793).

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amidst such company: ‘We go here living upon Juniper Be’ers most luxuriantly—and their Xavour loses nothing by use. I never used to think them so exquisite.’39 ‘There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating than this colony’, according to her. ‘Between their suVerings and their agre´ments, they occupy us almost wholly.’40 With the news of Louis XVI’s execution, which arrived at Juniper Hall at about the same time as Stae¨l herself, the Juniperians feared their new friends and hosts might turn against them, since it would have been hard not to hold Constitutionalists partly responsible for the King’s death. But Burney, despite sending to her father in London for some mourning clothes, stopped complaining about their liberalism. (It was rumoured that Suzanne Necker’s lamentations and wails at the dreadful tidings from Paris had been heard ringing in the streets of Geneva, though Gibbon was able to bring a little consolation to her spirits when he came to stay for a few days at the end of January.) In mid-February Burney told her father about Jacques Necker’s enthusiasm for her Wction at a time when, ‘after writing [Louis XVI’s] defence, [he] fell into a state of dejection that incapacitated him for every sort of pursuit till someone put Cecilia into his hands, which he had never found time to read, or perhaps inclination; it caught him, however, and soothed and regaled him, [Mme de Stae¨l] said, when nothing else could touch or interest or amuse him—. I own I was not very much displeased at this circumstance.’41 Stae¨l’s hope that proximity to Narbonne would restore his old feelings for her seemed unlikely to be gratiWed, however pleasantly attentive he managed to appear in company. Indeed, their apparently unlover-like behaviour towards each other persuaded Burney that rumours of a past and present liaison were unfounded—that, and the fact that Narbonne was so goodlooking (if inclined to fatness, according to Susanna Phillips, and with a cast in one eye).42 Stae¨l’s ugliness, for Burney, was in this respect decisive. Much later, in 1821, she would reXect that Stae¨l had ‘licentiously . . . betrayed her conjugal duty for an adored lover’,43 but in 1793 it took the intervention of a querulous and possessive father to persuade her that Narbonne and Stae¨l’s relationship made her further acquaintance with the latter undesirable. Burney’s relations with Narbonne, according to the prejudices of the day, were unaVected. 39 Ibid. 15 (to Mrs Locke, Mickleham, 16 Feb. 1793). 40 Ibid. 18 (to id., Mickleham, 16–19 Feb. 1793). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. xv. 43 Ibid. XI.208 (memorandum book entry, now lost).

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Susanna Phillips observed that Stae¨l’s and Narbonne’s minds ‘in some points ought to be exchanged, for he is as delicate as a really feminine woman, and evidently suVers when he sees her setting les biense´ances aside, as it often enough befalls her to do’.44 If Burney suVered from her friendship with Stae¨l, it was as much because disapproving acquaintances gossiped and warned her about it as anything. James Hutton,45 an eccentric Moravian bookseller and for many years a close friend of the Burneys, wrote to her on 22 February 1793 about ‘a report given out that she was in the habit of intimacy and much seeing the blasted character Madame de Stae¨l daughter of Necker who is in repute of wicked democratic esteem, and ran adulterously after Monsieur de Narbonne’.46 Yet if some put the blame for the relationship squarely on Stae¨l, others set it at least partly on Narbonne. The diarist d’Espinchal, for instance, compared his pre-Revolutionary self with Richardson’s rakish Lovelace or Laclos’s Valmont, in terms that echoed Suzanne Necker’s pre-marital warning to her daughter about associating with libertines. According to d’Espinchal, he was a witty man, but without moral principles or delicacy, given to plotting in the service of his own ambition, too fond of pleasure to stick at serious matters—in short, the linnet he had been nicknamed during his short ministerial career, one of Paris’s most amiable roue´s, but shameless and shallow. All the same, he had been supported in his Revolutionary days by the ‘atrocious ambassadress’.47 Burney’s pity seemed to be all for Narbonne and the parlous state of his Wnances, which helps to explain the rumours that the rent for Juniper Hall would never be paid. Monsieur de Narbonne, alas, has no £1000 a year!—he got over only £4000, at the beginning, from a most splendid fortune, and little foreseeing how all has turned out, he has lived, we fear, upon the principal! For he says if all remittance is withdrawn on account of the war, he shall soon be as ruined as those companions of his misfortunes with whom, as yet, he has shared his little all. He bears the highest character for goodness, parts, sweetness of manners, and ready wit: you could not keep your heart from him if you saw him for only half an hour!48

Yet when, as Dr Burney told his daughter in alarm on 19 February, it was reported that Stae¨l ‘has been accused of partiality to Monsieur de Narbonne, 44 45 46 47 48

Quoted in Herold, Mistress, 126–7. See Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 231. Burney, Journals and Letters, II.25. D’Espinchal, Journal, 325. Burney, Journals and Letters, II.18 (to Dr Burney, Mickleham, 16–19 Feb. 1793).

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and her house was the centre of Revolutionists before the 10th of August’,49 the shock was enough to stop her cultivating the great woman’s acquaintance, even though she later became convinced that Hutton’s warnings about Stae¨l’s ‘infamy’ and her life as a diabolical democrat or ‘adulterous demoniac’ were exaggerated. Indeed, she sent Hutton such a spirited reply and defence of Stae¨l that he too became persuaded that the ‘ugly chronicle’ he had heard was untrue, though she told her father that she had been devastated by it. Good God, my dearest father, what a dreadful letter is this of Mr Hutton’s—it is impossible for me or to Susan seeing all we see, to credit what we hear. Nevertheless I am thankful past all expression that a real indisposition had prevented my being under any roof than this [ to Stae¨l’s pressing invitation to remove from the Phillips house to Juniper Hall]. . . . [The] universe now would not induce me to go to poor Juniper, Wrmly as I believe its unhappy inhabitants cruelly calumniated, and truly worthy of every protection and support . . . Susan and I are Wlled with horror and indignation at this incessant persecution of ruined and desolate individuals.50

Her belief that Stae¨l and Narbonne were innocent of the charges brought against them by society at least makes plain that she never read the explicit letters Narbonne had received from his lover and later entrusted for safekeeping to his companion Alexandre d’Arblay, Burney’s future husband. Her genuine caution over issues such as this may be partly attributable to fears that her pension from the Queen might be stopped if the monarch heard about the risky friendship. True, Burney had been glad to leave the stultifying life of the court in 1791, where she had from 1786 been Charlotte’s Second Keeper of the Robes, and where she and her companions were, as Wollstonecraft put it, ‘the most oppressed’, lesser servants whose frustration at the formality and stuYness of the King and Queen’s lives was acute, and whose appointment to a court position such as the one she had occupied for Wve years was envisaged as being itself like a marriage—for life, or so the Queen hoped;51 but for the sake of the £100 per annum Charlotte awarded her when she left she had to avoid oVending prudish sensibilities. And it would be on account of a similar concern about a pension, in this case her husband’s from the French government, that some ten years later, in Paris, she would again avoid Stae¨l’s dangerous presence.

49 Ibid. 20–1 (Chelsea College, 19 Feb. 1793). 50 Ibid. 26 (to Dr Burney, Mickleham, 24 Feb. 1793). 51 See Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London: Flamingo, 2002), 69.

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But Charles Burney’s letter had devastated her. ‘I am not at all surprised,’ he wrote, at your account of the captivating powers of Madame de Stahl [sic]. It corresponds with all I had heard about her, and with the opinion I formed of her intellectual and literary powers on reading her charming ‘Apology of Rousseau’. But as nothing human is allowed to be perfect, she has not escaped censure . . . I know all this will make you feel uncomfortable—but it seemed to me right to hint it to you. If you are not absolutely in the house of Madame de Stahl when this arrives, it would perhaps be possible for you to waive the visit to her by a compromise, of having something to do for Susy—and so make the addendum to your stay under her roof.52

Rather oddly, Burney replied thanking him: ‘What a kind letter is my dearest father’s!’53 Yet she cannot really have wanted the charm of her new friendship to be so abruptly converted into an attitude of fear and suspicion. ‘I am both hurt and astonished at the acrimony of malice; indeed, I believe all this party to merit nothing but honour, compassion and praise.’ Besides, she could forgive much in one whose devotion to her father resembled her own, a devotion which was reportedly responsible for her embracing a revolutionary doctrine: ‘Madame de Stae¨l [is] the daughter of Monsieur Necker, the idolising daughter of course, and even from the best principles, those of Wlial piety, entered into the opening of the Revolution just as her father entered into it.’ It was not the least of Dr Burney’s objections to his daughter’s friendship with Stae¨l that he believed Necker and the nobles who moved for change to be the begetters of the French Revolution, and held all Frenchmen and -women who wanted to alter the status quo responsible for the violence it had brought with it. All the same, Stae¨l—who suspected nothing of all this—was ‘thunderstruck and disappointed’ when Burney refused her invitation to stay at Juniper Hall. ‘She wants us to study French and English together, and nothing could, to me, be more desirable but for this invidious report’,54 Burney reported wistfully. Although her father’s warnings struck her forcefully, the part her unloved stepmother played in the campaign to discredit Stae¨l did not recommend itself to her any more than that of other relative outsiders. Yet if Stae¨l could deceive herself about the degree of English disapproval she attracted—‘People are polite in society, with the but of my claimed democracy, but without the word prudishness being advanced, although I am living in the same house in 52 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.20–1 (Chelsea College, 19 Feb. 1793). 53 Ibid. 21 (Mickleham, 22 Feb. 1793). 54 Ibid. 23 (Mickleham, 22 Feb. 1793).

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the country as Narbonne’55—it seems likely that English reserve rather than general regard accounted for the apparent absence of censure. Whatever the case, she was happy in what she felt to be Burney’s spontaneous liking for her; as she wrote to Gibbon, ‘Miss Burney . . . has conceived a mad passion for me because we are both blue stockings.’56 It seems unlikely that this was the true reason. Burney hated to be thought clever, because it could be (and often was) construed as a social and sexual handicap, and because her father thought it unfeminine and therefore improper. Her unperformed play The Witlings satirized the ‘Queen of the Blues’, Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, a salon hostess much admired in the second half of the eighteenth century, and who had been good to her.57 Perhaps more dangerously from Stae¨l’s point of view, blueness was associated with the reactionary and pedantic, and deWned the opposite pole to the one she herself inhabited.58 What made the Blues attractive to Burney, on the other hand, and despite the hostility of The Witlings, was the fact that they published for proWt and public regard—as she herself did—while preserving unimpeachable reputations.59 The contrast with Stae¨l was inescapably striking. Whether or not they articulated it, both women felt frustrated and resentful at the role allotted to women in a male-dominated society, though they expressed their reservations diVerently. Unlike Stae¨l’s, Burney’s literary heroines—Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and Juliet—are all dependants, either because their true social rank is not recognized or (as with Cecilia) because patriarchal demands divest them of their due fortune and commit them to a subordinate role in marriage. Burney’s own life, of course, would display the reverse pattern when she married a pauper and assumed the role of chief breadwinner in her household. ‘I cannot resist Madame de Stae¨l’, she wrote in French to d’Arblay, ‘even when a most disagreeable thing has to be done’60—that is, presumably, when she was trying to obey the call of supposed duty rather than the spontaneous impulses of the heart. She told d’Arblay how grateful she would be if he could persuade Stae¨l to stop demanding letters in French, at least until her own 55 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.428–9 (to Gibbon, 25 May 1793). 56 Ibid. 400 (to id., 26 Feb. 1793). 57 See Katharine M. Rogers, Fanny Burney: The World of ‘Female DiYculties’ (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 19. 58 See Victor de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.39; also Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 59 See Poovey, Proper Lady, 37. 60 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.194 (Mickleham, 20–2 Feb. 1793).

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lessons from d’Arblay had borne some fruit, since writing to her now would be ‘a most disagreeable thing’ indeed. For all that, Stae¨l, the ‘head of the little French colony in this neighbourhood . . . , is a woman of the Wrst abilities, I think, I have ever seen’. ‘She is more in the style of Mrs Thrale than any other celebrity character; but she has inWnitely more depth, and seems an even [sic] profound politician and metaphysician. She has suVered us to hear some of her works in manuscript which are truly wonderful for powers both of thinking and expression.’61 Or again: ‘[Madame de Stae¨l] is one of the Wrst women I have ever met with for abilities and extraordinary intellects,’62 a ‘delightful’ person.63 (Stae¨l returned the compliment, calling Burney ‘the Wrst lady of England’.) Her grasp of English, too, was solid enough, despite her invariable preference for hearing as well as speaking French abroad. ‘Madame de Stae¨l,’ she informed Mrs Locke three weeks after Stae¨l’s arrival in England, ‘has written me two English notes, quite beautiful in ideas, and not very reprehensible in idiom. But English has nothing to do with elegance such as theirs—at least, little and rarely.’64 The same Stae¨l who had begun learning English by reading Milton told her in Milton’s language, rather touchingly, ‘I follow the same system writing my Wrst English letter to Miss Burney: after such an enterprise nothing can aVright me. I feel for her so tender a friendship that it melts my admiration, inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence, and impresses me to the idea that in a tongue even unbeknown I could express sentiments so deeply felt.’65 She then frightened Burney with the parting shot: ‘My servant will return for a French answer.’ In the event, it was not apprehension of this that caused the friendship to founder. When she replied in Stae¨l’s native language, she was sent a note of congratulation: ‘Your card in French, my dear, has already something of your grace in writing English: it is Cecilia translated.’66 (The irony, given what Laclos had said about the French translation, cannot have been intended.) Burney was able to hone her skill at spoken and written French with Narbonne’s companion d’Arblay, the Frenchman of ‘very Wne Wgure and good face’ about whom she had already written to her mistrustful father, ‘one of the most delightful characters I have ever met, for openness, 61 62 63 64 65 66

Burney, Journals and Letters, II.18 (to Dr Burney, Mickleham, 16–19 Feb. 1793). Ibid. 10 (to Dr Burney, Norbury Park, 4 Feb. 1793). Ibid. 13 (to Mrs Locke, Mickleham, c.9 Feb. 1793). Ibid. 14 (to Mrs Locke, 14 Feb. 1793). Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.387–8 ( Juniper Hall, 7–13 Feb. 1793). Ibid. 389 ( Juniper Hall, 8–14 Feb. 1793).

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probity, intellectual knowledge and unhackneyed manners’,67 and far less the worldling than Narbonne. Bertie Greatheed called him ‘pleasant’, ‘handsome’, and ‘very intelligent’.68 He lacked the savoir-faire and panache of the egotistical Narbonne, and would eventually suVer for the passivity that encouraged political leaders to overlook his claims to preferment. But it was d’Arblay who later ventured the opinion that Stae¨l had been slandered in the rumour-mongering about her morals, because ‘people did not do justice to the eminent qualities of her heart as of her mind. Nothing equals her benevolence, her humanity, her obligingness and the need she feels to practise it.’69 There was no one, he thought, who united more talents to more virtues than she did, and the fact that she had eVectively suVered an arranged marriage made her as much a victim as other women of her class. ‘All [such marriages], so to speak, were so many sacriWces, more or less painful, to conventions of which women have always been the victims.’ I swear on my honour that without being able to aYrm that the relationship between Madame de Stae¨l and Monsieur de Narbonne was not the most intimate imaginable, I do declare that at present this relationship is merely the most respectable friendship. I protest that I have seen Madame de Stae¨l moved to tears by the sight of a family as close as that of Norbury. I swear, Wnally, that I would recommend Madame de Stae¨l’s company to my wife, my sister, as useful in terms of decency as in all those of pleasingness.70

This verdict would have been reassuring to Burney in 1793, but the rigidity of social etiquette, along with her native timorousness, stopped the friendship developing, and she came to see Stae¨l as a threat compounding indecency and regrettable seductiveness. Once she had decided to refuse her invitation to Juniper Hall, the need to leave Mickleham on the pretext that she was unwell and return to her father’s apartment at Chelsea College in London became pressing. She cannot have expected that Stae¨l would try to see her there, but that is precisely what happened. Burney may have written to Mrs Locke at the end of February about ‘these exquisite people’ at Juniper Hall whom she ‘had been liking and loving more and more every 67 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.9, II.11 (to Dr Burney, 28 Jan. and 4 Feb. 1793). 68 Ibid. V. p. xx. 69 Ibid. II.31 (d’Arblay to Fanny Burney, Mickleham, after 6 Mar. 1793). 70 Ibid. 32. Margaret Anne Doody suggests that d’Arblay’s lesson is reXected in the sympathetic treatment of Gabrielle in The Wanderer: see Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 331.

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day without any suspicion or control’,71 but on 12 March she told Susanna Phillips about an unanticipated and embarrassing recent event. It was one which, in the paranoia it provoked, if not in the unpleasant prudery it elicited, would be echoed nine years later in Paris. Stae¨l had written on 8 March announcing her intention to call at Chelsea College four days later between midday and one o’clock. Burney described the occasion in dramatic terms: Nothing could happen more perversely than the events of this day. Poor Madame de Stae¨l was let in, and boasts she had a most courteous reception from la Dama [Mrs Burney], with whom she spent a quarter of an hour!—Thus the promised suspension was palpably broke, though so innocently! For she came on hither avowedly! And to make all worse and worse, Mrs Ord [Anne Dillingham Ord, a disapproving Tory hostess who would later ostracize Fanny for her marriage to the penniless Catholic d’Arblay] called while she was there!!! And then coming on herself to me, found her carriage here [Sloane Street]! And would not come in! but sent her name and a message! How very, very provoking! She went—and I then Xew into Mrs Ord’s carriage to appease, but she is all anew acharne´e, and I was much Xustered and distressed. It was an inWnitely indiscreet kindness in this poor ardent woman, who was so charming, so open, so delightful herself, that while with me I forgot all the mischief that would follow . . . To add to this comes another letter from Monsieur de Narbonne oVering to spend a day at Chelsea! How will all this then be blazoned! And how duped is the unsuspecting character who fancies she has made a friend! I am inexpressibly disturbed by the expectation of this eventuality spreading to Queen’s House and occasioning fresh terrors, perhaps injunctions!72

Thirty years later Burney looked back at the motives for and consequences of her avoiding a woman to whom she had spontaneously felt so drawn. Rereading the postscript by Stae¨l to a letter from Mickleham which Susanna Burney Phillips had sent her sister at Chelsea College on 6 May 1793, shortly before Stae¨l’s departure—‘Tell me if you have been fortunate enough to acquire any new secrets since I saw you—for myself, I confess that I still feel regard for you and give you permission to spread it abroad’73—she noted: ‘The secrets meant were F. B.’s motives for declining to visit Juniper Hall . . . F. B. had received renseignements which she durst not avow, but which forced her to stop the peculiar intimacy which the charm of the conversation had brought on, in F. B.’s ignorance of the unhappy incorrectness at least of the conduct of that wonderful enchanting highly gifted 71 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.27 (Chelsea College, 28 Feb. 1793). 72 Ibid. 34 (to Susanna Burney Phillips, Sloane Street, London, 12 Mar. 1793). 73 Ibid. 110 (Mickleham, 6 May 1793).

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woman.’74 (The new secrets, coyly suspected, were d’Arblay’s hopes of Burney’s aVections, his admission of strong feelings for her, and hers for him.) In 1802 she would refer to her acquaintance with Stae¨l as an ‘intimacy too hastily and unhappily formed’ or an ‘intimacy so unfortunately begun in England’, but in 1813, when both women were back in London, she still agonized about the way she had behaved towards the brilliant, kindly visitor in 1793. She ‘could not help dropping her’: for none of my friends, at that time, would suVer me to keep up the intercourse. I had messages—remonstrances—entreaties representation—letters and conferences, till I could resist no longer, though I had found her so charming that I fought the hardest battle I dared Wght against almost ALL my best connections . . . She is now received by all mankind—but that, indeed, she always was—all womankind, I should say, with distinction and pleasure.75

There would be later evidence of Stae¨l’s allegedly scandalous life that she took as conWrming the rightness of her original decision to break oV all contact with her. But, years after their Wrst meeting, the note of regret and frustrated desire can still be heard. Stae¨l ran into other diYculties in England than simply those involving her relationship with Burney. When she went to London she probably expected to be welcomed and even admired despite the establishment mistrust of her supposed republicanism. The reality was rather diVerent. Although Gibbon’s letter to Lord SheYeld at the end of 1792 had asked for the peer’s condescension, SheYeld’s reply cannot have been reassuring: We had a very pleasant party here at dinner last Saturday to meet Madame de Stae¨l, the Prince de Poix, Lally Tolendal, Princess d’Henin, Malouet, Baron de Gillier . . . We all went in the evening to Lady Catherine Douglas, where Madame de Stae¨l rather astonished the Chancellor . . . In conversation she disputed every principle of government and politics—a kind of teˆte-a`-teˆte. There is a great prejudice against her. She is supposed to be the most intriguing democrat likely to set the Thames on Wre. I can hardly get people to agree that that she is eminently lively, pleasant, endowed with extraordinary ability, though somewhat ridiculous.76

Her particular crime from the point of view of the English upper classes seems to have been of the same order as her impossibility for Burney—a tendency to breach propriety so Xagrant that it nearly caused polite social intercourse 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. VII.170 (to Mrs Waddington, Chenies Street, London, 26 Aug. 1813). 76 Gibbon, Private Letters, II.377 (26 Mar. 1793).

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to break down. Propriety counted for these English men and women in a way it did not for Stae¨l herself, even though she understood the importance of conforming to social and sexual traditions as well as Burney did, and like her satirized the concept of seemliness at the same time as upholding many (in Burney’s case most) of its demands. What separated them was the importance they publicly as well as privately attached to regularity. Here as in other respects Burney’s hand was forced by the condition of subordination she lived in as the daughter of Dr Burney and a dependant of the Queen. That her understanding of propriety was inconsistent is evident in her dropping Mrs Thrale for daring to (re)marry for love in the teeth of social disapproval, even though making an unsuitable marriage was precisely what Burney herself did in becoming the penniless d’Arblay’s wife. But whereas her ostracism of Hester Thrale was almost irrelevant—there was no need for her to concern herself with her former friend’s life choices— Burney’s disapproval of Stae¨l was necessitated by her social position and the relationships she had with other people. It is of course easier to be cavalier about such things when, like Stae¨l, one is rich and already has a reputation for independent-mindedness, though none of the literary works that really made her name had been written by 1793 (and the novels that set female greatness of a moral or artistic kind above the smallminded impulses of the ‘regular’ world were nine years and more away). But perhaps if Stae¨l had read Evelina and Cecilia more attentively, she might have divined in Burney greater tolerance for her own state of irregularity than she apparently did. True, The Wanderer would show through the character Gabriella, and the unhappiness she endures in an arranged and distasteful marriage, the sort of sympathy with the lot of high-born Frenchwomen and the socially aberrant conduct it may engender that she had refused to entertain in the case of Stae¨l. By 1814 d’Arblay’s strictures had obviously borne fruit. Yet it is perhaps possible to see in the plots of the earlier Burney novels an imaginative understanding of these same issues of female unhappiness in a prison created by patriarchal society, issues that would also concern Stae¨l in De l’inXuence des passions. The fact that Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, along with The Wanderer, all end with the acceptance of established order does not mean that the order goes unquestioned;77 they simply convey a realistic perception of how the world works and what the power of its conventions is, 77 See Rogers, Burney, 4.

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particularly for disenfranchised females. On this reading, Burney may be seen as less committed to propriety than pragmatically aware of its sway.78 When she was still at court she had a conversation with the Revd Charles de GuiVardie`re (‘Mr Turbulent’, as she called him) on the subject of good conduct.79 In the course of it she stated that she had never done anything she repented, because she rarely did anything. (Her later character Camilla, scatty but well-intentioned, would have made a more revealing case for de Guiffardie`re to examine in this respect.) When asked whether prejudice, education, or accident had protected her thus, Burney said that all should have done, but added fear: ‘I run no risks that I can see—I run, but it is always from all danger that I perceive—not because that is morally right, but because it is not wrong.’80 Hence her avoidance of Stae¨l in Surrey and London. Stae¨l, by contrast, was temperamentally a risk-taker, as much because she deplored the small-mindedness of those who jibbed at being venturesome as because she associated more important values with being bold—as she had been, for example, in risking her own safety to rescue beleaguered friends and acquaintances in 1792. Yet Burney herself had taken a real risk in publishing her Wrst novel, that of incurring an adored father’s displeasure as well as being discovered and disapproved of by the world. It may have been potentially a lesser risk than many Stae¨l took—Wghting the political establishment, braving social scorn and rejection—but it was still a fearless assertion of nonconformity, which even periodic concessions such as withdrawing The Witlings because her father and a family friend were critical of it did not disprove. She and Stae¨l were both realists in their diVerent ways, knowing that they had somehow to engage with the world to mature and achieve. As realists they showed in their lives and Wction that women cannot earn by moral qualities or physical attributes a stable form of happiness, since that is dependent on a social structure which they as women cannot change. Although Stae¨l diVered from Burney in believing that the individual could aVord to challenge this order, her novels realistically reveal that taking chances oVers no guarantee of happiness or success as a result. Her relationship with Narbonne had also illustrated this truth. The autonomy she preserved, and which allowed her to behave in ways Burney disapproved of, was relative, as it would be for her allegedly 78 pace Patricia Spacks, who Xatly states in Imagining a Self (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976) that Burney is committed to propriety (158). 79 Also described in Spacks, ibid. 160. 80 Burney, Early Journals and Letters, III.392.

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liberated heroine Corinne. If Burney shows in Evelina and Cecilia (who sacriWces a fortune that would have let her help the village poor simply in order to conform to the desires of her husband’s family) the diYculty for women of upsetting the status quo, Stae¨l is equally convinced that woman’s position in society condemns her to dependency. Observing and knowing Burney as she did in England, feeling the loss of Narbonne’s love, she must have been forced to reXect on how female ‘irregularities’ have an eVect on female happiness out of all proportion to their origin. De l’inXuence des passions—which she had started working on by this time—would consequently develop the sense of fatalism about woman’s destiny that Burney’s pre-Revolutionary Wction had also pointedly suggested. In Camilla (1796) Burney would show the boundaries of ‘proper’ conduct to be lines drawn by men,81 and the matters on which women are judged as deWned simply by appearances. Ironically, however, she could not clearly see that her judgement on Stae¨l was conditioned in exactly the same way. She was unable as a consequence to progress from being a moralist to a humane realist. Yet her doubts about the correctness of observing the proprieties had been awakened well before she met Stae¨l in 1793. In April 1791, at a social gathering, she had been tempted to cut Lady Duncannon, the daughter of Lady Spencer and sister of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, on account of her adulterous reputation. Nonetheless, ‘I was beginning again, internally, to incline towards her with softened sentiments of goodwill when Lady Spencer, rising, proposed my taking her seat [by her daughter]. This was too much; this was leading to an intimacy I peculiarly wished to avoid: and neither respect for the mother nor pity for the daughter could operate . . . and when asked again I frankly said I preferred moving about . . . ’82 But Lady Duncannon’s allegedly vengeful husband proceeded to take such tender care of his wife that Burney was shaken and ‘struck with some doubt of the truth of the charges brought against this poor suVerer’. When the much looser Lady Elizabeth Foster then incurred her further displeasure, on the other hand, ‘I am satisWed her general powers of shining were violently damped by my coldness and reserve.’ More: ‘My distaste for this intercourse now drove me, as to one less irksome, upon Lady Duncannon! For her suVering state, her softness and the ease with which she was repressed, made her an object so greatly more to my mind . . . that I was fain now to address 81 See Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 51. 82 Burney, Journals and Letters, I.43.

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her myself !’83 The brief conversation they were able to have did not leave her feeling precisely pleased—‘for repugnant doubt kept oV pleasure’—but ‘admiration, and a disposition for liking her, were forced from me, and more and more, as I longer stayed, in so much that I ended in fervent wishes that calumny, not truth, may have condemned her . . . and—in fact I cannot believe her culpable of the crimes laid to her charge!’84 She was equally perplexed by the character of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by her ‘mannerliness, sobriety, seriousness, secret melancholy . . . ’, and ‘I came away impressed with the most mixed sensations of pain and pleasure. The terrible stories circulated of the miserable misconduct of a part of this community made me shudder at their powers of pleasing; and the excellence of the behaviour and manner I witnessed contradicted them all, and rendered these objects of defamation patterns of virtue! Lady Elizabeth Foster I except . . . ’85 Mrs Ord was ‘quite in dismay at this acquaintance, and will believe no good of them, and swallows all that is said of evil! In some points, however, I have found her so utterly misinformed that I shall never make over into her.’ Some memory of all this clearly persisted in her later reaction to the intimations of scandal surrounding Stae¨l; but not enough to make her brave social disapproval, any more than her conviction that Mrs Thrale deserved her condemnation could be shaken—though ‘even now [May 1792], if I saw her kindly disposed, I should instantly, involuntarily, Xy into her arms’.86 Poor Burney, then to be pitchforked into Stae¨l’s risky but seductive company! She had no doubt read Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1778), and so knew that: ‘The same degree of active courage is not to be expected in woman as in man; and, not belonging to her nature, it is not agreeable in her.’87 Had she not done so, might she have dared to cross the gender divide? (It is tempting to conclude that she would, if only because she regularly creates such irritatingly passive men in her novels.) If, as has been claimed, she was ‘at the front line of the ongoing battle to defend and extend ‘‘polite’’ values’,88 did she Wght with conviction? If she had done so more regularly, would her attitude towards Stae¨l have changed? We cannot be certain, but it is tantalizing to reXect that later in the year in which she fell for and then rejected Stae¨l’s charms she wrote a short 83 Ibid. 46. 84 Ibid. 47. 85 Ibid. 49. 86 Ibid. 155. 87 Quoted in Burney, Evelina, ed. Stewart J. Cooke (New York and London: Norton, 1998), 341. 88 See Claire Harman, Fanny Burney (London: Flamingo, 2000), 191.

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work bearing on the world of public aVairs traditionally thought to be closed to women, but where Stae¨l would occupy an increasingly prominent position as the years passed. Burney’s Brief ReXections Relating to the Emigrant French Clergy, published on 19 November 1793, takes up the cause of the refractory priests driven by Revolutionary events from their own country to England, and reliant on the support and goodwill of a nation often mistrustful of the Roman Catholicism they professed and defended. Encouraged to support the emigrants by her father, the honourary secretary of the band of ‘Ladies of Great Britain’ who were then attempting to raise money on their behalf, Burney was for the Wrst time leaving the apolitical space which her Wction appears to endorse as woman’s natural habitat. Although her opening words declare that public matters are not the appointed province of her sex, the message is that the female’s domesticity, which gives her voice its characteristic sensitivity, sympathy, and benevolence, is precisely what Wts her for appeals of this kind—a limited concession maybe, but a real endorsement of the feminist intimations heard in her novels. Women are not to be ‘mere passive spectatresses of the moral as well as of the political economy of human life’;89 it is their ‘retirement, which divests them of practical skill for public purposes, [that] guards them at the same time from the heart-hardened eVects of general worldly commerce’.90 More, ‘however truly of [women] to withdraw from notice may be in general the Wrst praise, in a service such as this they may with yet more dignity come forward’.91 Tame this may be, but the impetus behind it stands comparison with Stae¨l’s publication the same year of the Re´Xexions sur le proce` s de la Reine, a panegyric of essential womanliness. This work, according to its author, is less a political tract or plea than the characteristically female product of pity for a suVering Marie-Antoinette, described as a pure Wgure of tragedy undeservingly reduced from glory to the depths of misery. (There is perhaps an edge to Stae¨l’s writing here, given that she had earlier tried and failed to persuade the royal family to Xee from the danger of remaining in Paris.) She paints a rather unconvincing picture of a virtuous and maternal queen who stood at a distance from politics, itemizing her alleged virtues as part of a promotion familiar in Marie-Antoinette’s day: celebrating her maternal 89 Burney, Brief ReXections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, in Hannah More, Considerations on Religion and Public Education (1794), ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Reprint Society, 1990), p. iii. 90 Ibid., p. iv. 91 Ibid., p. v.

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love was particularly popular, and artists such as Vige´e Le Brun tried to convey it in paint, though Stae¨l argues the queen’s alleged beneWcence without any reference to her known prodigality and obliviousness to the plight of the poor. She had, of course, set about writing her defence as one wronged woman trying to save another, but the Re´Xexions seems positively perverse in its forced attempt to invoke the sympathy of every female, no matter what her class, for the captive queen: ‘Oh Women, you of every country, every class of society, listen to me with the same emotion as I experience; the destiny of Marie-Antoinette contains all that can touch your heart; if you are happy, she has been . . . ’92 What this illustrates with great clarity, however, is the rigid and paradoxical class-consciousness of its author. Marie-Antoinette’s faults are smoothed over (we may contrast the ‘improved’ image Stae¨l presents of her with the hatchet-job she performs on Rousseau’s low-born consort The´re`se Levasseur in the Lettres sur Rousseau) for the sake of accentuating the pathos of her fate. The main point of the panegyric, however, is to uphold the regal principle—an unsettling manifestation of Stae¨l’s very qualiWed democratic beliefs. She is on safer ground arguing in De l’inXuence des passions that any woman is inevitably condemned to unhappiness once she has left the estate to which man condemns her. Although the life of Marie-Antoinette illustrates the failure of a particular and privileged woman to exert beneWcial public inXuence, the case of the female writer who exalts her shows something diVerent—at least when she belongs to the liberal and republican wing of politics. Stae¨l is uncharacteristically too modest to make this connection, but the evidence of her Wghting career underlines it. Burney’s approach was less controversial, and her emphasis on the tactful discretion that may be woman’s most powerful revolutionary weapon entirely true to her own more muted being. But just as her novels carry a disguised polemical charge in their treatment of contemporary manners,93 so the Brief ReXections tactfully engages in politics at a distance. When Burney remarks on the way leisure allows women of a certain class to reXect not merely on the virtues of benevolence, but also on the 92 Stae¨l, Re´Xexions sur le proce` s de la Reine par une femme (aouˆt 1793), ed. Monique Cottret (Montpellier: Presses du Languedoc, 1994), p. v. 93 See Barbara Zonitch, Familiar Violence (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 32, and Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Fanny Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), 5 V.

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pleasures it aVords,94 she means her observation to be taken in a practical sense: that their almost invisible presence and inXuence will result in a reassuring sense of tangible achievement, less a permanent change in the status quo than a quiet altering of previously Wxed minds. Women, on this interpretation, work for the long term, with all the patience and forgetfulness of personal glory that this implies, and their success may be more durable as well as more substantial than that of men. They operate behind the scenes, invisibly yet eYcaciously, but for all that are no more the e´minences grises of traditional politics than they are the ostentatiously disengaged (English) creatures of the Conside´rations sur la Revolution fran¸caise who withdraw from debate and leave the men to their wine. Their sex can Wnd a middle ground in which to work. Yet violence periodically erupts in Burney’s novels95 as men use their physical and social advantage to inXict cruelty upon the opposite sex—the sickening race of the two old women in Evelina, the intermittent physical humiliation by Captain Morvan and Sir Clement Willoughby of Madame Duval (the pantomime dame of the plot in the same novel), the terrifying rages and threats of Mr Harrel in Cecilia, or the brutality of Juliet’s French husband in The Wanderer: all underline the female need for a regular protector. The dismaying evidence over the range of Burney’s Wction, however, is that he cannot be relied upon. Stae¨l’s novels, later, will emphasize the same absence in women’s lives by highlighting the male irresoluteness that leaves heroines without support. Their vulnerability stems too from their ambiguous Wnancial position in a world where marriages are desired for the Wnancial beneWt they will bring the man, as is most cruelly illustrated in Camilla: however ancient the tradition of such arrangements may have been, the new ‘feminine’ ideology makes them appear shockingly retrograde. Like Stae¨l after her, Burney is caught in the paradox of inhabiting a nostalgic, feudal social climate that is yet obliged to adapt to a newly materialistic and capitalistic one. Had Stae¨l read Burney’s novels more carefully, she might have found much to qualify the rose-tinted view of England that fortiWed her before, during, and after her exile. Women are caught in a web of physical challenges—sexual assault, threatened suicide, actual death—that also captures and displays the countervailing impulses of politeness, decorum, and femininity. Whether or not the latter has to entail traditional female repression is an open question. Stae¨l, who would show 94 Burney, Brief ReXections, pp. iv–v.

95 See Zonitch, Familiar Violence, passim.

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many of the same scenarios in her novels, gave it as ambiguous an answer as Burney. The social regulations that constrained their sex may have been equally real for both women, but Burney’s fault was perhaps to make them more entrenched than they had to be. Her contretemps with Stae¨l suggested as much, as did her prudish reserve with the Spencer sisters. In literature, as was natural, she could be freer, more experimental, but in art as in life social pressure made a moralist out of her, when she was truly a realist. In De la litte´rature Stae¨l would discuss a consequential paradox, the fact that women are unfairly asked to cultivate domestic virtues at the expense of literary skills which might elevate them, but may be forgiven even moral lapses if they avoid the public notoriety of artistic success.96 For her, of course, such fame is what De l’Allemagne calls the death-knell of woman’s personal contentment, ‘the dazzling mourning for happiness’. The entry into literature presupposes sacriWcing passion to work, just as the entry of woman into the world of action entails losing autonomy as well as reputation. To win (artistic) fame is, by deWnition, to achieve dangerous notoriety. It is hardly surprising that Burney, anticipating this logic, should show that no woman may set herself up against society and hope to be happy; Stae¨l presents the same predictable outcome in Delphine. With men the result could and should be diVerent, yet the enervated heroes both women depict seem to call even this hesitant conclusion into question. Stae¨l’s leavetaking at the end of her stay in Surrey was sad. A letter Susanna Phillips sent Burney on 6 May anticipated the moment with melancholy, observing that ‘the approaching departure of Madame de Stae¨l . . . chagrins her inexpressibly. She goes with undisguised reluctance, and dreads the prospect of travelling alone.’97 In the evening of 21 May, after a sorrowful day at Norbury Park, she ‘could not rally her spirits at all—but seemed like one torn from all that was dear to her’. Mrs Phillips had walked with her and Narbonne to Mickleham, and Stae¨l ‘sobbed in saying farewell to Mrs Locke’. ‘I am in very low spirits after the departure of Madame de Stae¨l,’ her sister told Burney, ‘because I foresee Monsieur de Narbonne will soon set oV alone, and perhaps we shall never meet again. The more I see of him the more I love him.’98 (In fact he did not leave until June 1794, over a year later.) If Stae¨l had seen the sisters’ exchange, she might have felt rather 96 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 333. 98 All this quoted in ibid. 121–2.

97 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.110.

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bitterly about the comparative equanimity, if not actual relief, that greeted her own departure, and those she left behind did little to dispel this impression. On 22 May d’Arblay simply noted in a letter to Burney that Stae¨l ‘is gone at ten this morning’.99 At least Burney was then able to anticipate with pleasure the prospect of returning to Norbury Park, ‘for this persecuted lady is gone’.100 Apparently she did not pause to consider whether her own conduct, a poor return for the guest’s apparent devotion, might have contributed to that sense of persecution. Stae¨l, who loved the company of men, was rarely prejudiced in favour of women, however greatly the beauty of Juliette Re´camier could transport her. Another exception to the general rule was her cousin Albertine Necker de Saussure, of whom she said: ‘She has all the virtues I lack.’101 The almost passionate tones of her early letters to Burney may simply convey the truth that she did not really distinguish between love and friendship,102 or highlight the fact that she was writing in a foreign language whose nuances escaped her. Burney’s enraptured references to her new friend in diaries and letters, by contrast, are less ambiguous. Stae¨l had simply swept her oV her feet, which is why the unpleasant allegations about her character had struck so hard. On the way back to Switzerland Stae¨l continued entranced with the country she had just left, and with its language. ‘I speak only English, I adore England, I cannot conceive how I ever spoke ill of it.’103 Even the Rhine made her feel nostalgic because it reminded her of the Thames, and so provoked Xoods of tears. She was, as Burney observed, returning to her husband, with whom she would proceed to her parents in Switzerland. The assumption was that Narbonne and Talleyrand would follow as soon as possible. Burney was pleased: ‘Does this seem at all consistent with the terrible reports and assertions you as well as I heard about this lady?’ she asked. ‘I assure you I cannot believe them; but I am nevertheless extremely relieved that she is gone, for the pain of avoiding and dropping her, assigning no reason, and disbelieving her deserving such conduct, was truly cruel.’104 In returning to Coppet Stae¨l would be returning to the life of frustration and torpor which she had been so desperate to escape in 1792. 99 All this quoted in ibid. 121. 100 Ibid. 139 (to Mrs Waddington, Chelsea College, 3 June 1793). 101 See Andre´ Lang, ‘L’Amitie´, source des passions de Madame de Stae¨l’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe, 193–202, at 196. 102 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. ccxiv; Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, I.xxxvi, 121, 161–3, etc. 103 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.111 (Cologne, 30 May 1793). 104 Burney, Journals and Letters, II.139 (Chelsea College, to Mrs Waddington, 3 June 1793).

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‘I adore my father. It is a form of worship. But people do yawn in church.’105 (At less frustrated times she would declare more wholeheartedly that she loved God, her father, and liberty, in that order.)106 Narbonne would continue to frustrate her by declining to follow obediently, and Talleyrand to tell her that this was because her former lover lacked courage and was indecisive, although he deserved sympathy. Talleyrand himself, expelled from England under the Aliens Bill, had in 1792 gone to America. It seemed that Stae¨l would have to make do with a husband who, despite her professions of only a few years before (‘I feel great friendship for you and a great desire for you to love me in twenty years as much as now’),107 was annoying her with his attentions and possessiveness. They moved into a rented house in Nyon, close to Coppet, but although friends visited them Narbonne still obstinately refused to appear. She settled down to two years of grinding boredom, marooned in a land she detested. ‘I have an absolute horror of all Switzerland. These high mountains seem to me like grilles in a convent separating us from the rest of the world. One lives a life of infernal peace here. One shudders, one dies in nothingness.’108 Still, she was reunited with her children, and Eric de Stae¨l extended his ambassadorial protection to his wife’s friends Mathieu de Montmorency and Jaucourt, who travelled to Switzerland incognito. Stae¨l carried on busily saving people from mortal danger. But there was one person, MarieAntoinette, she could no longer help. A sharpened awareness of potential loss, which pervades the Re´Xexions sur le proce` s de la Reine, seemed the natural accompaniment to political revolution and violence. One consequence, as Stae¨l knew only too well, was for relationships to be infused with greater intensity and momentum than they might otherwise have possessed. Where danger changed tranquillity into turmoil—though that would rarely happen in Coppet—it might also create a sense of duty or obligation absent in less perilous times. Her feelings for Narbonne, heightened by anxiety and stress, encouraged her to accuse and insist where in other circumstances she might simply have let go. She invested other, less exclusive relationships, whether of love or friendship,

105 Quoted in Herold, Mistress, p. 37. 106 See Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. xxxiv. 107 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, I.121 (17 Sept. 1786). 108 Quoted in Pierre Kohler, Madame de Stae¨l et la Suisse (Lausanne and Paris: Payot et Cie, 1916), 138.

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with the same sense of urgency. In Switzerland she tried to explain this possessiveness to Gibbon: there are feelings which, uniting all the qualities of love and friendship, have modiWed your existence to such an extent that they are you, much more than you, I do not intoxicate myself with romantic ideas, and I believe in everything which reason has said against them since the beginning of the world. But when extraordinary circumstances like the Revolution which created them have brought together the minds and hearts of two people for Wve years, when these same circumstances have created a mutual dependence that makes it quite impossible to exist without one another, when everything that people call the proprieties, the considerations, the advantages of the world simply presents a heap of ridiculous and dilapidated conventions, I cannot see what the point of living would be if one had to separate.109

She would Wnd out. 109 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.454 (Baˆle, 10 June 1793).

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wiss exile, if it was a homecoming for her father, to Stae¨l felt like death. Dix anne´es d’exil explains why:

Exile, in its various gradations, from banishment from Paris to being immured in a chaˆteau, is the means of terror with which Emperor Napoleon had most success in subduing the upper classes in France. Living in this country, where the pleasures of society are so elegant and varied, is worth so much to the inhabitants that you can cause them more pain than to any other nation by depriving them of their native land . . . Exile seems such an undramatic measure, so apparently moderate, that it is highly advantageous for despots to provoke so much fear and so little protest with this punishment than with more emphatic ways of inXicting pain. . . . Among nations where arbitrary power has long prevailed, people forget that the misfortune of our neighbours threatens our own homeland, and that, far from isolating ourselves to escape tyranny, we should unite to resist it . . . Exile acts on the imagination and is constantly present as an obstacle to every desire, every plan, every hope.1

To deprive her of the two things she most desired, Paris and Narbonne, was bad enough; but this loss was accompanied by another, quite unwanted, presence. Eric de Stae¨l’s intrusiveness, whether intended or involuntary, made the already distasteful positively repellent. She despised him for not being the person he should have been, ignoring the fact that in his own eyes that was precisely what he was. And since he was not Narbonne he would be particularly damned for intruding in areas reserved for her lover. Extravagance, for example, might just be forgiven in a Marie-Antoinette, but a spendthrift husband who consumed funds that could have helped support Narbonne was intolerable. ‘I am more disgusted with Monsieur de Stae¨l than ever,’ she wrote from Frankfurt on the return journey from England, 1 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 155–6.

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and this is why. You [Narbonne] may or may not know that I drew closer to him only in order to be richer. Now I discover that he has more debts than fortune. This man compounds all his faults with a disorder and a taste for luxury you cannot imagine. It is not out of a spirit of generosity that he is ruining himself, but out of ostentation and self-indulgence. He has to travel with a bed, the best horses, a pack of hounds, three valets, and he is as democratic as Robespierre! What a mixture of every kind of baseness, for it is baseness when everything one knows is in misery, when luxury no longer serves any purpose, to Xaunt it. Nothing would revolt me so much as to see Monsieur de Stae¨l in a carriage and you on foot . . . Just think that hell would be preferable for me than living in a house where I had to say at each unnecessary expense: ‘if that had been avoided, what pleasure Monsieur de Narbonne could give his mother, what pleasure he could feel’? And what are these tastes? generosity, pure generosity, while this man-woman is followed by his bed. Who could care a Wg about his being comfortable?2

The worst aspect of this new life was having to acknowledge, as she did, that her husband was as much in love with her as ever. And even if he found favour for certain devoted gestures—ministering to her in a fever, for example—‘he does not understand how pouring so much lemonade doesn’t give him the position in my heart you have’.3 And he was always there, an eternal third party ‘instead of Juniper, that charming and delicious retreat’. But a few months later, in March 1794, ‘I am ready to give myself to Ribbing’. A new favourite had, it seems, appeared on the scene. He was a handsome Scandinavian, a refugee from justice, the man who with two coconspirators had successfully plotted and executed the assassination of King Gustavus of Sweden in 1792. Now he was sheltering in the chateau to which Stae¨l had moved from Coppet, Me´zery (previously Gibbon’s home). Ribbing’s importance lay not principally in his exceptional good looks, with which she could taunt the merely handsome Narbonne; the main thing was his allegedly desperate love for her. ‘I have been imprudent enough to let him love me madly, and sometimes receive from the excessive despair of his noble spirit a sort of agitation which for a moment displaces the dreadful weight on my heart. If I believed that his unbelievable beauty could stir my senses, that by giving myself to him I might enjoy Wve minutes of intoxication, I would do it this evening.’4 But in the midst of temptation she had remained like ice, professing her undying devotion to Narbonne and on occasion making her despairing adorer faint for half an hour. She decided to spare Narbonne further details 2 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, II.1.113–14 (2 June 1793). 3 Ibid. 143 (Coppet, 1 July 1793). 4 Ibid. 260 (Lausanne, 25 Mar. 1794).

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of the aVair, but could Wnd no alternative to moral blackmail when he failed to respond. Suzanne Necker’s ill-health provided the pretext: ‘In the state I am in, so overwhelmed by my mother’s danger . . . at the moment of enduring the most horrible scenes, hearing my mother saying that my attachment to you was driving her to the tomb—you are abandoning me.’5 Not even this, apparently, could move him, nor a further bitter rehearsal of what he owed to her selXess devotion. From Zurich she wrote on 15 April 1794: ‘your attractions are of course a hundred times greater than mine, no man on earth, I think, and I have felt it only too much, has been endowed with wit, seductiveness, charm to equal yours, and I, wholly governed by my impulses, am good for nothing but to give my life, to serve far more than to please, to abandon myself far more than to captivate.’6 Yet a week later she was telling Narbonne that if he neither left for Switzerland nor invited her back to England she was determined never to see him again, a threat which cannot have moved him unduly: ‘I have loved you too much for a half-measure of indiVerence and forgetfulness . . . I shall never again see a man who in my opinion has been more cunningly appalling to me than even the mind of a Robespierre could imagine.’7 She ended up following her husband back to France. Three weeks later she was in Switzerland again, writing to Narbonne from Me´zery with a new edge to her reproach. She had resolved to stop corresponding with him forever, but had one last thing to tell him: ‘My mother died in my father’s arms.’8 It was, of course, Narbonne’s fault. ‘She wrote me a letter when I was in England predicting everything that has happened between you and me. I am not superstitious, but as a moral it is striking.’ To Ribbing she described Suzanne Necker’s death in equally stark terms: ‘She rejected me; she was true to her character till the end.’9 Suzanne Necker had dismissed her daughter from her room with the statement that such a young and brilliant person should not be exposed to the spectacle of destruction. Sarcasm or a hitherto unsuspected concern? Stae¨l had few doubts, telling her husband Wve days before her mother’s death, after she had been refused permission to see her since returning to Me´zery a fortnight before, ‘I am astonished at the constancy of hatred: it is the only lasting feeling in nature’.10 In the midst of it all Jacques Necker was wretched but courageous. ‘I shall tend him as best I can, but you know, alas! how diYcult he Wnds it to love anything that is 5 Ibid. 251 (Lausanne, 19 Mar. 1794). 6 Ibid. 269. 7 Ibid. 278 (21 Apr. 1794). 8 Ibid. 285 (Me´zery, 15 May 1794). 9 Ibid. 648 (15 May 1794). 10 Ibid. 657 (10 May 1794).

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not her.’11 This hardly resembles the man whose closeness to his daughter had so often irked his wife; but Suzanne Necker’s long-drawn-out approach to death had shocked him into a mixture of obsessive devotion and pathetic dependence. His daughter wrote to her husband that her father was investing his wife’s tomb with the same sort of superstitious power she had possessed over him during her life.12 Stae¨l, who did not miss her mother at all, now had some cause for contentment. When Narbonne did Wnally appear at Me´zery in August that year, he was not greeted as he might once have expected to be, and the date of his arrival explains why. The Thermidorean coup had taken place a few days before, Danton and Robespierre were dead, the Terror was over, and Ribbing had been invited to live in the chateau, this last factor intended by Stae¨l to infuriate her husband and snub Narbonne. The calculated insult slightly misWred, however. The political turnaround had resulted in the freeing from jail of friends Narbonne held dear, none more so, perhaps, than his former mistress Madame de Laval, the mother of Stae¨l’s friend Mathieu de Montmorency. Narbonne, though younger than her, saw no bar to resuming the relationship. Stae¨l fumed, then decided to Wnd consolation elsewhere. She was not, however, disposed to regard love with the romantic positivity of youth any longer, having learnt too much about the negative inXuence and eVects of feeling on the female psyche for that. When she thought and wrote about passion henceforth, it would be with the conviction that it was as destructive as the great writers of the seventeenth century had shown it to be, Racine and Madame de Lafayette in particular. It destroyed because the weaker sex was, indeed, weak; the eVect of profound emotion rarely seemed so extreme for men. The phial of poison she had carried with her in order to end life should persecution become too much had symbolized much more for her, she Wnally realized, than it had for Narbonne. It was emblematic of the terminal despair that thwarted feeling induced in her sex, as it would do for Delphine, Corinne, and other characters in her Wction, and which her later lover Benjamin Constant would simply mimic as he initially tried to break her resistance. This is the understanding of passion that she now set about developing in her oeuvre. She would ‘write out’ the pain of desertion, past, present, and future, distilling and sublimating personal grief through the medium of 11 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, 664 (to Eric de Stae¨l, 15 May 1794).

12 Ibid.

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words as she had so markedly failed to do in her letters to Narbonne. It was one of the more eVective ways in which she sought to combine the two powers often seen as opposing each other (and as marking a central distinction between men and women), reason and emotion. It also, incidentally, anticipates her words in the preliminary discourse to De la litte´rature: ‘Among the various developments of the human mind, it is philosophical literature, eloquence and reason that I regard as the true guarantors of freedom.’13 She, who so often challenged convention, saw no reason why a woman should not uphold this principle as eVectively as a man. Her short story Zulma marks an early eVort to show at its point of greatest intensity the dissolution caused by passion, for which purpose she thought it appropriate to use the burning tropics as her setting. Despite having earlier saved him from mortal danger, Zulma murders her lover Fernand, a fellow savage who learned ‘civilized’ arts in Spain when he was captured and taken there by the conquistadores: she kills him in cold blood because she has found him—or thinks she has found him—guilty of inWdelity. Although exonerated of blame for this crime of passion, she commits suicide upon hearing the verdict of her judges, unable to bear existence in a world in which love is not an unsullied absolute. Stae¨l, who condemned suicide later in her career, here justiWes it as the natural response to the ending of perfect love and as the ultimate proof of passion’s inXuence. Indeed, she originally intended the story to form part of De l’inXuence des passions, but later decided to publish it separately on account of its narrative rather than expository character. It hardly matters whether, or how closely, this and similar works reXect her own experience of desertion following exile or emigration. What is signiWcant is the recurrence of a motif—woman betrayed by man as he leaves the close-knit circle of family and home—that will later, in Stae¨l’s full-length novels, be re-presented in scenarios involving the sapping and Wnally destroying of female integrity by the irresolution of the wavering male. The eternal feminine, the principle of woman as lover and potential redeemer, is explored and extended in other writings she published at about this time, but which she had in some cases completed much earlier—the story of Mirza, the tragic, disillusioned West Indian girl betrayed by her partner Xime´o, or Pauline, the beauty deWled by rapacious settlers in St Domingue and subsequently destroyed by the unbending moral 13 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 78.

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principles of her French husband. The idea of love as female fatality became a constant of Stae¨l’s human philosophy from early on, apparently just postdating her marriage (at least in its explicit written form) but pre-dating her developed relationship with Narbonne. If Fernand’s murder in Zulma is the literary transcription of a symbolic murder in real life, it was an act of more strength and resignation in his lover than immediately appears. It is also psychologically consistent, although some readers thought it crudely overstated. Isabelle de Charrie`re, who did not reciprocate Stae¨l’s admiration for her work (she dismissed the younger woman as a writing-machine),14 loathed the story, sending it to a friend with the acidulous comment that after Wrst refraining from open criticism to the author she had felt bound to tell her her real opinion,15 and suggesting to a second acquaintance that literary pride had made her do so.16 When Stae¨l visited her on 17 September she was greeted with politeness that masked contempt. Madame de Stae¨l, Charrie`re noted, ‘prided herself on wit as though she had none, on titled friends as though Monsieur de Stae¨l had plucked her yesterday from the Xoor of a costumier’s, and on Paris society as though she was a provincial who had spent only six weeks there’.17 The second acquaintance to be told about Madame de Charrie`re’s dislike for Zulma was a young man in his twenties, Benjamin Constant, who regularly discussed nihilism, and argued for it, with the equally disabused Charrie`re. He was about to enter Stae¨l’s life with explosive force, then spend most of the following decade-and-a-half trying to Wnd an exit from it. By the late summer of 1794 the party at Me´zery realized that the freedom which had seemed to accompany the fall of Robespierre was a false dawn. Now it was the government of Berne that persecuted them, deciding they must move on. If Ribbing was an exile already, Mathieu de Montmorency and Narbonne hardly felt like free agents. They all drifted towards Coppet, where Stae¨l watched her father’s acts of devotion towards the dead Suzanne 14 On Charrie`re’s hostility towards Stae¨l see C. P. Courtney, Isabelle de Charrie`re (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), 546–84 passim. Charrie`re also criticized Stae¨l, Madame Huber, and Mme de Genlis for contriving ‘appalling, gigantic’ twists of plot (letter of 27 Jan. 1797 to Caroline de Sandoz-Rollin, Charrie`re, in Œuvres comple`tes, 10 vols. (Amsterdam: G. A. van Oorschot, 1979–81), V.287). By contrast, she observed that she herself dreaded the thought of becoming ‘a scribbler by profession, a sort of maniac with pen and ink’ (V.491, letter of 29–31 Oct. 1798). 15 Charrie`re to J.-P. de Chambrier d’Oleyres, 14 June 1794 (ibid. IV.460). See also her letter to him of 5 July 1794 (IV.485). 16 Charrie`re to Benjamin Constant, ibid. IV.420 (3 May 1794). 17 To id., ibid. 571 (24 Sept. 1794).

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Necker from outside the mausoleum, and then decided to return yet again to Me´zery. When she met Constant soon after, they talked unstoppably. Stae¨l invited him to stay as she would anyone else whose conversation interested her and whose ideas Wred her, but without a thought of the future place he would hold in her life. She described the encounter in a letter of 18 September to Ribbing, whose desertion had left her with her usual feelings of melancholy: ‘I found a man of great intelligence here this evening who is called Benjamin Constant . . . , not good-looking, but extraordinarily witty.’18 Others described him as lanky, graceful, and gauche at the same time, with features that were noble in their undeniable ugliness, a man who was virile in a juvenile way, with a pasty complexion and red hair. Stae¨l found him physically repellent, but soon goadingly announced in a letter to Ribbing of 6 October that he was hopelessly in love with her. ‘I shall keep his letters for you and hide his face, which would make my brilliant indiVerence look too easy.’19 But if Ribbing was drawing away from her, as he evidently was, she would surely need consolation. There was no future in her relationship with Narbonne. Constant was already quite sure, even if Stae¨l herself was not, what she should do about this impasse. It was probably not until 1796 that they became lovers, however, Stae¨l only belatedly discovering that she could feel attraction towards him despite his unalluring physical self. The same year, predictably enough, Constant found that he was falling out of love with her. In 1794, however, that stage must have seemed remote. Constant’s friend Julie Talma, the former wife of the great actor Franc¸ois Talma, would later remark, in an observation strikingly applicable to the plot of Constant’s short novel Adolphe as well as to its author’s experiences with various women, that the two sexes had antithetically opposed goals in love, which meant that they could never make each other happy. The man’s desire was simply to enjoy a woman, after which he might rapidly tire of her, and the woman’s to retain her lover once she had yielded to him. The latter would be Stae¨l’s self-imposed task for the best part of Wfteen years with Constant. Before the crystallization of love occurred, however, she continued to regard him with a half-amused, half-disgusted fascination. Many years later Maria Edgeworth would echo the distaste, for Constant did not improve with age: 18 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, III.118.

19 Ibid. 149.

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I do not like him at all: his countenance, voice, manner and conversation are all disagreeable to me. He is a fair, whithky-looking man, very near-sighted, with spectacles which seem to pinch his nose. He pokes out his chin to keep the spectacles on, and yet looks over the top of his spectacles, squinching up his eyes so that you cannot see your way into his mind. Then he speaks through his nose, and with a lisp, strangely contrasting with the vehemence of his emphasis. He does not give me any conWdence in the sincerity of his patriotism, nor any high idea of his talents, though he seems to have a mighty high idea of them himself. He has been well called Le he´ros des brochures. We sat beside each other, and I think left a mutual antipathy.20

Constant’s passion for her at least gave Stae¨l a weapon to use against Ribbing (who seemed unlikely to be harmed by it), just as Ribbing’s passion for her had given her ammunition against the probably indiVerent Narbonne— ‘never, perhaps, has my Adolphe [Ribbing] loved me so passionately’.21 For a long time, however, Constant’s face remained an invincible obstacle. For the moment she remained obsessed with Ribbing, and everything around and within her was providing copy for her work on the passions. Stae¨l brought the same creative attitude to bear on all practical experience, whether she was consciously gathering material for a novel or treatise or simply suVering life’s ups and downs. However unbearable it might seem, she realized, pain could normally be lessened by the reXection that it was adding to knowledge, that what had been lived and endured might fruitfully be transmuted either into art or, more simply, into an enriched personality. This theory sustained her throughout her exile, a period when times of particularly deep and often distressing emotion proved to be correspondingly fertile in artistic and philosophical terms. In later years she derived pleasure from trumpeting this boon to Napoleon, who while thinking he was breaking her spirit was in fact sustaining it. SuVering, which she associated particularly with the situation of embattled womanhood, could be shaped into a transcendent force. It could also provide a useful means of attacking authoritarianism. Feeling that he had lost his advantage, Constant resorted to melodrama. He made an extravagant but serious-looking suicide attempt to which Stae¨l herself was the antidote—not Stae¨l in the form he really desired, the slaker of lust, but Stae¨l the tender woman who could not endure the sight of pain 20 Maria Edgeworth, Life and Letters, ed. Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols. (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), I.300. 21 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, III.158 (Me´zery, 22 Oct. 1794).

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when it might be assuaged. (Later on in their relationship there was a reversal of roles, Constant Wnding that he pitied her too much to break with her.) Mathieu de Montmorency was not taken in for a minute by these histrionics, calmly continuing to read Augustine’s Confessions until Constant’s conduct brought him to pronounce: ‘Throw him out of the window, this man who simply brings trouble into this house and dishonours it with a suicide!’22 Stae¨l, however, spoke some kindly words which instantly rallied Constant. He might have felt less fortiWed had he known that afterwards she returned to her room, washed in perfumed water the hand he had kissed, and declared: ‘I feel I would have a physical antipathy for this man that nothing could overcome!’23 So for the moment nothing, indeed, advanced Constant’s cause, especially as other men in her life seemed more alluring. At least he could reXect that he had made his mark. When the time came to leave Coppet, accordingly, it seemed natural to both of them to depart in the same coach heading for Paris. They knew that they had political work to do together, le he´ros des brochures cutting his journalistic teeth and Stae¨l based in the Swedish embassy and so enjoying the diplomatic immunity her husband’s return to the rue du Bac gave her to speak, write, socialize, act the salonnie`re, and manipulate in her usual way. But her passion for friendship (as she called it; others still regarded it as an addiction to Xirtation) had found her out. In Switzerland she had consorted too freely for the ease of the new political masters with a number of more or less inXuential members of the aristocracy, including Montmorency, Franc¸ois de Pange, and the chevalier de Jaucourt. On 18 August 1795 she was accused of involvement in an anti-republican conspiracy, despite the fact that her Re´Xexions sur la paix of the previous year had shown her to be moving under Constant’s inXuence towards the new political orthodoxy. She was, in fact, convinced that the principles of order-loving republicans and peace-loving royalists were identical, which encouraged her to attempt bringing the two sides together, Thermidoreans and monarchists, in her salon. Predictably enough, however, she ended up pleasing neither. The Committee on Public Safety mistrusted her increasingly and in October 1795 exiled her to Switzerland. She travelled Wrst to Forges-les-Eaux in Normandy, hoping to buy time, but in December the sentence was conWrmed. Constant escorted her on the sad return journey. It would be a year before she was in Paris again. 22 Quoted in Kohler, Madame de Stae¨l, 178–9.

23 Ibid. 179, quoting Bourrienne.

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However inveterate the association between Switzerland and tedium, she was not immediately bored in her native land: writing on the inXuence of passions, and perhaps for this purpose recalling their sway over her in the recent past, prevented that. Earlier in the year she had published her essay on Wction, which apart from praising Cecilia also lauds Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cle`ves, a work largely denied to its real author during her lifetime and attributed in parts to the various men who frequented her salon. The heroine of the story upholds the range of traditional virtues that Stae¨l herself mostly lacked: an examplar of modesty, reticence, virtue, nobility of soul, and self-denial, she remains faithful out of a sense of duty to a husband she does not love despite her passion for another man. The Essai sur les Wctions praises a number of other works that seem little if at all concerned with upholding traditional ‘female’ principles—the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, Guilleragues’s Lettres portugaises, and in particular Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨ se. (Stae¨l does, it is true, express the wish that Rousseau had not shown his new Heloise, Julie, actively guilty of unchastity, since what deWnes La Nouvelle He´loı¨ se for her is its depiction of the omnipotence of the heart.) The Essai concludes with a characteristic statement that may be seen as coloured by Stae¨l’s disappointment with Narbonne as well as her dissatisfaction with herself for having entered into a doomed marriage: the opposite sex misunderstands the ardent and impressionable soul of woman, which inevitably results in the dashing of all her hopes for happiness. Given this opinion, the emphasis De l’inXuence des passions places on the necessary unhappiness of women who depart from the estate society deems proper for them seems provocatively odd—unless one takes the view, which would be hard to argue persuasively, that Stae¨l regretted her unconventional politicized ways and came to see them as straightforward causes of her own misery. Yet she clearly regarded suVering as exalting and enlarging as well as degrading; and even if she had blamed her independent-mindedness for making her wretched, it seems most unlikely that she could ever have been happy conWned to woman’s conventional domestic role. She is on safer ground proposing the thesis that untrammelled passion, in the sense of an irresistible driving force, may be an obstacle to political and personal well-being, even though it provides a salutary corrective to the torpor of ‘regular’ existence that has not been infused with the spirit of sublimity. (Switzerland, however apparently sublime its Alpine crags, was her standard example of such deadening regularity.) Strong feeling certainly condemns to

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misery and death both Delphine and Corinne, Delphine the passionate lover and impassioned Wghter against social wrong, and Corinne in whom the current of genius runs inseparable from the tide of passion; but it is hard to conceive of either character without this infusion of moral and artistic grandeur. One wonders whether Stae¨l’s thoughts on the matter had been fed by contact with Diderot, a regular presence at Suzanne Necker’s Friday salon, and an early champion in the Pense´es philosophiques of 1748 of strong feeling as a power conducing to greatness as well as destruction. It does not seem out of character in this connection for Stae¨l to have declared: ‘Love is the history of women’s lives; it is an episode in men’s,’24 however sharply she distinguished between herself and most members of her sex in other ways. The statement was a pragmatic and familiar acknowledgement for its times, perhaps for all times, and the role of grande amoureuse was one she liked playing. (Indeed, it was part of her quarrel with Narbonne that he seemed unable to respond adequately to her intense passion, whether by writing letters or through more direct means.) That is not to say that De l’inXuence des passions is simply traditional in insisting on the disadvantaged position which such a psychology of feeling imposes upon women; indeed, it was strikingly feminist for its times. But it would have surprised no one in its insistence that where love is concerned ‘reputation, honour, esteem, everything depends on the conduct . . . women have maintained; whereas the laws of morality itself seem suspended in the relations between men and women’.25 After this statement Stae¨l paraphrases Julie Talma’s disabused observation on the diVerent goals men and women have in love, the man’s physical and immediate, the woman’s emotional and long term. According to De l’inXuence des passions, however, the real aim of humans should be to depend upon their inner resources, to which end the passions ought simply to be neutralized. This Stoic idea seems closer to the sixteenth century and its extension into the seventeenth, when lay as well as religious moralists and imaginative writers tirelessly proclaimed the destructive eVects of all-powerful feeling, than to the eighteenth, with its professed belief that intense emotion could be a power for good in mankind, a fount of creativity as well as a cause of destructiveness, and so deserving rehabilitation. In this spirit Stae¨l excitedly calls for the terrors of passionate excess to be dispelled, but then weakly and wholly unpersuasively concludes that love should 24 Stae¨l, De l’inXuence des passions, 125.

25 Ibid.

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really just be translated into friendship or the calm plateau of conjugal companionship, just as the self-regarding obsession with glory should become the love of God. Still, it is all edifying and apparently seriously meant, and she would reproduce the tableau in Delphine and Corinne. Delphine persuades Le´once to enter into a platonic relationship with her when she identiWes her illicit longing for him as sinful, and Corinne seeks solace in religion when love Wrst destroys her poetic gift and then breaks her heart. But the tragic outcome of both books suggests that, whatever her theoretical beliefs, Stae¨l actually saw the neutralizing of passion as creating as much misery as it saved, if not more. It was all too easy to believe that purging intense feeling might be a loss as much as a gain.Was this, though, just another of the ways in which the (rational) male condemned the (emotional) female to a life of unfulWlment and apartness? One possible solution was to preserve passion in all its strength but oVset it against reason, its antithesis, optimistically attempting to link male and female principles as though kneading together Wre and snow. This idea was also characteristic of its age, and Stae¨l was well aware of the problems it raised. SpeciWcally, it seemed to ignore altogether the essential conXict that had historically condemned women to the status of outsiders, inferior participants in human aVairs, burnt out by their emotions rather than mastering them by an eVort of reXection and dispassionate judgement. So she argued in De l’inXuence des passions that although individuals (by which she surely meant members of her own sex in particular) were unequal to such an eVort, since they were driven by forces they could not control, nations were diVerent. Nations, she announced, controlled their own destiny. Napoleon would perhaps show something rather diVerent, but in the mid-1790s Stae¨l could not anticipate the scale of his future conquests, and in any case she often adapted circumstances to suit the needs of the writing moment. If nations could steer a course between determinism and anarchy they would, she believed, demonstrate the full virtues of enlightenment, pursuing perfection in a practical way and incidentally illustrating that aYnity between reason and emotion—rather than their opposition— which she would further address in De l’Allemagne. (Condorcet had outlined one possible approach in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s de l’esprit humain of 1794.) Liberal thinkers in Revolutionary times had little choice but to embrace this belief and so subscribe to the theory of ‘perfectionnement’, or the onward march of mankind.

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For once, a literary work of hers would win her favour in high places, although Stae¨l was normally spectacularly poor at estimating how the establishment (rather than the public) would respond to her writings. De l’inXuence des passions, which she had asked Constant to circulate in Paris, and which inXuential friends of hers praised publicly, was greeted as a great achievement, and by some enthusiasts proclaimed as the Wnest treatise of the eighteenth century. It was decreed, as though in consequence, that Stae¨l should be allowed in principle to return close to Paris—twenty miles from it, to be precise. Of the Wve Directors Barras alone seems to have been consulted on this matter, and his view was apparently that the only real necessity was to keep her beyond the reach of the salons in which she could exert such inXuence. So she set oV from Coppet, airily leaving her two sons with their grandfather, passed through the capital with Constant on Christmas Day 1796, and settled in the abbey of He´rivaux, which he had bought for a song after the Revolution and furnished with the help of a large loan from the resigned Jacques Necker. (In November Stae¨l had acquired a property of her own at Angervilliers, at roughly the required distance from Paris, but rapidly decided that it was inconveniently far from Constant and that she was spied upon and gossiped about there.) By this time she had come to the conclusion that Constant was the man she loved above any other, the one she desired ‘with all the life that is left in me’.26 Eric de Stae¨l’s visit to his wife the previous September had been convenient, all the same. It meant that she could, without absolutely oVending appearances, claim residence in the Swedish embassy on the rue du Bac to give birth to her, but not his, daughter. The husband may well have felt outrage at the wife’s doings—by June 1797 she had, after all, been openly living with Constant for months—but the government made no objection to her returning to Paris for the conWnement. As Napoleon’s star rose, he would become more and more critical of the company she kept, her friendships with ministers, political and military colleagues, even her dealings with members of his own family. This, among other things, may explain the later caution exercised by Alexandre d’Arblay and his wife Burney when Stae¨l was eager to renew their friendship in Paris and they feared compromising d’Arblay’s already delicate political position. Stae¨l, unsuspicious of all these reservations, was deeply 26 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, III.225 (13 Sept. 1796).

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impressed by Napoleon when they Wrst met on 6 December 1797 after his victorious campaign in Italy, at this stage seeing nothing of the loathsome future despot. In 1797 he was a man of simple, decorous conduct, contemptuous of idle display; and Stae¨l, disposed to hero-worship from childhood, was drawn by his plain warrior’s demeanour, declaring him to be a Scipio and a Tancred who united the former’s simple virtues with the latter’s brilliant deeds. The hero was less complimentary about her, calling her praise demented raving and its author a madwoman.27 Talleyrand arranged their meeting. Stae¨l came to the Ministry of Foreign AVairs at ten in the morning on the appointed day, though she had been asked for eleven. Napoleon arrived more punctually. She found a small, tired man who said little to her beyond regretting that he had missed seeing Jacques Necker at Coppet. (Shortly afterwards, however, perhaps struck by the family resemblance, he would describe Stae¨l’s father as a madman.) He then turned to the explorer Bougainville, who was present with some others, as though wary of conversing any longer with such a woman. Stae¨l, in the meantime, had diYculty breathing and thus speaking, an unheard-of occurrence in her. She met Napoleon again four days later when he was received at the Luxembourg Palace by the Directory, dressed in Roman costume. The victor of the Italian campaigns handed over the Treaty of Campo Formio and was treated with due reverence. According to the Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne, however, he felt besieged by Stae¨l, and shortly afterwards declined her invitation to a ball. Apparently she did not yet know that he liked women to be modest, unassuming creatures rather than politically ambitious society hostesses, though she would Wnd out soon enough. In any case it was not long before they met once more at a reception Talleyrand gave in Napoleon’s honour, on which occasion the latter became uncomfortably aware that Stae¨l had certain designs on him. It was then that she asked him which woman of ancient or modern times he most esteemed and he gave his celebrated and damning reply in favour of the most fertile. (‘I certainly acted wrongly,’ he reXected in his memoirs, ‘for I did not suYciently weigh the eVect of a pointed word or joke.’)28 At a subsequent encounter Stae¨l, who was beginning to throw caution to the winds, harangued him about the Directory’s plans to invade Switzerland, 27 See Paul Gautier, Madame de Stae¨l et Napole´on (Paris: Plan-Nourrit, 1903), 2 (quoting Bourrienne). 28 Napoleon I, Memoirs, ed. F. M. Kircheisen, trans. Frederick Collins (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), 95.

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arguing that it should desist from doing so (the unspoken reason being that her father was still on the list of e´migre´s, and that the law condemned to death all e´migre´s remaining in a country occupied by French troops). Napoleon listened impatiently as she praised, for perhaps the Wrst time in her life, the beauty of her native country and the happiness of its inhabitants; he continued unimpressed despite her best eVorts to entrap him with her eloquence and coquetry, attempts that were as misguided in conception as they were ludicrous in execution. Neither party ever forgot them, Stae¨l with a memory of humiliation, Napoleon with one of disdain. Many years later she would take as much pride in refusing to answer the former hero’s invitation to Paris as she did in denying him in her Wction the artistic fruits of conquest; but by then, in her view, Napoleon had changed beyond recognition, as happens when power corrupts the once incorruptible. At least she could say with some truth that she herself had always been the same. There were a few satisfactions for her in the months she spent in Paris, a few positive achievements for her industry, courage, and guile. But whereas Talleyrand and Constant could boast solid advances, she felt sidelined— inevitably in view of her sex and reputation, no doubt, but still woundingly and frustratingly. The media jeered at her, variously calling her a hermaphrodite, a prostitute, an intriguing kingmaker, or a Messalina. She returned to Coppet at the end of the year, and French troops duly entered Switzerland, where they were surprisingly civil to the chaˆtelain and his family. In mid-June 1798 she set oV once again for Paris, settling in the family property of Saint-Ouen for about four months. When Jacques Necker was deWnitively removed from the list of e´migre´s at the end of July his personal safety at Coppet was guaranteed, and the Necker fortune still left in Paris appeared secure. His daughter’s repeated forays from occupied Switzerland to France were made none the easier by these developments, however, and her stay at Saint-Ouen was terminated in November when the police hinted to her that she was no longer welcome to remain on French territory. So the gypsy life continued: she moved from Geneva, where she rented an apartment in January 1799, back to Coppet, then, boldly, to France again in support of Constant’s failed candidacy as deputy for the city of Geneva. In July that year she was expelled once more from France and resumed residence at Coppet. Later on, either forewarned or herself politically involved, she again left Coppet and returned to Paris, just in time for the coup d’e´tat of 18–19 brumaire (9–10 November). The result was for Napoleon to be named Consul along with Sie´ye`s and Ducos.

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Sie´ye`s may have had had a real plan for the new constitution at whose head he stood, but Napoleon’s authoritarianism never gave it the chance to Xourish. Still, Stae¨l was initially thrilled at the political outcome, and when new posts were created by the Constitution at the end of the year she played a part in Constant’s nomination to the Tribunate. Napoleon had been reluctant to see this happen, but was ‘tormented’ by his brother Joseph, a friend of Stae¨l’s, into giving way. Constant was appointed on 24 December 1799, the day Napoleon became First Consul. When, on 5 January 1800, he delivered an anti-Bonapartist speech calling for the Tribunate to be given a more serious political role—indeed, to act as an independent opposition to the Consulate—the furious Napoleon was convinced that Stae¨l was behind it. Writing to Constant a week later Julie Talma referred to Stae¨l’s disconsolate state, wretched and indignant at Saint-Ouen: ‘What is this desolation of one of your women friends, who spends her nights weeping because the talent and courage you displayed have made you so many enemies?’29 Two years later Constant would lose his seat. His autobiographical novel ´ Cecile (1809) rakes over the events leading up to this debacle, laying much of the blame on the Stae¨l-Wgure Madame de Malbe´e who had impeded his progress by her various acts of imprudence, her contradictory liaisons, and her constant need for display and self-advertisement. It was just one of the many grievances he nursed over the long years leading up to his Wnal break with his former lover. But her contretemps with Napoleon was one of the principal reasons why, as she notes in Dix anne´es d’exil, she herself suVered grievously during the winter of 1799–1800. Bonaparte’s inXuence was such that her fair-weather friends—of whom there were apparently many— either left her to vegetate in the country or deserted her when she returned to the Paris social scene, a victim, she believed, of the social and political diVerences that made a woman’s life ‘singularly bitter’. She was particularly incensed by the conduct of Talleyrand, someone whom she had often helped and towards whom she described herself as feeling ‘perfect friendship’. He gave a grand ball on 25 February 1800 for everyone who counted in Paris. Napoleon attended, but the host ostentatiously declined to invite Stae¨l, a failure that signalled the end of her regard for him. ‘For ten years he had spent his life in my house. I had arranged for him to return from America . . . I had several letters from him in which he 29 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.1.253, citing Julie Talma, Lettres a` Benjamin Constant, ed. baronne Constant de Rebecque (Paris: Plon, 1933), 10.

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said he owed me more than life itself. It was he who Wrst showed by his conduct that to please the Wrst consul it was necessary to avoid me . . . ’30 And Talleyrand, she further noted, both gave the signal for her persecution to start and was subsequently the prime cause of her exile. A few months later she was exposed to the most disagreeable form of social ostracism at another ball, this time one given by Philippe-Egalite´’s former mistress Madame de Montesson, a woman who was very close to Napoleon. An unpublished fragment of the Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise describes the experience, ‘one of those salon tortures . . . which French aristocrats are so good at inXicting on the friends of liberty’: I went into Madame de Montesson’s salon without fear, never dreaming that one could incur the most oVensive disapproval for not praising Bonaparte. Of all those present, excepting the hostess, I knew only Madame de Custine, who curtsied to me; as she had braved death through generosity, this feeling was always natural to her in matters great and small. Everyone else turned away from me, looking at Madame Bonaparte as though glorying in her presence in an act of impoliteness which gave no appearance of being dangerous. Madame Bonaparte, noticing my situation, was perfectly polite to me, and gradually the assembled company came round to me.31

Madame de Chastenay conWrms the apparent disfavour into which ‘poor Madame de Stae¨l’ had fallen that evening, in ‘her great slate-coloured satin dress’, but claims that she herself chatted with her.32 Stae¨l would later use this scene of social exclusion in Delphine, which she named after Delphine de Sabran/Custine as a mark of regard. Not long after these events she left Paris with her and Constant’s daughter Albertine, almost following Napoleon to Coppet. There the First Consul seemed to entertain ‘the greatest regard for the chaˆtelain’ and promised his brother Monsieur Necker de Germany that Jacques Necker would be repaid the 2 million francs he had lent the Treasury. (Apropos of this outstanding debt it was remarked by a contemporary that Necker was the only man alive who could be owed such an enormous sum by the state and yet spend two hours with the First Consul without mentioning it to him.)33 Yet whatever regard such discretion might be thought to have won him, Necker would later be contemptuously dismissed by Napoleon as ‘a great heavy schoolmaster, all puVed up’.34 30 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 89. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 274.

31 See Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.1.257. 34 Las Cases, Me´morial, II.175.

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If Stae¨l felt politically and socially disadvantaged, Constant scarcely regarded his own situation as enviable. The main diYculty, as over many years to come, was his impossible relationship with her. Tired of her, tied to her, he had often appealed for help to his aunt, the comtesse de Nassau. A typical request is the one contained in this letter, written on 15 May 1798 at his abbey, in ‘the most complete solitude, amidst my forests’, to ask you if you can help me give this situation what it lacks. A bond which I preserve out of duty, or if you will out of weakness, but which I know I shall preserve for as long as a more real duty does not free me from it, and which I shall only be able to break by admitting that I am horribly tired of it, which I am too polite to say, a bond which, in plunging me into society I do not like, and tearing me away from the countryside I love, makes me deeply unhappy, and threatens with the greatest disaster a fortune which, amidst the vagabondage of my life, I have only hung on to by a miracle, in short, a bond I can break only with a move that cannot come from me has kept me in chains for two years. I am isolated without being independent, I am subjugated without being united.35

He had, he continued, tried in vain to end the relationship, but it was impossible for someone with his character to stand Wrm against the plaints of another person when all he could oppose them with was his will, and when he could consequently postpone his release from one moment and one day to another without obvious inconvenience. So he wore himself down in a situation contrary to his tastes, his favourite occupations, and the tranquillity of his life. It was a state of acute strain, and one which it appeared impossible to resolve. Stae¨l herself had been tormented as the new millennium approached by the inconvenient presence of her husband, back in Paris since November 1799. On 20 December Rosalie de Constant would tell her brother that Stae¨l was ‘suVering conjugal anguish’ at Saint-Ouen: ‘Her dear husband, completely penniless but unable to live far from Paris, has resigned his ambassadorial position to come and live with her as tenderly as can be. So he is spoiling things for his children . . . , and ruining and boring to death his famous wife.’36 On 11 February 1800 she reported that Stae¨l was ‘going mad having to live in the country, under surveillance, restricted in all her movements, all her acquaintances, and on top of it all having her husband

35 Constant, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, ed. C. P. Courtney, in Œuvres comple`tes (Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1993– ), ser. 2, I– (1998– ), II.334–5. 36 Quoted in Herold, Mistress, 173–4.

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there’. In the second week of February her patience Wnally snapped, and she returned to the capital. Given her phenomenal capacity for work in almost any circumstances, it is unsurprising that she had continued to write throughout these years of turmoil, which brought the eighteenth century to its close. De la litte´rature, which earned her more fame than anything she had written before, was begun over the period when she was shuttling disconsolately between Switzerland and Paris, and appeared in April 1800. To publish a work with such a title at the beginning of the nineteenth century seemed a dazzlingly male achievement that commanded respect; yet although it made a great stir, it also won her the enmity of conservative readers and the further mistrust of Napoleon. Its central theme about artistic creativity—which it allied with the spirit of northern races—was particularly daring for the age in which it was written, as well as provocative with respect to the Corsican who stood at the head of the French nation; and its observations on the position of women, at Wrst glance conventional, were calculated to ruZe establishment feathers. Stae¨l, apparently, either did not see or, more oddly but perhaps equally likely, did not care what political mischief she was stirring up. De la litte´rature, building on the concept of cultural relativism whose bestknown exponent in French literature until then had been Montesquieu, argues that literary creation depends on the social, political, and religious institutions of a given country, and hence draws attention to the importance of nationhood—the very notion that Napoleon’s conquests seemed in one sense to qualify. At the same time, however, and paradoxically, in attributing literary superiority to northern lands it encouraged southern ones to join in a celebration of what Stae¨l called cosmopolitanism, but which may also look suspiciously like the supremacist pan-Germanism of the following century (a kind of geographical aYnity that Stae¨l herself was far from feeling). Finally and relatedly, it appeared to stand on its head the concept of individualism later to be celebrated in Corinne. Napoleon was most adversely struck by Stae¨l’s continued persistence in looking outside France for models of artistic and cultural value, though he can hardly have been surprised at a relativism that her exile encouraged the author to develop. After all, he would implicitly concede the force of such views when he plundered Italy of works of art to bring back in triumph to France. What he disliked, what simply went against his developing authoritarianism, was having to admit it openly, and being forced to admit it by a female.

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As a misogynist, he certainly found the energy with which De la litte´rature fought the cause of the author’s sex distasteful. Stae¨l’s discussion of ancient and modern literature links the development of the novel form with sensibility, and hence with women. Such a link has long appeared clear and uncontroversial; De la litte´rature did not originate it, but Stae¨l’s discussion lodged it Wrmly in the public consciousness. The ‘womanly’ components of sensibility—sympathy, altruism, and pity—are consistent with a morality founded on self-denying duty such as would later be explored in Delphine and Corinne, and which is also represented by Corinne’s feminized hero Oswald. Unluckily, however, her women Wnd themselves, as women have done ever since the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, in societies ruled by male egoism, brutality, and inXexibility, qualities that seem to jar with Stae¨l’s Enlightenment belief in ongoing progress. Her boldness in arguing this, as well as in other respects, was unlikely to endear her to a First Consul whose views on the subordination of women had been so emphatically, even humiliatingly, declared in her presence. A man, according to De la litte´rature, ‘can, even in his works, refute the slanders of which he has become the object: but for women, defending themselves is one more disadvantage; justifying themselves, a new cause for rumour . . . The appearance of ill-will makes women tremble, however distinguished they are. Courageous in misfortune, they are timid in the face of hostility.’37 It may not be easy to see all this as relevant to Stae¨l herself, but its general truth for her own times is not in question. To the political establishment of 1800 it was unthinkable that women should allow themselves to be suspected of irregularity and then object when they were denied the opportunity for self-justiWcation. This, to Bonaparte and his allies, provided the perfect illustration of what made Stae¨l so intolerable: she was unwilling to accept subordination (despite speaking in its favour in De la litte´rature), yet accepted some of its implications by occasionally manifesting ‘womanish’ fear and timidity. It was also tactless in the extreme for her to state as forthrightly as she did in this work that England was the land in which women were happiest and most loved, although her qualiWcation that the essential reason was their ‘domestic destiny’ may be seen as prudently palliative, if hardly persuasive in the light of her own revolt against domesticity. She does, however, boldly anticipate the time when women in general will be decently educated, be protected by civil laws (the reverse of 37 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 341.

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what later occurred under the Code Napole´on), and enjoy an unspeciWc but guaranteed contentment. Her argument that character as well as literary production depends on political regime and cultural climate would be well illustrated in Corinne’s Oswald, a warrior who is untouched by pride in his virile exploits because he is also the melancholic Man of Feeling familiar from eighteenth-century literature. Even Delphine’s Le´once goes unheroically to Wght with the e´migre´ troops (at least in the revised conclusion to the novel) in order to get himself killed, suVering from personal frustration as much as patriotic grief. Yet Stae¨l never questions the rightness per se of the male’s performing actions that are glorious in intention. The fact is that his sex must act in this way because females have crucial limitations in comparison, whether socially imposed, physically induced, or caused by some other apparent inevitability. Is this the reason why Stae¨l denies that women have endowed the modern literature of feeling with any works of lasting value, however gifted with subtle perceptions they may be? She seems breathtakingly condescending towards her own sex when she makes this announcement: ‘Women have not composed truly superior works: but they have, nonetheless, eminently served the progress of literature by all the thoughts inspired in men through their relations with these mobile, delicate creatures.’38 And one wonders why she never asks whether a change in social and political circumstances might bring about an alteration in the picture. After all, the feminist awakening promised both before and during the Revolution was perhaps thwarted only by the increasing hostility of Napoleon, which resulted in women being more savagely repressed than ever before. Did her neglecting to address this matter merely show that she did not honestly believe the average woman to be capable of her own achievements (which was probably a correct judgement)? The women she knew—she, who had been surrounded from birth by important men, and who always regretted not having married a great man herself—were more social ornaments, like the frigid beauty Juliette Re´camier, or amateurs of the arts like Delphine de Custine, than serious, engaged women, though of course there were some exceptions. So it was natural for her to conclude that women in general were simply prompts to male genius. ‘All the feelings they are permitted to give themselves up to, fear of death, regret for life, boundless devotion, 38 Ibid. 171–2.

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limitless indignation, enrich literature with new expressions. Women, not being responsible for themselves, so to speak, go as far in their words as feelings of the soul lead them. Right reason, male eloquence, can choose, can explain among these developments.’39 Given such assertions, it is probably unsurprising that she should dismiss the danger of meeting a woman whose superiority is disproportionate to the destiny of her sex, even though her own self was obviously an exception to the general rule. It is also evident why she is so cavalier about the further danger of women’s becoming alerted to the real misfortune of their condition by a long-desired development of their rational faculty: she sees it simply as a risk worth taking, like other risks attendant on the spreading of enlightenment, and something that in most cases will pay handsome dividends if turned to positive account. Yet Delphine will be as unhappy in this awakened state, which permits her to see the injustice of female subordination, as Corinne in the philistine gloom of provincial northern England. Neither woman eVects any constructive change to the status quo, which suggests that women are ineluctably powerless. Or is it simply that their rationality is fatally clouded by their misplaced passion for unworthy men? Fortunately, however, Stae¨l regards unhappiness and frustration, or at least melancholy, as artistically productive (even though women themselves, whether unhappy or not, are seldom fertile in this way) and therefore beneWcial. Yet when she announces in De la litte´rature: ‘Whatever truly great things man has done he owes to the painful feeling of incompleteness in his destiny,’40 she seems to be using ‘man’ in its non-generic sense, given that the female Corinne Wnds sadness artistically crippling. On the other hand, Corinne does illustrate her view that northern people in general are less preoccupied with pleasure than southern ones, which is why the heroine has to Xee the north to regain her balance, and with it her artistic creativity. Perhaps this paradox was inevitable, given Stae¨l’s conviction that the north held the key to progress in literature as well as in socio-political life, but that the south was the home of brilliance, inspiration, and gaiety. In De l’Allemagne she would state the case baldly: ‘No, I shall never live in the north; my soul is not young enough to do without the sun.’41 After all, ‘how could you endure life if nothing around you beautiWed it, and if you could not experience in the sight of smiling nature the involuntary sensations that 39 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 180. 40 Ibid. 208. 41 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.319, app. 1.

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deprive us even of the power of thought?’ It was a pertinent and damaging observation. By the time she wrote De l’Allemagne Stae¨l could not ignore the fact that the Revolution which she had hoped would promote virtue, generosity, and enthusiasm for the well-being of others had in fact ushered in an age of crude materialism and harsh calculation. Yet De l’Allemagne would still suggest that women might inXuence society positively and stem the tide of self-interest, since their sex, it argued, was simply more morally worthwhile than the male: ‘In an age where the universal evil is egoism, men, to whom all positive interests relate, must have less generosity, less sensibility than women.’42 Stae¨l does not bother to specify what she means by ‘positive interests’, or consider whether matters might change if women as well as men had them. In 1800 it seemed clear enough that they did not; and in that respect she had published De la litte´rature at precisely the wrong time, at the very moment when Napoleon was taking measures against her and her sex’s kind of hope. Nor had she been wise to eulogize in De la litte´rature the race Napoleon came to detest above all others, a tendency that would get her into further trouble when Delphine was published two years later. ‘Women,’ she pronounced, ‘have nowhere enjoyed the happiness brought by domestic aVections as fully as in England’43—not in ancient Greece and Rome, nor in Asia or modern France. Women, she declared, were loved more truly across the Channel than anywhere else, a fact she saw as illustrated in English novels. The argument seems inconclusive, not least because some of the English novels she is known to have read by this stage in her life, such as Richardson’s Clarissa, suggest otherwise, and even Burney’s Cecilia devotes much of its length to showing something entirely diVerent. Although there was little in De la litte´rature that was demonstrably directed against him, its general drift was to make perfectly clear that Anglophobe despots such as Bonaparte were the enemies of all humanity and enlightenment. Either she had to carry out an open assault on his depredations from afar, or she had to change tactics and launch a more subtle attack. She had undergone reprisals enough for her boldness in stating political views and defending human rights, particularly where she saw her friends endangered, and she would go on suVering on account of her ‘otherness’, her unforgivable readiness to champion unpopular causes and defend inconvenient principles. No doubt she was unwomanly in being prepared to 42 Ibid. 65.

43 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 243.

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speak out even when frightened, even when able (as she was mostly unable) to gauge the likely response of political leaders accurately. In her case the manifestation of hostility often was true misfortune. But even when it was not, she would carry on refusing to give way to bullies. By moving, as she was beginning to do, from social philosophy and cultural commentary to imaginative literature, she indicated that she had chosen to continue resistance by a more indirect method than before. In writing Wction concerned with central but controversial issues—liberty, privilege, moral order—she would both revolutionize a literary genre and attract the odium of the political establishment for daring to discuss public matters and, worse still, doing so from a woman’s perspective. Although she would deny the charge of political involvement through Wction, she would still smuggle in a critique of the prevailing orthodoxies under the skirts of a novel.

3 Delphine and its Aftermath

riting De la litte´rature and enjoying the celebrity it brought her had convinced Stae¨l, if she needed convincing, of her right to be considered an exceptional woman. Yet although she knew she should be ranked among the truly gifted, her achievements had often been challenged by envious or intolerant readers, more often than not men. For that and other reasons, she had never allowed herself, or been allowed by others, to celebrate her status as she felt it should be celebrated. Her Wction to date had featured suVering women who existed outside the world she knew, a ‘civilized’ world of conversing, politicking, entertaining, thinking, and writing in which she felt at home, but from parts of which circumstances—particularly her actions and words—kept on excluding her. As her literary fame became assured she was drawn to the idea of depicting a woman who stood for some of her own principles, at least as she saw them: social conscience, devotion (to duty as well as to persons), liberalism, and the kind of activism that liberal society might regard as just permissible in her sex. She did not, however, envisage making her heroine artistically engaged; that would be attempted only later, despite the association drawn in the Essai sur les Wctions and De la litte´rature between (some) women and great literature. For the moment, too, she would Wnd it convenient not to trumpet her heroine’s projected relation to political matters of the day. Even so, in a letter to Charles de Villers of 3 June 1803 that answered his criticisms of Delphine, she maintained that it had had to be set in Revolutionary times because ‘for showing the struggle between prejudice and reason there is no period more favourable’.1 (Villers had suggested that the story could have been situated ten years earlier.) Indeed, she continues, she might have made more pointed allusions to the times ‘if I had not been scared of talking politics’. The pivotal

W

1 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.628.

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situation around which she had constructed the novel, she observes, ‘is the scene at Baden, where Le´once cannot make up his mind to marry [Delphine] when she wants to break her vows, and for that situation I needed the Revolution: it alone gave a quality of reasonableness and inconvenience at one and the same time to this facility to break one’s vows, which alone was capable of developing what characterizes Le´once.’ (The Revolution dissolved religious orders and allowed former monks and nuns to re-enter the secular world.) Yet though she was scared of talking politics publicly, she had no intention of wasting the chance to do so discreetly. There is little need to believe the disclaimers she periodically voiced in this connection, since they were so obviously dictated by prudence. Thus she wrote to her friend Claude Hochet on 1 October 1800: ‘I am carrying on with my novel, it will be Wnished in a year, I think, there will not be a word of politics even though it is set in the last years of the Revolution, what will people say about such abstinence?’2 Napoleon, as she would discover, would have plenty to say. The fact is that Delphine was not at all politically abstemious, which is why it so displeased him. To understand the speciWc reasons for this disaVection, let us brieXy consider what happens in the novel. The heroine, Delphine d’Albe´mar, is the young widow of an elderly man who married her solely to safeguard her fortune. Emotionally naive, though intellectually sophisticated, she thinks that promoting the happiness of others is all that she requires for personal contentment; but she realizes her mistake when she falls hopelessly in love with Le´once de Mondoville, who is engaged to the daughter of her cousin Madame de Vernon (a duplicitous character said to be modelled on Talleyrand). Le´once loves Delphine too, but because he believes some invented slander which Madame de Vernon circulates about her he marries Mathilde instead. He and Delphine attempt an unsatisfactory platonic relationship, with Le´once alternately chaWng at their imposed chastity and thinking his honour compromised by the ambiguity of their position, until in one of the novel’s many imbroglios Delphine is tricked into becoming a nun—just before Mathilde dies and Le´once becomes free to remarry. Although Delphine’s vows can be annulled, Le´once’s priggishness and social conformism make him reluctant to become her husband on such conditions, and in the Wrst version of the novel Delphine commits suicide as her lover faces a Wring-squad for alleged counter-Revolutionary activities. Her story is interwoven with tales 2 Mistler, Lettres, 22; see also Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.1.326.

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of other women deprived by worldly disapproval or social convention of the happiness that is their right—Delphine’s sister-in-law Mademoiselle d’Albe´mar, who thinks herself too ugly to live in society; Madame de Lebensei, a timid divorcee who shuns the world because of her ‘irregular’ position; Madame de R., a woman with a scandalous past that continues to dog her; and others. The whole book thus presents an utterly bleak picture of the female condition, although some of the negativity it displays is clearly misplaced. Thus, although it may be unfair that Mademoiselle d’Albe´mar is ugly (and there is no point in denying that in most human societies looks do carry a certain weight), the situation for which she suVers can hardly be called an unmitigated evil of patriarchy per se; besides which, beauty does not last, while moral qualities of the kind Mademoiselle d’Albe´mar develops despite her dejectedness about her appearance, or perhaps precisely because of it, manifestly do, and in the end may win their possessor more lasting contentment than physical attractiveness ever does. This seems to be conWrmed in the person of Madame de Ternan, the embittered and authoritarian Mother Superior of the convent in which Delphine takes her vows, who herself retreated from the world simply because she was ageing and losing her looks.There is no suggestion that religious belief, if she has any, gives her consolation for what she has lost. Although Delphine is as unworldly a creature as many members of her class and sex at the time, she is also too much a child of the Enlightenment not to support at least some of the Revolutionary ideals—the brotherhood of man, religious freedom, and social liberalism. She is no more revolutionary than Stae¨l, however, in her expectation of seeing women enjoy rights equal to those of men, Wnding no obvious place for her sex in public life except as support to brother, husband, father, or male companion. All the same, she is warned that her closeness to one particular acquaintance, the liberal Lebensei, has done her even more harm in the eyes of the world than her liaison with Le´once. Although Lebensei is the only activist in the novel, the important part he plays makes nonsense of Stae¨l’s claim about the book’s political disengagement. Constant, on whose character that of Lebensei is based, actually thought that the Revolution Wgured too prominently in Delphine; Stae¨l’s old acquaintance Simonde de Sismondi, on the other hand, saw how precisely focused the depiction of prejudice, illiberalism, and the Revolutionary ideals that counter them really was.3 3 See Simone Balaye´, Madame de Stae¨l: lumie`res et liberte´ (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), 123.

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The novel is dedicated to ‘la France silencieuse’, by which the ranks both of the repressed female sex and of individuals silenced by authoritarian regimes seem to be meant. In Stae¨l’s own case these were of course equivalent. To show woman in society, she implies, is to show a creature who cannot eVectively live in society except on suVerance, on the condition, that is, that she conduct herself according to a preordained pattern established by men. If she cannot or is unwilling to do so, she should either Wght or withdraw, as Mademoiselle d’Albe´mar, Madame de Lebensei, and Madame de R. are shown to do, exiles on account not of any dictatorial Wat but of constraining social forces that appear to them no less absolute. In a sense, this makes Delphine an exile narrative par excellence. The relation between social pronouncement and enforced absence is as real for these women as that between socio-political decree and banishment for Stae¨l, the only diVerence being the internalizing in the Wrst two women of a prohibition that elsewhere comes from outside.4 For none but Stae¨l, however, is it as absolute as the legally and religiously imposed exile Delphine suVers, Wrst from the married Le´once and then, as a nun, from the secular world. Moral interdiction, on the other hand, may feel as complete as any of the other kinds of sanction described in the book. When it appears in Delphine that the barrier between the convent and society can safely be breached, the prohibition remains as strong as ever because the heroine and Le´once have simply internalized the force that separated them from each other. The interplay between public and private realms—norms of behaviour, spheres of action—is ever-present in Delphine.5 The focus on romantic love, the preferred subject of novels, entails a focus on woman, although a focus on man is also a natural consequence of the book’s central theme. Delphine and the married Le´once are driven into a private world of feeling because their relationship, while never consummated, is nonetheless irregular. Le´once’s struggle throughout the story is to avoid being driven by his public role of convention-bound male obsessed with the social values of a patriarchal world, rather than those of religion or humanity, and it is characteristic of Stae¨l’s men to feel painfully caught between personal inclination and an awareness of wider duty (Oswald is another example). Le´once’s sense of duty towards society is much stronger than that he feels towards his late 4 As in the social ostracism described in Delphine and that suVered by Stae¨l herself at the salon of Mme de Montesson. 5 See Susan Tenenbaum, ‘Liberal Heroines: Madame de Stae¨l on the ‘‘Woman Question’’ and the Modern State’, Annales Benjamin Constant, 5 (1985), 37–52 passim.

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wife, however, which is why the thought of breaking convention by marrying a former nun tortures him so. The second preface to La Nouvelle He´loı¨ se, one of the novels extolled as masterpieces in the Essai sur les Wctions, declares reading Wction to be a dangerous pastime for young women. Stae¨l defends it as a moral activity, however, believing that the novel’s presentation of intimacy fosters a sense of values that beg to be preserved in a world otherwise enslaved to the vulgar thrust of glory-seeking and self-interest. Delphine tries to draw Le´once away from the social dictates that imperil sensibility and the rule of the heart, and to an extent she succeeds: his community of feeling with her when he allows himself, though married, to spend time in her company is almost a triumph of the feminine principle, if by that is understood a power for nurturing and conserving that stands at the opposite extreme to stereotypical male aggressiveness. Almost a triumph, but not quite, since it is a community that cannot survive. While Le´once chafes at its escapism, as well as at the chastity it presupposes, Delphine uneasily feels its moral dubiousness. Nor does it appear that Stae¨l sanctions the provisional solution it presents to the problem of tailoring private desire to the world’s will. Sentimental responses to social diYculty are indeed a form of escapism, and the novel ends as it does because neither the private nor the social code is suYcient to the happy resolution of human conXicts. Besides, it is impossible to feel that even Stae¨l’s split spirit could have been satisWed with a solution that simply upheld conventional female values. There would have had to be a dynamic resolution of the diVerences between the two spheres, almost a form of hermaphroditism, for that to be the case. Such a merging of sexual distinctness, though contrary to the powerful heterosexual attraction between Le´once and Delphine, may seem an appropriate designation of the eVective condition to which social and religious interdiction has reduced the couple, since that sort of union—a type that fascinated the Romantics—blurred the boundaries between freedom and constraint, familiar and unfamiliar, fulWlment and unfulWlment, and might therefore serve as a metaphorical illustration of Stae¨l’s abiding theme, the conXict between home and exile. Yet the strangeness of the world that lovers alienated by social norms Xee is matched by an irregularity or incompleteness in the world to which they retreat. The desired synthesis between known and unknown is, on the evidence of this novel, impossible to achieve, and it does not appear that Stae¨l truly believed it possible in real life. The status of exceptional being she claimed for herself as of right was

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not consistent with the resolution of diVerence that her social philosophy presupposed. At least, resolution as far as woman is concerned; the epigraph to Delphine declares that men should challenge this process because (at least it is implied) they have the power to do so. The paradox is to be felt over the length of Stae¨l’s life. The exceptional character, who in the real world and in the novels is woman at her most essential, draws vitality and reassurance from having perceptions that are not commonplace. Indeed, she dismisses everyday perceptions as worthless. If Delphine had not seen Le´once (however wrongly) as godlike, she would not have broken convention as she did in drawing close to him and achieving a kind of moral greatness through her fearless irregularity. That she remains chaste and imposes chastity on him is not a mark of her ‘littleness’, her delicacy, in the restricted sense which Stae¨l’s admirer Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave to ‘all the women in the world apart from Madame de Stae¨l’;6 but nor is it a mark of something great enough to earn her the regard that the less chaste Corinne is granted. Although she becomes a relatively sophisticated society woman, Delphine is also a passive domestic female who allows her social role to be circumscribed to an unnecessary degree. She does not suVer in the same way as Stae¨l from the warring currents within her, one towards female conformity and the other towards unfeminine worldly ambition, but her inability to resolve the conXict between love and the proprieties is still devastating. It is far more devastating in practical terms, indeed, than Stae¨l ever found it to be herself. Delphine is a very noisy book for one dedicated to ‘la France silencieuse’. Perhaps its author felt the need to be vocal precisely because (womanly) France so rarely was, with the obvious exception of certain Revolutionary female Wgures. But is it noisy in a way best calculated to improve the female lot? It depends on what improvement one is envisaging. The law that dissolved closed religious orders, lifting the vows binding their inmates to institutions which both created and symbolized their exit from the world, had been passed by the time Delphine would need its assistance, but notwithstanding this development Stae¨l’s determined presentation of claustral despair antagonized Napoleon and, we may assume, renewed the energy 6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914), p. xxxvii; see also Ellen Peel and Nanova Sweet, ‘Corinne and the Woman as Poet in England’, in Karyna Szmurlo (ed.), The Novel’s Seductions (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 216; also Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: W. H. Allen, 1977), 173–6 and passim.

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of his religiosity. (Even so, Stae¨l’s depiction of the convent is far less lurid than Diderot’s in La Religieuse or Matthew Lewis’s in The Monk.) Nor was that her only faux-pas. Napoleon thundered at the novel’s plea in favour of divorce—although he would later Wnd it a very convenient resort for himself—not least, one suspects, because its eloquent advocate is the Cambridge-educated, Constant-modelled Lebensei. This was, of course, the same Bonaparte who barred Wve or six divorced women from his wife Jose´phine’s drawing-room, and who when his sister-in-law Hortense told him that she was considering divorcing his brother Louis Bonaparte furiously responded: ‘A divorce in my family, to get my name bawled out all over Europe!’7 He even resisted his family’s eVorts to make him repudiate Jose´phine, though he detested the Beauharnais clan. In Stae¨l’s novel Delphine rejects the facility of divorce (Le´once’s from Mathilde) out of greatness of soul, Le´once out of social conformism. Even though most of the action of Delphine pre-dates the passing of the divorce decree of 20 September 1792, Stae¨l’s liberalism was a constant. As De l’Allemagne would later put it, the reason why marriages so often fail is the ‘strange inequality which public opinion prescribes between the duties of the respective spouses. Although Christianity freed woman from a state resembling slavery, because it posited her equality with the man before God, from woman’s slavery there remain prejudices which, combining with the great freedom society leaves them, have brought many evils’.8 Le´once’s union with Mathilde and Oswald’s with Lucile make this painfully clear. In that sense Stae¨l must be seen as a realist, rebelling against novelistic convention and romantic (but not Romantic) disposition—which does not mean that she ever stopped seeing marriage as potentially the most perfect fusion between individual and society possible.9 Napoleon also railed against Delphine on account of other freethinking elements it contained. Las Cases described a characteristic scene on St Helena in Janury 1816: ‘Delphine . . . was at that time our evening topic. The Emperor analysed it; little in it met with his approval. The disorder of the mind and imagination that prevailed in it roused him to criticism. ‘‘There were still,’’ he said, ‘‘the same faults as had formerly distanced him from the author, in spite of the warmest advances and most insinuating Xattery she had tried on him.’’’10 And Napoleon told Bourrienne: ‘I no 7 See Gautier, Stae¨l et Napole´on, 109. 9 See also Poovey, Proper Lady, 203.

8 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, IV.369. 10 Las Cases, Me´morial, I.332.

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more like women who make themselves men than eVeminate men. Each has his role in the world. What is this ranting, rambling imagination? What remains? Nothing. All that is a mere metaphysics of feeling or disorder of mind. I cannot endure the woman. First because I don’t like women who hurl themselves at me, and God knows how much wheedling she tried . . . ’11 But he was also incensed at the way Stae¨l focused on the narrowest aspects of Catholicism, as she did with the description of Mathilde’s convent or Lebensei’s letter against monastic vows. Protestantism, on the other hand, she predictably presented as the very incarnation of freedom, contrasting in every respect with the Catholic religion of enslavement. This was incendiary material, given Napoleon’s desire to be reconciled with the Catholic clergy via the Concordat (the agreement between him and the Pope which led to the dismissal of e´migre´ bishops, reorganized Catholicism in France, and increased the State’s power over the Church). His hostility towards Stae¨l was essentially the hostility of disapproval, which irrationally also acquired an element of fear. Given that Stae¨l—or so it appeared—could do nothing practically or directly to sap his power through either writing or speaking, his determination to expel her from the centre of political power seemed an extreme reaction. But in Napoleon’s France it had become unacceptable to speak in any but laudatory terms of the ruler, which is why so much of the country lapsed into silence. Since Stae¨l was no longer disposed to praise, she had to be sent away, even though sending her away gave her a freedom that she might have been less intent on exploiting to such devastating eVect if she had been allowed to remain in Paris. It was, in other words, a paradox generated by despotism. There was probably also another reason for Napoleon’s active mistrust of her. Although her oYcial exile did not begin until 1803, during the previous year she had become involved—more closely involved than she admits in Dix anne´es d’exil—in a conspiracy among a group of French senators and army generals to halt Napoleon’s increasing hunger for power (including his desire to become emperor). Bernadotte, the French general who became Crown Prince of Sweden, stood at the centre of the group, and during the dangerous negotiations entered into in this connection Stae¨l often saw him and his friends—often enough, as she remarks in Dix anne´es d’exil, ‘to destroy me if their scheming had been discovered’.12 Napoleon’s remark 11 Quoted in Guislain de Diesbach, Madame de Stae¨l (Paris: Perrin, 1983), 260. 12 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 130.

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about Stae¨l’s insidious inXuence on others comes to mind: ‘She is not talking about politics or me,’ Madame Necker de Saussure quotes him as saying, ‘but for some reason I do not understand, people always like me less when they have seen her.’13 The consequence of this, according to Stae¨l, was that he came to regard her as the only guilty party, though others were far more actively compromised than she had ever been: many of the disaVected (men) were treated leniently or spared punishment altogether, though one general’s proclamations to the army were intercepted by the head of police. Napoleon hushed up the aVair and relocated some of the most senior military involved, while Stae¨l herself was banished. According to the Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne, Napoleon thought she had stirred up the army chiefs by talking of the return of the exiled priests to France.14 Another witness, Constant’s cousin Madame Cazenove d’Arlens, recorded in her diary for 21 March 1803 that the year’s delay in announcing her exile came about because she had just returned to Coppet when her new role became suspected (and thus seemed to pose no particular threat). Yet ‘Bonaparte swore that she would not come back [to Paris] the following year’.15 Friends told her that Bonaparte was suspicious of her relations with Bernadotte, but he refrained from punishing the latter either because he needed his military talents or because Bernadotte’s wife was the sister-in-law of Joseph Bonaparte. The degree of circumspection Stae¨l still felt obliged to observe as she wrote Delphine may have prevented her from referring clearly and passionately to the Revolution, but contemporaries did not see much caution in her method, as Constant’s comments on the book make clear. Although Delphine is herself as unpolitical as almost any Frenchwoman of her class and time, she is Enlightened enough to react with the same distaste as Lebensei to the conservatism of contemporary society. This makes her helpless attraction to Le´once even more pitiable. She is not so gullible as to attach importance to being well received in society drawing-rooms, but she cannot ignore tittle-tattle, even—or especially—when it is caused by her misdirected love. The only real means of self-protection she has, once she has realized Madame de Vernon’s perWdy, is to leave Paris, putting herself beyond the reach of scandal-mongers in the same way as Madame de Lebensei had done. She vaguely hopes that Lebensei will manage to console 13 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. ccc. 14 Las Cases, Me´morial, II.189–90. 15 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 131.

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her—‘he has thought so deeply about feelings and ideas that perhaps he will calm my soul by accustoming me to consider life from a more general point of view’16—but draws only limited comfort from his reassurances. Le´once, predictably enough, thinks Lebensei’s ideas insane, apparently because they would have oVered him a solution to his problem (namely divorce) that the ‘real’ world would never countenance.17 If he secretly knows that this world is not entirely real, or not as real as it would like to appear, he none the less grants it every appearance of substantiality when he declares worldly opinion to be a triumphant enemy, even though its triumph depends entirely on dubious attitudes, such as his own, that might be changed. There are faint intimations throughout the novel that his better judgement may prevail over existing codes and niceties, but the mood of rebellion is never sustained. When Delphine tries to persuade him that his real duty is political inactivity, because it is a crime to kill one’s fellowcountrymen in the name of a doubtful (royalist) cause, he has no answer except that he has to defend the weaker side (that of the royalists) whatever the principles they are Wghting for, and however weak these principles may be.18 Caste wins, not right. He simply cannot allow that ‘a man of my family’ might ally himself to the enemy side; rather, antiquated notions of privilege must continue to hold sway because ‘there are some old gentlemen who have decided that it should be so’.19 Privilege, in other words, should not require rational defence. It is true, of course, though hardly reassuring, that this was more or less Stae¨l’s own view. Her republicanism was never whole-hearted enough to tolerate the suppression of an elite ruling class, the class to which she belonged, since she thought that to allow the masses power would be to usher in a kind of Woolworth’s world of vulgarity. That her class was that of comparative arrivistes, of new money, on the other hand, never seemed to bother her unduly. She was always attracted by perversity. What else could explain the fact that, at least according to Las Cases, she would send Napoleon a letter of warmest congratulation when he escaped from Elba in 1814 and returned to France?20 Is it the same ambivalence as that which in 1802 made her uncertain how critical to be of Napoleon’s authoritarian actions insofar as they were directed at her? When Hochet sent 16 Stae¨l, Delphine, ed. Be´atrice Didier, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), I.333. 17 Ibid. 482. 18 Ibid. 467. 19 Ibid. 464–5. 20 Las Cases, Me´morial, I.333.

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her a calm letter about Napoleon’s denunciation of her that summer, she replied from Switzerland: I am living like a hermit, and people claim that I have been denounced . . . , which is absurd—it is no less so that the consul, who doesn’t like the English newspapers, is composing for them the most brilliant article about his fear of a woman.—Well, if he expelled me from France I would go to England, and certainly there I would be more irritating to him than lonely and trembling in Paris, as everyone must be— besides, I have Monsieur de Stae¨l’s debts which call me back to Paris this winter, and I certainly won’t get involved in politics there.21

Others too were unsure how seriously Napoleon worried about Delphine and its author, though not necessarily for reasons Xattering to Stae¨l. Sydney Smith described the book in the Edinburgh Review as ‘this dismal trash which has so nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic among us with gaping, [and] has so alarmed Bonaparte that he has seized the whole impression, sent Madame de Stae¨l out of Paris, and, for aught I know, sleeps in a nightcap of steel and daggerproof blankets’.22 To counteract what she judged to be Delphine’s immoral inXuence, a Miss M. Byron published in 1806 an AntiDelphine which was said to have ‘drawn sweet tears from the eyes of tender females, [but] has met with few readers in England, where Madame de Stae¨l’s novel has been loudly condemned’.23 Some of Stae¨l’s other English readers were less charitable than she might have hoped. Mary Berry, who would become a great admirer of hers later on, wrote from Paris to the sculptress Anne Damer: In spite of my headache yesterday, I contrived to read nearly three volumes of Madame de Stae¨l’s Delphine. As I conclude it is long before its time in London, I need not tell you what it is. It is certainly interesting—the great sine qua non of a novel. It is well written too, and there is much nice observation of the aVections of the human heart; but much false and incongruous, and still more, which has been drawn from, and only applies to, the corrupted and factieux societies of Paris.24

She also dissented from the notion that Stae¨l had painted herself in Delphine, calling the alleged portrait ‘ridiculously dissimilar’. The novel’s depiction of passion, too, she regarded as excessive, leaving little or nothing to the imagination, and contrasting with Rousseau’s portrayal in La Nouvelle 21 Mistler, Lettres, 36 (summer 1802). 22 Quoted in Robert C. Whitford, Madame de Stae¨l’s Literary Reputation in England, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, IV.i ( Johnson Reprint Society, Feb. 1918), 14. 23 Ibid. 14–15. 24 Berry, Journals, II.233.

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He´loı¨ se of ‘perfect and admirable friendship’ (a radical misreading of that work). Notwithstanding this view of Delphine’s Xoridness, Stae¨l wrote to Madame Pastoret in connection with the huge contemporary success of Chateaubriand’s Atala, a high Romantic evocation of love and tragedy among Red Indians, ‘I have tried in my novel [Delphine] to see if social life and natural religion might not stimulate the imagination as much as the savage life and superstition. The element of the extraordinary in my novel is entirely contained within the aVections of the heart; the framework is our everyday life.’25 On 16 January 1803 Maria Edgeworth wrote from Paris to Henry Edgeworth that Stae¨l’s novel could be called ‘le malheur d’eˆtre femme’, and further reported: It is cried down universally. There are Wne passages in it but altogether we are of the general opinion that it is tiresome and immoral or as a gentleman lately said, il manque d’eˆtre abre´ge´ e´clairci et e´pure´. Innumerable witticisms have been circulated about this novel which with the stones of the moon have Wlled the conversations of society till everybody was thoroughly tired of both.26

Stae¨l, she added, was said to be so displeased by the Parisian verdict on Delphine that she would not come to the capital that winter. ‘I am sorry that we shall not see and hear her for one evening—that is all.’ In a letter of 10 August 1800 Stae¨l had written that Delphine was, as she worked on it, becoming ‘the story of the destiny of women presented from various angles’.27 Women’s lot illustrates with particular clarity the central theme of the novel—the force exerted by social opinion and prejudice over the individual—because convention denies women essential freedoms enjoyed by the opposite sex. While men never really suVer the consequences of breaching propriety, women constantly do. As Stae¨l remarks in Quelques re´Xexions sur le but moral de ‘Delphine’, ‘it is accepted that they must respect all barriers, bear every kind of yoke’.28 Yet Delphine herself was educated by Monsieur d’Albe´mar to believe that women should be freed from the weight of received opinion. She is hardly disposed, therefore, to think that her sex must be submissive and unquestioning, at least until she falls in love with the hidebound Le´once (who is himself inconsistent, happy to challenge the proprieties when it suits him and obey them when it does 25 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.386 (27 June 1801). 26 Maria Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 82–3. 27 Quoted in Simone Balaye´, Madame de Stae¨l: e´crire, lutter, vivre (Geneva: Droz,1994), 61. 28 Stae¨l, Delphine, II.365.

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not). What guides her are the impulses of the heart, according to whose dictates she will practise the religion of pity instilled in her by her eighteenth-century education. Yet even this disposition, it is suggested, may be tainted to some degree, since the desire to help the various unfortunates she encounters may stem from nothing more exalted than her own need to be loved. A religion of beneWcence that initially appears morally pure, in other words, can be bound up with personal deWciency. Despite the disapproving tone of Quelques Re´Xexions sur le but moral de ‘Delphine’, which attacks the heroine’s impetuousness and heedless Xouting of convention, Delphine is presented as a sympathetic and winning character, all the more winning, indeed, for the fact that she Wnds virtue diYcult to practise. The novel shows her progressing from a state of emotional and social innocence to one of worldly wisdom, so describing an education from uncomprehending quasi-altruism to an acceptance of ‘douleur’ as the natural and inevitable condition of her sex. Delphine’s case is no doubt an extreme one, but nowhere in the novel is woman’s lot shown to be either morally endurable or materially satisfactory. The ‘histoires de femmes’ which dot the narrative are designed to reveal the inevitability of female suVering in the reactionary aristocratic world of Revolutionary France. Mademoiselle d’Albe´mar, as we know, has chosen to live in a convent because she is convinced that her physical deWciencies condemn her to unfulWlment in a world that values superWcial attractions highly, though it happily promotes the careers of ugly men. Madame d’Ervins also enters a convent out of remorse for her husband’s death in a duel with her lover. Madame de Vernon herself is more deserving of pity than even Delphine realizes, being the victim of a neglected upbringing and a distasteful arranged marriage, while her daughter Mathilde’s faults can be laid at the door of unloving parents who gave her an inadequate education and priests who developed her tendency towards fanaticism. Showing solidarity with Madame de R., as Delphine does, amounts to supporting the cause of women in general, because any female can become the victim of male exploitation (which is really all that has happened to this supposedly libertine woman). Whereas Monsieur de Lebensei fearlessly faces up to the Roman Catholic world that chastises him for having married a divorcee from a Protestant marriage, his wife Wnds retreating to the country the only way of coping with her so-called irregularity. The fear of social disapproval, along with the self-exile that it often indicates, naturally becomes a much stronger emotion when that disapproval

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positively demands withdrawal. One ‘histoire de femme’ describes Madame de Belmont, who is disowned by her relatives for marrying a helpless blind man and eVectively obliged to live with him in country isolation. The husband’s situation is another such story, for he is wholly dependent, useless except for the purposes of parenting and domestic life, feminized in all but the conviction (fostered by Madame de Belmont) of eVortless intellectual superiority to his wife. Yet their life of seclusion is also fruitful and fulWlling, an instance of the positive beneWts that being apart from the world may bring. Ostracism of the type Madame de R. endures is entirely diVerent, though both kinds of exclusion may be seen as illustrating Maria Edgeworth’s ‘malheur d’eˆtre femme’—a sexism that is no longer latent in bien-pensant society, but openly declared by it. Such prejudice could only enrage Stae¨l, because it indicated an indefensible conception of what was right in woman, as opposed to what was right for woman. The critic Fie´ve´e wrote against Delphine that ‘a passionate woman is not against nature; but she is against the nature of well-brought-up women; that is why in all good novels one Wnds only tender women: the Princess of Cleves, Clarissa, Pamela, Virginie,29 even Rousseau’s He´loı¨se are not passionate women’.30 But it is precisely this notion of the proper sphere of woman—one of decorous reserve, guaranteed by an ethos of restraint— that fuels Stae¨l’s resentment at having to live in a state of (spatial) containment or exile whose analogue is to be found in the (moral, domestic, or other) constriction imposed upon her sex. She particularly objected to Napoleon’s refusal to let her live in the society that was best adapted to nurturing her genius because it was paralleled by a long-established habit of incarcerating women within the walls of seemliness. But she was wrong when she assumed, as she sometimes did, that the self-assertion she craved was necessarily hindered by geographical and political containment. In fact, as her writing career illustrates, it could be paradoxically furthered and enhanced by such restriction. Authoritarianism generated a countervailing intellectual and moral freedom that enabled her to conceive and write great revolutionary literature. In comparison, the freedoms which Delphine claims as her right appear depressingly limited.

29 Pamela and Clarissa from Samuel Richardson’s respective letter-novels of the same name, and Virginie from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s exotic pastoral novel Paul et Virginie. 30 See Simone Balaye´, ‘Un Emissaire de Bonaparte, Fie´ve´e critique de Madame de Stae¨l et de Delphine’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 26–7 (1979), 99–116, at 106.

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Nevertheless, they scandalized or amazed many contemporary readers. Diderot’s daughter Ange´lique de Vandeul, the product of an enlightened education, was incredulous at the self-restraint Stae¨l gives her heroine: ‘the idea of a virtue which resists months of teˆte-a`-teˆtes is, I confess to my shame, beyond any idea I have ever had of my own strength. I should have Xed to the end of the world on the second day . . . Or it would all have ended as stupidly as it normally does.’31 Can Delphine be a masochist who revels in frustration, or a sadist who enjoys imposing it on Le´once? Byron conWded that he had once told Stae¨l, ‘the incomparable Corinna’, how dangerous for young women he considered both Delphine and Corinne to be. ‘She never forgave me. She endeavoured to prove to me that, au contraire, the tendencies of both her novels were supereminently moral. I begged that we might not enter on Delphine, as that was hors de question. (She was furious at this) . . . ’32 Simonde de Sismondi’s mother, on the other hand, found it all very edifying as well as compelling. In her diary, which she wrote in English, she describes how her son read Delphine aloud to her, noting: ‘I am relieved to have done: I felt myself too deeply interested for a mere novel and the end crush [sic] the heart to pieces . . . [At a reception] I was told there a young girl, one Miss Dunant, had turned mad after having read two volumes of Delphine and that Madame de Stae¨l has been much aVected by it and will call upon her and try to comfort and cure her.’33 Something remarkably similar happened when Stae¨l was being lionized in England in 1813. One can just imagine her, in all her human warmth and maternity, crushing the girl to pieces in her arms and willing the Wt to pass. The epigraph she borrowed from her mother’s Nouveaux Me´langes: ‘a man must be able to brave [public] opinion, a woman submit to it,’34 sounds sexist and restrictive enough to Wt the image of Suzanne Necker she projects, particularly when she recalled all the eVorts that mother had made to prise her away from unsuitable lovers. Yet the notion that Delphine does straightforwardly uphold the message of the epigraph is highly contestable. On the contrary, the heroine reluctantly bows to opinion until her devotion to Le´once overcomes prudence, and Le´once, eVectively her 31 See Jeanne Carriat, ‘Delphine lue par Meister’, ibid. 121–33, at 132. 32 Blessington, Conversations, 25–6. 33 See Norman King, ‘Sismondi, Madame de Stae¨l et Delphine: les de´buts d’une intimite´’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 26–7 (1979), 33–76, at 54–5. 34 Emphasis added. See also Balaye´, E´crire, 70.

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murderer, dies himself because he is too spineless to act against a society whose force he resents as well as respects. Yet however dubious many contemporary readers found its message to be, the form of the novel Wts the version of female conventionality urged by Suzanne Necker. One can see why Stae¨l adopted the epistolary mode, despite its being distinctly dated by 1802 (it had Xourished in France in the second half of the eighteenth century, but was given the coup de graˆce in 1782 by Les Liaisons dangereuses). Letter-Wctions suited women writers: they were a natural—that is, socially and artistically acceptable—means of expression for their sex, permitting them to aim at and attain a speciWc (gendered) kind of eloquence. (The ‘right’ to eloquence was normally a male one, based on the rhetoric boys learned at school and practised as men in venues denied to women—the political assembly, the pulpit, and the court of law.) One of their advantages for Stae¨l was the fact that they permitted the dialectical airing of issues that might have appeared positively and dangerously polemical if set down in any other form. The exchange of letters between diVerent characters presents all the oppositions around which the novel is structured: marriage and divorce, Catholicism and Protestantism, freedom and curtailment, reason and passion. Stae¨l, as author, shows woman as a free-standing power of imaginative adaptiveness, if not of sexual independence; within the limits of the mode she has embraced and the social constraints she acknowledges, she writes with extraordinary daring. Delphine, it must be remembered, was published in the year Napoleon became Consul for life. Conversely, the epistolary form provides a framework that actualizes containment. Letters between friends and acquaintances are another example of the limited space regarded by Stae¨l’s society as proper to women, whose very domesticity is a paradigm of conformity. Of course they may move outside their habitual conWnes, though when they do this in Delphine they still remain anchored to home life and the ideological issues it generates: Lebensei’s tirade against Catholic bigotry and praise of (Protestant) divorce laws emphasizes this fact. Such issues emerge, and are addressed, as matters of ordinary existence that make it possible for the novelist who presents them to work in the service of everyday moral reform. This is not, however, to say that Stae¨l is simply concerned with the dissemination of domestic virtues throughout society, and it would be belittling to claim that she was. She succeeds in showing that the ‘woman question’ has ramiWcations beyond and above those of domesticity. To formulate her social and

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literary programme she had to reach outside the world of ‘proper’ femininity, but the literary form she adopted made it appear uncontroversial to do so, at least to many readers. If woman, she says, is to be deWned primarily in terms of relationships—familial, marital, extra-marital—then for the sake of justice those relationships have to be shown as properly extending into the world outside. She thus endorses a kind of female activism that is rooted in habitual experience but ‘benignly’ forced to exceed its limits. The pressure to conform to an image of proper femininity, against which Delphine and her creator struggle to assert themselves, is as alien to the venturesome spirit Stae¨l manifests in declaring her right to be an author as to Delphine’s irregular social actions—defending and befriending Madame de R., helping the lovers The´re`se d’Ervins and Serbellane, or consenting to her own trysts with the married Le´once. In eVect, Stae¨l is suggesting that the spheres of ordinary and extraordinary human relations should, if only experimentally, be fused, or the apparently extraordinary redeWned. To treat one as properly located in the everyday social world and the other as rightly banished to an area outside it is a kind of corruption; an enlightened social order would accommodate them both. The future, or modernity, always seemed likely to permit such an accommodation, but as a child of eighteenth-century perfectibilism and a witness to the Revolution Stae¨l wanted it to happen in the present, primarily because many of the relationships conducted in the world were essentially the same as those relegated outside it. Only the female principle, she concluded, could reconcile them: not the starchy, inXexible female spirit of her mother and Delphine’s Mathilde de Vernon, but the embracing warmth of true, generous maternity. Her later relationship with a shamed and shunned Byron in Switzerland seems to have developed out of the same conviction. The aesthetic closure of ideal narrative and the imaginative gratiWcation of sentimental or romantic love are missing from Delphine, and the promise of emotional fulWlment is thwarted through the power relations instituted by society. In the novel this situation is emblematically conveyed by the dissolution of letters into rambling monologue, an unfocused and undirected discourse of solitude. Ostracism and persecution are as familiar to Delphine as to Stae¨l, and the latter’s exile is merely a variant on an eternal theme of loneliness. The situation of British women writers contemporary with Stae¨l is instructive in this respect precisely because the despotic authoritarianism of France was alien to the spirit of the British constitution. This made it

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possible for Wollstonecraft and Austen to Wt their imaginative worlds within an order of propriety that did not preclude free self-expression. (Austen’s work is of course far less overtly ideological than Wollstonecraft’s.) Austen in particular conWnes herself to a private sphere into which the light of contemporary European events only occasionally shines; she is without Stae¨l’s intention—notwithstanding the alleged absence of political reference from Delphine—to show the public sphere of action and existence. So she as comfortably, but also as ironically, reinforces prevailing bourgeois and aristocratic ideologies as Stae¨l’s former friend Burney, whose self-control and self-eVacement, so unlike Stae¨l’s expansive loudness, proclaim the message of female denial. Of course, the thrust of De la litte´rature had been to reinforce female curtailment, in the sense that it showed the abiding power of social institutions and political regimes as moulding the art of writing into a male undertaking. It drew limited comfort from the promise of political renovation in a republican regime, implying caution where women were concerned: only in ideal circumstances, about which the exiled Stae¨l is sceptical, would the principle of perfectibility be extended to the situation of the female sex. The new poetics she created in setting northern melancholy above southern brio appears, it is true, to favour hidebound women, but scarcely demonstrates a female artistic advantage in that regard. On the face of it, the meditative character which De la litte´rature discerns in the English as a product of their political and social freedom35 should conduce to a speciWc kind of female self-development, precisely that which can occur within a state of domestic conWnement. Stae¨l certainly saw the domestic sphere impressively realized in English literature. Yet she could not deny that English women were often as devoid of free agency as their French counterparts, nor that the fruitful artistic assertion of liberty inside as well as outside the home was also a desideratum rather than a reality in England. It is in keeping with this perception that Corinne will paint its devastating picture of female subordination in provincial Northumberland. In any case, Stae¨l also believed the ‘destiny of women’ to be an ineluctable matter of sexual type, and often a destructive consequence of male vacillation that seemed as inevitable as it was unspeciWc to any nationality or geographical situation. Nothing she discusses in De la litte´rature seems a plausible agent for the kind of character change that would be required to 35 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 241.

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alter man’s irresolution: it is as marked a feature of the Hispano-Gallic Le´once as of the Scottish Oswald, or in real life the Wckle Narbonne or the indecisive and ironically named Constant. If men would only behave properly, she wrote, women would be guaranteed contentment,36 but since they will not, the ‘malheur d’eˆtre femme’ remains eternal and ubiquitous. What Stae¨l evidently desired was the kind of consideration (artistic, yet also political) enjoyed by Corinne, but which the Napoleonic age denied her, though she certainly did not want it at the price Corinne Wnally pays. Some contemporary societies she encountered during her exile, such as that of Regency England, seemed to grant her this concession, but she wanted her France, with all its peculiar seductions. So she resignedly told Madame Pastoret on 10 September 1800 that propriety, ‘this accursed womanly dignity’, robbed her of the chance of self-fulWlment as a freely creative writer, even though ‘the condition of women authors is so rare that it isn’t worth the moralist casting his eye on it’.37 Yet the type of woman author Stae¨l was fatally attracted prohibition. The best way she could Wnd to escape the odium of Napoleon and his court was to avoid presenting Delphine as herself, however keen she may have been to give novelistic form to her own generous impulses, unfairly thwarted by Revolutionary authoritarianism; to convey her own grievances via a morally superior alter ego. To do so would have been too risky. So Lebensei, not Delphine, has to be made the spokesman for social change and political renovation, her advocate of liberty and happiness, and libertyas-happiness. One of Le´once’s weaknesses is a lack of political conviction that matches his wavering moral beliefs, an irresolution that Stae¨l regards as almost a crime in a man granted the boon of legitimate political activism. Accordingly, he dies without actually Wghting for a cause he believes in. But is it a weakness in him not to support a cause (for example, the freedom of a woman to have her religious vows annulled) that has been generated by a Revolution of which he cannot approve? Logically speaking, it is not; but it still makes him as much a prisoner of a bankrupt socio-political system as Delphine herself. As Stae¨l remarks in her letter to Charles de Villers, the Revolutionary period was therefore the perfect one to use as the backdrop to reason’s struggle with prejudice.38

36 See Simone Balaye´, ‘Coppet et les amis de Madame de Stae¨l’, RHLF 66 (1966), 139–49. 37 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.1.322. 38 Ibid. 2.628 (3 June 1803).

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The opening-up of a Wctional world that her preoccupation with exile brings about contrasts with the practice of her eighteenth-century novelist predecessors.39 Rousseau’s Julie has a private end, as does the fallen but redeemed heroine of Charrie`re’s Lettres e´crites de Lausanne, Caliste. Stae¨l breaks with tradition in choosing for Delphine’s death a public space that mirrors the open-ended conclusion she wanted for her novel. Delphine is a ‘roman-question’ rather than a settled, demonstrative narrative with an obvious message, for the public-private existence Stae¨l had created for herself could not be otherwise translated than by the tension between inner and outer worlds. For all her frustration with the state of political impotence thrust upon her sex, she often tried to intervene indirectly with the political order in France. Her rescuing of aristocratic friends about to be massacred in September 1792, supplying them with false papers that had been smuggled into France by her servant, was of course a form of political activism, and not always particularly undercover work. Then she intervened in Constant’s political career, but according to him sometimes to unfortunate eVect. The way she made Joseph Bonaparte badger Napoleon into giving Constant the seat on the Tribunate that he would lose two years later (‘Joseph tormented me . . . I ended up giving way’, Napoleon remembered)40 was typical of her sometimes counter-productive eVorts at exerting political inXuence: in Ce´cile Constant translated them into the ‘imprudences’ of Madame de Malbe´e, her ‘meddlesome ways’ and ‘constant need to make a show’. Stae¨l carried on dreaming of Napoleon’s downfall, entering into dangerous negotiations with a team of disaVected former partisans, spending useful plotting time with Bernadotte and his friends, and generally arrogating to herself the superWcially masculine role that had encouraged Talleyrand’s famous quip about the creation of Madame de Vernon’s character in Delphine (‘I hear that Madame de Stae¨l has disguised both of us as a woman’). Stae¨l liked to think of herself as a bold spirit, and most would agree that she was. Her intrepid character could make her unsympathetic to the lot of women whose instincts rebelled against self-assertion, even though she understood their reserve. The Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise, as 39 See Marie-Claude Vallois, Fictions fe´minines: Madame de Stae¨l et les voix de la sibylle (Saratoga, CA: Amna Libri, 1987), 52. 40 See Henri Guillemin, Madame de Stae¨l, Benjamin Constant et Napole´on (Paris, 1959), 8.

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we have seen, would describe the English as epitomes of this silent virtue, vessels of taciturnity so deep that the ignorant outsider took them to be suVering from terminal taedium vitae.41 In 1793 she had been occasionally been on the receiving end of semi-admonitory silence in London and elsewhere in England, but the Conside´rations accounts for it in general terms as the native inclination towards understatement. And even if the unwary guest becomes trapped in a ‘glacial circle’ of speechless Englishmen, she notes, help—a gendered kind of help—is at hand: I know no more delicate politeness or protection than that of Englishmen towards women, in all circumstances of life. If there is a danger, a muddle, a service to perform, they neglect nothing to aid the fair sex. From the sailor [sheltering women in a storm] to the English gentleman of the highest rank, a woman is never exposed to any kind of diYculty without being supported, and everywhere one Wnds this happy mixture that characterizes the English: republican austerity in domestic life, and the spirit of chivalry in social relations.42

All the same, it took a certain amount of spirit to adapt to the wordlessness of the natives, as Vige´e Le Brun discovered at about the time Delphine was published. She described an after-dinner scene when she was visiting Donnington Park, the country seat of Lord Moira, where the company gathered in a beautiful gallery in which the women sat apart, embroidering or doing tapestry-work without exchanging a syllable, while the men picked up books and kept the same silence. Something similar happened at Knole, where she was visiting the Duchess of Dorset: The Wrst time we all gathered for dinner, the Duchess said to me: ‘You will be very bored, for we do not speak at table.’ I reassured her on this point, telling her that it was my habit too, having for many years almost always eaten alone. She obviously set great store by this custom; for at dessert her son, aged eleven or twelve, came up to her, and she barely said a word to him, and Wnally sent him away without a single mark of aVection.43

According to Ferri di San Costante, the pause ensuing on a verbal exchange between natives was known as une conversation anglaise: the erstwhile interlocutors simply looked at each other mutely and intently for several minutes, as though reXecting profoundly on what they had said.44 Rousseau had 41 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 559. 42 Ibid. 560. 43 Vige´e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, II.145; see also Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vige´e Le Brun (London: Deutsch, 1997), 249–50, for these and the following two examples. 44 J. L. Ferri di San Costante, Londres et les Anglais, 4 vols. (Paris, 1804), I.234.

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presented a more positive image of this dumbness in La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, describing the so-called matine´e a` l’anglaise enjoyed by Julie, Wolmar, and Saint-Preux, united and surrounded by silence, revelling at one and the same time in the pleasure of being together and the calm of recollection. How rare are the people who know the rapture of this state! I have not met anyone in France who has the least idea of it. ‘The conversation of friends never wanes,’ they say. It is true, language provides an easy chattering for those joined by an ordinary attachment; but friendship, milord, friendship! . . . Can what one says to one’s friend ever be worth what one feels by his side? . . . It is certain that this state of contemplation gives feeling men one of the greatest pleasures life can oVer. But I have always found that unfortunate people prevent one from enjoying it, and that friends have to be on their own to feel they need say nothing except when they want to.45

Burney’s silent elusiveness, which had so provoked Stae¨l towards the end of her stay in Surrey, might initially have seemed to her no more than a mark of the same national characteristic, though of course it was nothing of the kind. Stae¨l would be perplexed and oVended by what appeared to be a repetition of this ‘English’ conduct when both women were on French soil. But who was to blame for the provoking episode, the independent-minded Stae¨l or the constricted Burney? It is hard to say. The vagaries of politics caused the same kind of behaviour as the Englishwoman’s strait-laced moral timidity had done at Mickleham a decade earlier; a diVerent kind of pragmatism dictated the response. The signing of the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 brieXy restored the crossChannel traYc that had been curtailed by hostilities between France and England, and which would cease within a few months as war resumed and Napoleon started assembling a huge invasion force around Boulogne. The tide that would take Vige´e Le Brun over the water in search of a new market amongst the portrait-loving English also carried Maria Edgeworth, Mary Berry, and Fanny Burney to France. They found a country that appeared to be rediscovering court life, as the natives attempted to return to the magniWcence, gallantry, and e´clat of the ancien re´gime. The brilliant careers of the young army generals and of the new political leaders, too, seemed to call for celebration and show. As visual splendour, an essential aspect of court life, became more and more necessary to the government around the 45 Rousseau, La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, in Œuvres comple`tes, II.557–8.

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turn of the century, so Napoleon had the Tuileries gorgeously restored, Josephine’s apartment upholstered in purple and yellow silk, and his own Wlled with Old Master paintings and Se`vres porcelain. Paris came to life partly with the cash of what the old aristocracy called parvenus, and would stay more or less alive for years to come. Well-placed people regularly had a dozen evening invitations at a time to choose from. Mary Berry describes calling on Stae¨l (on one of her forays from Switzerland) one March morning in 1802 and Wnding her in ‘an excessively dirty cabinet—sofa singularly so; her own dress, a loose spencer with a bare neck’.46 A month later she reports dining at Stae¨l’s house with twenty other guests, including Juliette Re´camier, Constant, and Narbonne. ‘Luckily I got seated next Comte Louis de Narbonne, who is uncommonly sensible and pleasant in conversation.’47 In general, English visitors who came to Paris at this time found French society more formal and less bent on pleasure than their own. Madame d’Abrante`s, too, was struck by the improvement in manners which the Revolution had brought and the post-Revolutionary world continued.48 Misfortune had injected a measure of seriousness into daily life, she said, ending the libertinism of the ancien re´gime. This may have reminded any Parisians who needed reminding that a restrictive military power was at the heart of their new society. However inferior to what it had once been, the salon society of Paris could still impress visitors as inimitably stylish. Maria Edgeworth found polite society there inWnitely more cultivated than in London, where for all the eVorts made by hostesses such as Lady Davy and Lydia White in their so-called ‘esprit’ parties the exquisitely light touch of the French was missing. (Holland House, where Stae¨l would shine in 1813, was an exception, but proper ladies often avoided it.) The witticisms about Delphine which Edgeworth reports hearing in Paris drawing-rooms did not last, however; according to her, everyone eventually became tired of such sport. For those who had crossed the Channel for other reasons than those of entertainment and the enjoyment of reWned social pleasures these matters scarcely seemed signiWcant. Napoleon’s empire, and with it the exclusive rule of men, had not yet begun. In the salons people still listened to music and conversed; they watched plays and talked about literature and art rather than money and 46 Berry, Journals, II.145 V. 47 Ibid. 170. 48 Madame d’Abrante`s, Me´moires, 10 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1893), III.35.

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other concerns of a world governed by self-interest. Some of the aristocratic French who returned to France in 1802 and 1803 nonetheless found themselves in an alien world, a Bonapartist power in which the exquisite delicacy of pre-Revolutionary society was transformed into something cruder and more brutal; so they sighed for paradise lost and gave free rein to their Weltschmerz. Stae¨l, deprived of Parisian spirit when she had most wanted it, could not be so disaVected. During the winter of 1801–2 her longing for the capital had become unendurable, and after reading in the paper that the most illustrious Englishmen and the wittiest Frenchmen were then to be found there she was seized with a new urge to enjoy its pleasures, particularly its conversational pleasures: ‘I shall not conceal the fact that living in Paris has always seemed to me the most pleasant of lives: I was born there, I spent my childhood and earliest youth there; the generation that knew my father, the friends who went through the perils of the Revolution with me—only there can I Wnd them again.’49 She also missed the company of friends such as Madame Re´camier, who epitomized the chic life of which Switzerland was so enduringly devoid. This fabled beauty could attract every notability of the age to her drawing-room, and seemed in herself suYcient to embody and thus preserve all the elegance of the ancien re´gime. Vige´e Le Brun, returning to France in 1802, was much struck at one of the Re´camier balls by her ability to summon unto herself everything expressive of French cachet: ‘This was the Wrst time [during the Peace of Amiens] young men and women of twenty saw liveries in Paris antechambers, and ambassadors in drawing-rooms; distinguished foreigners, richly dressed, all decorated with glittering orders; and whatever people may say, such luxury is better suited to a ball than short jackets and trousers.’50 Yet Stae¨l was prevented from re-experiencing all this stylishness, even though she felt better Wtted than anyone to promote its urbane virtues. (Dress, as opposed to culture, was admittedly less her forte.) She may have been a European celebrity, but for Paris Madame Re´camier was queen. In the early nineteenth century Juliette Re´camier was at the height of her comeliness and prosperity; newspapers were Wlled with accounts of her balls and receptions, and the attention paid to her least indisposition made her absolute pre-eminence all too apparent. Bertie Greatheed, staying in Paris in 1803, would observe with no apparent enthusiasm that ‘I hear of no French 49 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 135.

50 Vige´e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, II.110.

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house but Re´camier’s’,51 and it attracted its throng of foreign as well as French visitors. Most contemporaries were enchanted by it, the decoration as novel as the interior was opulent, and the centre of attraction naturally the hostess’s bedroom. In Germany, the following year, Stae¨l would occasionally unnerve those visitors who did not understand the French society lady’s habit of receiving social calls in this intimate chamber, but at the Re´camier house in the Chausse´e d’Antin there was feverish enthusiasm to catch a glimpse of the ravishing Juliette reclining on her couch, precisely as she appears in the famous portrait by David. Wherever she was, at home or about town, she was the major aesthetic attraction of consular Paris, a bewitching apparition who could seduce even the down-to-earth Edgeworth: for according to her Madame Re´camier was a gracious and decent beauty,52 unlike many of the nouvelles riches who had entered Paris since the Revolution. Madame d’Abrante`s, initially predisposed against her and thinking her merely one of the merveilleuses, was easily won over too: How surprised I was to see this enchanting face, so fresh, so child-like and yet so lovely! But how much more surprised to see the pained timidity her triumph inspired in her! . . . [S]he suVered from the enraged glances of many women who made themselves no more agreeable by looking daggers and who, if only out of self-interest, should have done like me and looked with calm and pleasure at this lovely face, exclaiming after a proper look: ‘Heavens above! how pretty she is.’53

Stae¨l knew all of this, enjoyed it without rancour, and saw it as epitomizing the delights that were now so cruelly forbidden to her, since in 1802 venturing to stay in the capital mostly seemed too risky. Her Paris contacts might tell her that Bonaparte was totally absorbed by his planned expedition to England, but she remained sceptical: ‘I did not believe a word of this scheme, yet I Xattered myself that he would be unconcerned about my living twelve leagues from Paris, with the very few friends who would come such a distance to see a person in disgrace.’54 So she settled in a small country property, planning to stay there for as long as ‘this tyranny’ lasted.55 But by September she too had been inexorably drawn to Paris, as Constant noted ‘against my wishes’,56 51 Bertie Greatheed, An Englishman in Paris, 1803: The Journal of Bertie Greatheed, ed. J. P. T. Bury and J. C. Barry (London: Bles, 1953), 7. 52 Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth in France, 53. 53 d’Abrante`s, Me´moires, IV.9. 54 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 148–9. 55 Ibid. 149. 56 Constant, Journaux intimes, in Œuvres comple`tes, VI.218 (23 Sept. 1804, recalling the previous year).

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and against the advice of all those friends who were not so submissive to her will that they refrained from speaking out. This was the year when she tried to see Burney in the capital. Fanny had married d’Arblay in 1793 and settled in a cottage they had built on William Locke’s land with the proceeds of her novel Camilla. Narbonne had commented, on hearing that they were to marry, that even supposing the pension remained, they would have to live like peasants. This pension was presumably Burney’s annual £100 from Queen Charlotte; but the d’Arblays’ trip to France was primarily concerned with the recovery of the military pension d’Arblay was due, as well as with reclaiming some family property at Joigny. D’Arblay himself had left for Paris at the end of 1801 and settled in lodgings at the Hoˆtel Marengo, 1185 rue Miromesnil, while his wife stayed behind nursing their sick son Alexander. In the event Napoleon responded to d’Arblay’s claim by inviting him to join an expeditionary force to St Domingue to crush the insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. Disliking the conditions set, d’Arblay refused and returned to England in January 1802. On about 10 February, however, back in France, he was told that the government accepted his terms, only to Wnd that his conditions—never to be required to Wght his wife’s fellow-countrymen—were refused. Political circumstances, however, made it impossible for him to go back to his wife and son, who therefore prepared to cross the Channel and join him. Burney’s trip was never meant to last the ten years it did, but she had reckoned without a volatile political situation. No doubt she also reckoned without having to evade Stae¨l for the second time in a decade. After mother and son arrived in mid-April, the family lived for a month and a half in the centre of Paris, then spent the summer at Monceau (at that time almost a suburb). After a six-week visit to Joigny they moved into a small house in Passy, where Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau, and Balzac at diVerent times lived, and stayed there for three years. From 1805 they would lead a very private life in Paris, subsisting on a small income comprising Burney’s pension and d’Arblay’s meagre salary as a minor functionary in the Ministry of the Interior. Engaged in tricky negotiations to secure his military pension, they had to remain circumspect; nothing must jeopardize their attempt to gain Bonaparte’s goodwill. That meant, among other things, being careful to avoid the merest hint of scandal. Burney took to heart the injunction to preserve appearances that she had felt obliged to obey nine years earlier in England. Now, as then, the regrettable consequence was the need to evade certain dangerous and seductive beings.

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First there was a proposed introduction to Madame de Laval, Mathieu de Montmorency’s mother: certain reports against this lady with respect to her amitie´ for an old and admired friend of ours, had made me anxious to defer the acquaintance till I could know better with what degree of intimacy or coldness to begin it. I soon found, however, my precautions rather too late; she had already formed the project of a free connection . . . and persuaded Monsieur d’Arblay to let her choose me a cap and a hat from her own milliner.57

This was embarrassing enough, but far worse was Madame de Laval’s temerity in visiting uninvited, a visit which Burney’s husband told her it would be impossible to refuse. Madame de Laval therefore climbed the three Xights of stairs up to the d’Arblays’ Xat and appeared before them, ‘still pretty, though with bad teeth’.58 Again Burney’s theoretical disapproval warred with the spontaneous pleasure she took in meeting a woman whose look, ‘had I not been prejudiced against her, would have struck me as mingling benevolence of character with spirit of disposition . . . But I held back involuntarily from thinking the best, lest I should again have to crush, as with Madame de Stae¨l, an intimacy too hastily and unhappily formed.’59 She was almost won over, but still felt oppressed and reticent. Hardly had she recovered from this shock when Narbonne, who had bought a house nearby, was announced. Part of Burney’s upset, it is true, was caused by the memory of the time when they had all been together at Mickleham dining with Susanna Phillips, her late sister. Narbonne was ‘pale as death’ and trembled constantly during the visit, though on account of what emotion it is diYcult to know. Then the moment came to alert her husband to the visitors’ connection with one another, which produced another shock (Narbonne being d’Arblay’s ‘nearly dearest friend’): I found I gave him almost as much amazement as consternation; he had considered the connection from the lady’s time of life as necessarily innocent, and as such held it an abomination to attack the few possible comforts in the power of his ruined friend; by calumniating an intercourse from which he derived the only remaining consolation of his life, that of reposing his grief and discussing his aVairs with a person in whom he could place entire conWdence . . . 60

57 Burney, Journals and Letters, V.248 (c.20–1 Apr. 1802, to Mrs Locke). 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 254.

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Given Burney’s reports, however, he agreed to an ‘immediate suspension of all intimacy’, unhappy though it made him. They reached a kind of understanding, and Burney conceived a plan which gave a new lease of life to the prudishness that had ended her acquaintance with Stae¨l a decade earlier. ‘We settled, therefore, that I should decline to accompany her to any public place, or going to any of her parties; but that I should return her visit by a morning call, and behave to her with all the civility I could make compatible with the restraint and coldness hanging upon my doubts.’ In light of these events, Stae¨l stood little chance. Yet, being the woman she was, she tried. Burney’s Paris journal records for 24–5 April 1802: I held a private discourse with Mademoiselle de Mortemart upon my embarrassment as to Madame de Stae¨l for the terrible character she held in England, which embarrassment was not much lightened by her telling me it was not held more fair in France!—yet that everywhere the real evil is highly exaggerated by report, envy and party spirit, all allow. She gives, however, great assemblies at which all Paris assist, and though not solicited or esteemed by her early friends and acquaintances, she is admired and pitied, and received by them.61

The prim tone of what follows is bewildering only if we ignore the intricacies of Burney’s previous disappointment in Surrey. What most surprised and perplexed her at this period, she muses, ‘was the following ‘truly extraordinary’ note from Madame de Stae¨l: ‘I should like to convey to you my eagerness, Madame, and I am fearful of being indiscreet. I hope that you will have the goodness to let me know when you are suYciently recovered from the fatigue of your journey for me to have the honour of seeing you, without bothering you.’62 The only surprising thing, of course, is that Burney should have found this very polite communication oVensive. But ‘How is it possible,’ she wondered, ‘when even the common civility of a card to her card is returned, that she can have brought herself to descend from her proud heights to solicit a renewal of an acquaintance broken so palpably in England, and so palpably shunned in France? Is it that the regard she appeared to conceive for me in England was not only sincere, but constant?’63 Surely it was. Perhaps Burney had forgotten about Stae¨l’s habitual preference for male company; it might have told her that for Germaine to seek out Fanny’s own she must certainly value it. Yet not even an assurance of this would have satisWed Burney’s prudish caution. Whatever Stae¨l’s good faith, it was ‘a waste of kindness’—‘her character and 61 Burney, Journals and Letters, V.275–6.

62 Ibid. 276–7.

63 Ibid.

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conduct make it impossible for me to repay [it]; even though, on this spot, I am assured all her misdemeanours are aggravated, nay, caricatured by report, and that she exerts her utmost inXuence, and calls forth her best talents, upon every occasion which presents itself for serving those who have been her friends . . . ’ Notwithstanding all of that, and notwithstanding the fact that Stae¨l’s excellence of moral character in respects other than those of sexual conduct had been proven—‘I have heard stories of her returning, personally, good for evil,’ Burney wrote, ‘that would do honour to any character living’— after much discussion d’Arblay composed this reply: ‘Madame d’Arblay cannot but be inWnitely Xattered by the extreme goodness of Madame la comtesse [sic] de Stae¨l. She will most certainly have the honour of calling on Madame de Stae¨l as soon as possible.’ ‘Cooler than this it was not easy to write,’ reXected Burney, congratulating d’Arblay on extricating them so skilfully from an embarrassing situation. ‘Cannot but be’ was a turn of phrase she was particularly pleased with, since it stayed the right side of Xattery, but would prepare Stae¨l for ‘the frozen kind of intercourse which alone can have place between us’.64 The action that precipitated this particular moral crisis seems insigniWcant enough. Stae¨l had been determined to renew contact with Burney earlier in the month, hard though Madame de Laval tried to dissuade her. ‘Do you believe she will receive me in a friendly way? If so, I shall go and see her, though it is not usual for ladies in France.’65 Madame de Laval’s hesitation, according to Burney, changed Stae¨l’s tone from condescension to scorn and resentment, and she added: ‘If not—so be it!—what is Madame d’Arblay to me?’ She had then merely left her visiting-card.66 Burney wondered whether to answer, sure that Stae¨l intended to call again, ‘resolved to resist all oVence for the most manifest coldness’. She still felt remorseful, for ‘I seemed not only forgetful of the intimacy so unfortunately begun in England, but insulting too to civility so eagerly oVered me here’.67 She was, she concluded, truly sorry to Wnd Stae¨l in Paris, ‘for nothing is so painful as repressing kindness, and nothing seems so odious as returning condescension with contempt’. Perhaps Stae¨l was entirely oblivious to Burney’s anguished uncertainty. Even if aware of it, she seemed determined—characteristically determined, 64 Ibid. 277 for this and the preceding quotations. 65 Ibid. 263. 66 Ibid. 267. 67 Ibid. 268.

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as Burney would have conceded—to return incivility with friendship. A letter Burney sent Mrs Locke in April or May records that, while the d’Arblays expected ‘so supercilious an answer to so humble a note’ to awaken all Stae¨l’s pride and terminate the aVair, they had not reckoned on her Wghting spirit; for in a few days she came to the Hoˆtel Marengo in person.68 Again, Madame de Laval seems to have tried to discourage her, or at least warned the d’Arblays what was afoot. As a consequence, the porteress had orders to say that young Alex was still unwell and his mother not available. When a message was sent up to see d’Arblay, he was still (allegedly) en de´shabille´, and made his excuses too. Consulting each other after this stroke of ingenuity and luck, husband and wife decided that it was indispensable to return the visit; but before the appointed day Madame de Laval received a note from ‘this I doubt not unhappy persecutrix—with all her talents, all her consciousness of them, all her good qualities and all her bad ones, unhappy persecutrix’69—to announce that she was leaving Paris. Nonetheless, the couple still thought it right to leave their names, or rather wrong not to, and in early May, towards the end of a day ‘of incessant calls’, they called at Stae¨l’s home to deposit their cards. As they prepared to complete their mission at the house in the rue de Grenelle to which Eric de Stae¨l had moved, Paint to yourselves, my dearest friends, what were my feelings, and how great was my consternation, when . . . we heard the lady was still in Paris and at her home! How sick I turned! The reproaches I expected, my inability to speak one word that would clear them, the intimacy with a dear departed angel [Susanna Phillips] in ignorance of all that has since been found so repulsive—all crowded upon me, and like a culprit for terror lest the whole should end in unavoidable reconciliation.

Luckily she did not have to face that dread eventuality. Stae¨l, she discovered, was out, and leaving Paris the next day. For all Burney’s horrid sanctimoniousness, her reader may be slightly molliWed to discover how ill she thought of herself: ‘You [Mrs Locke] will, I am sure, more than anyone, conceive how irksome to myself has been the seemingly ungrateful, nay insolent part I have appeared to act towards one whom all the world admires, and whom we have all—once—been disposed to love.’70 Many years later, in 1813, she would recall this diYcult episode and again reXect how painful had been her duty to resist all Stae¨l’s seductions, how determined all her friends to prevent her from giving in. ‘I had found her so 68 Burney, Journals and Letters, 280.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid. 281.

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charming that I fought the hardest battle I dared Wght against almost all my best connections!’71 All the same, she does not emerge from the Wght with much credit. True, the d’Arblays’ pressing need not to oVend the French government or its head was paramount. Yet it is quite probable that Alexandre d’Arblay’s failure ever to advance from the lowly position he occupied in the Ministry of the Interior was as much due to oYcial disapproval of a man who had married an Englishwoman as to the couple’s known past relationship with Stae¨l. As Napoleon once remarked to another suppliant: ‘Even if you ceased the relationship, even if you were not in the wrong, it is possible that I shall order you to leave. You know that one is guilty in politics when one worries the person who governs.’72 Whether or not Stae¨l had at this stage already become involved in a plot against Napoleon,73 she so manifestly represented the opposite pole to his conception of woman’s rightful place in society that any dealings with her were bound to arouse his suspicions. All the same, Burney’s prudery seems as oVensive as her disapproval of Mrs Thrale for marrying Piozzi. She could have managed things better. It had become Stae¨l’s regular summer practice to shuttle between Paris and Coppet, particularly given her father’s unwillingness to travel to the French capital even after his oYcial removal from the list of e´migre´s at the end of July 1798. After the signing of the Treaty of Amiens she would be broaching the question of his staying in or near the city, where the question of his loan to the Exchequer could be more easily discussed, but he was reluctant to move. He could not endure the thought of stopping his daily visits to his wife’s tomb, doubted whether he could exist under Napoleon’s despotic regime, and felt embarrassed about his appearance, his enormous girth, and particularly his swollen legs. Meister would later note that during the last years of his life Necker’s body was ‘dreadfully large’, and Stae¨l herself wrote to Charles de Lacretelle in 1802 that the sight and size of his legs made him extremely self-conscious about being seen walking.74 In the meantime Napoleon probably rejoiced at Stae¨l’s periodic disappearances. He was feeling little safer for having expelled Constant and nineteen other members of the opposition from the Tribunate on 1802, signed the (temporary) peace treaty with England, and so gained more time to devote to internal police matters. Through the oYces of Madame de 71 Ibid. VII.170 (to Mrs Waddington, Chenies Street, London, 26 Aug. 1813). 72 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.485. 73 Be´atrice Jasinski’s opinion is that she had not (ibid. 484–5). 74 Ibid. 425.

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Genlis and other spies he was thoroughly informed about Stae¨l’s circumstances, thoughts, and likely actions, even if there was little tangible evidence that she was engaged in plotting against him. Whatever his suspicions, in any case, they seemed to be allayed when she went to Switzerland, though when she was safely away the arrests of dissidents in the so-called Generals’ Plot might have seemed potentially compromising for her. If she had wanted to help change society at the very time of the Concordat (1801) and of Napoleon’s being named Consul for life (1802), she would have found it hard to mount, or sound, an eVective political protest. She could, in his opinion, hardly argue from an objective position the moral right to encourage or induce political reform, and for all her goodness—a quality former friends like Burney readily conceded in her—she apparently lacked the virtue of principle that should have been its support. (On a diVerent interpretation, of course, her principles were both strong and impressive.) However much she, in common with Benjamin Constant, wanted to reveal Napoleon’s growing despotism as an oVence against which his subjects should rebel, it was particularly hard for her as a woman to argue that her model of state and private governance was superior, given her sex’s position outside the bounds of the political world that would-be reformers had to inhabit. Womanhood excluded her from this world not merely because it reduced her, by convention, to the status of bystander, but because the moral standards by which it was judged were diVerent from, and harsher than, those that applied to men. Napoleon was happy with this imbalance. Stae¨l, naturally, was not; but in Napoleon’s eyes she had fatally compromised whatever moral authority her sex was traditionally accorded by her numerous intemperate and risky actions. The result, as her relations with Burney illustrated, was for her to suVer renewed expulsion—not just from the male world of action, but also from the private world of sociability inhabited by women. Stae¨l had intended to publish Delphine in Geneva, and so nurture her pride as an author: ‘does self-respect not cure one of love for one’s country?’75 But more practical considerations intervened. The day after writing this to Claude Fauriel on 24 April 1802 she reported to Du Pont de Nemours that her husband, from whom she had long been separated, was suVering from a ‘paralysis of the brain’ (he had had several strokes) that made 75 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.491.

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him almost an imbecile. ‘I thought I should take care of him when he lost his mind, and I hope I can Wnish clearing his debts without ruining my children.’76 Yet she felt stupeWed by the days spent paying his creditors, ‘a poor preparation for Wnishing a novel’, and wanted to complete Delphine on top of the Alps, for ‘only there are you in touch with your soul’. To Nils von Rosenstein she repeated on 1 May 1802 that she had returned to Stae¨l of necessity, but managed to do so without sounding at all self-congratulatory: ‘he has made many mistakes . . . but he is very wretched.’77 Finally she set oV for Coppet with her husband, Albertine, and a servant. On 8 May the party put up at a hostelry in Poligny (Jura), 15 leagues from Coppet. During the night Eric de Stae¨l had another stroke, ‘more terrible than the preceding ones’. He went to sleep peacefully, but died at about three in the morning.78 Describing Stae¨l’s ‘devastating apolexy’ to her steward Uginet, the widow asked him to spread the dreadful news around Coppet. Extraordinarily for her, a woman who had always been able to write, whether or not at the same time as conducting a conversation, being dressed, having her hair done, or ordering the day’s meals, she felt unable to put words on paper, even for the purpose of communicating with Albertine Necker de Saussure or Mathieu de Montmorency. The funeral was held at Coppet on the morning of 11 May. In the days after, Stae¨l—once more mistress of her pen—wrote to her friends about her husband’s deplorable end, describing it to Hochet as a ‘terrible’ event. It seems that seeing death at such close quarters you feel yourself ready to lose everything you love, and need to hold hands with everyone around you to convince yourself of their existence. You know that I am not aVecting anything: certainly at another time this loss would not have been very painful to me, but I cannot tell you how desperate I felt at this spectacle, this so sudden loss of the hope of doing good to him. I am ill in bed with these painful emotions.79

To Nils von Rosenstein she reXected on the pleasure her husband had seemed to take in being with his family again. Then death had ended it all. ‘Never in my life have I felt such grief. I was enjoying the fact of having had a positive eVect on his mind; I was Xattering myself with having inspired in him a taste for order, and pleasure in my father’s company and our children’s: everything was destroyed.’80 She told Pictet de Rochemont of her searing grief after the gratiWcation of giving Eric de Stae¨l the attentions 76 Ibid. 493. 79 Ibid. 504.

77 Ibid. 497–8. 80 Ibid. 505.

78 Ibid. 502.

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she had been unable to provide as a lover. ‘In truth, I am deeply aVected by this death, and I shall never console myself for not having been able to make him happy for a time after he returned to me, free of his evil friends.’81 Three weeks later her children’s tutor Gerlach died of fever in Geneva. So ended a devastating period for her. She still had her ‘heavenly father’—Jacques Necker, not God—and her children, but the sense of loss could not easily be repaired. When the publication of Delphine provoked a furore, drawing fresh Napoleonic wrath on the head of its author, she must have felt that she could win at nothing. Jacques Necker’s publication at about this time of his Dernie`res vues sur la politique et la Wnance was no cleverer politically than his daughter’s publication of Delphine, since it argued against the concentration of power in the military and professed the false belief that Bonaparte could never establish a sovereign state under a new dynasty. On 4 August Napoleon was granted the power to choose a successor, but the Dernie`res vues described him as merely the guardian of the three possible constitutions it envisaged. Naturally enough, Jacques Necker blamed himself for having caused his daughter’s exile: Napoleon wrongly assumed that Stae¨l had deliberately informed and incited her father, and swore that she would never again set foot in any part of France but Geneva (then a French possession). In Dix anne´es d’exil she describes Necker’s noble oVer to leave his beloved Coppet to plead her cause in Paris,82 all too conscious of what his grandchildren and their mother were sacriWcing in living away from the capital. Stae¨l brieXy allowed herself the fantasy of a feˆted return there before brutal realism intervened to inform her that Napoleon would simply use the occasion to humiliate her father and, more particularly, herself. Necker’s evident relief when she conveyed an edited version of this conclusion to him said more than words could have done, and she retrospectively reXected on the guilt she would have felt—as opposed to the still considerable guilt she did feel— at his death Wfteen months later, given his state of health at that time: ‘the poison of remorse would have further infected my wound.’83 She often felt this kind of guilt, and at times there seemed only only one way to dull the pain: taking opium, as she later did ‘to suspend the anguish I felt’ at Mathieu de Montmorency’s exile, earned for the crime of visiting her at Coppet after her own proscription.84 The trouble was always that she remained addicted to company and fearful of solitude. ‘My friends are 81 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.506. 82 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 139. 83 Ibid.

84 Ibid. 222.

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necessary to me to keep me going, to make me alive, to give me a new perspective when I am made immobile by the impression of grief ’, and ‘the lineaments of death have never appeared to me so cruel as prison’.85 Exile, then, was potentially the greatest torment Napoleon could have devised for her. Furthermore, as a writer she was so deeply aVected by impressions that danger always seemed even more urgent than it actually was.When her own need for diversion and renewal of an intellectual as well as emotional kind was set against the real and possible consequences of her exile for others, she was suddenly brought up short, forced to reXect that being banished was perhaps a less personal fate than she had imagined. Was she unduly inclined to see her own loss of a world as a private disaster, and not suYciently aware of the chain reaction such a loss provoked? A few years later these possibilities would be unpleasantly hardened into incontrovertible fact as she saw Juliette Re´camier as well as Montmorency banished for the crime of supporting her in her solitude, but even now she was forced to acknowledge the contagion she might involuntarily spread, all the more dangerous for the inXammatory power of politics at its heart. When a woman such as herself was the carrier, the consequences could be devastating. This, at any rate, was what Napoleon hoped and believed; but he reckoned without Stae¨l’s solidity and resistance. The publication of Delphine in December, with the gratuitous insult of its preface—dedicating the book not to him, but to the silent and ineluctably feminine France—was the coup de graˆce. Napoleon had a pre´cis of the novel prepared for him, on the basis of which he wrote a review attacking its ‘wrong-headed, antisocial, dangerous principles and total lack of moral intention’ in the Journal des de´bats. Stae¨l’s Quelques Re´Xexions sur le but moral de ‘Delphine’ was a reply of kinds, though some months later in Weimar she would note in a study of Kant that ‘Delphine shows its moral aim too clearly; human life is without an evident aim’.86 She did this mainly because she had come to see that novels are about humans, not types— fallible, various people who are all less representative and symbolic than individual and particular—but partly too because she felt that Bonapartist pressure had driven her into a corner. The mental Xexibility this revision argues is characteristic of her. It stood her in good stead throughout her life, though she would never waver in her opinion about the principles that really mattered. She may later, in 85 Ibid.

86 See Balaye´, Lumie`res, 154–5.

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Weimar, Berlin, and London, have sounded unappealingly dogmatic to her critics, but her own consciousness of fallibility—which Burney might have done well to imitate—was a saving grace. Although she would carry on lecturing, what she really enjoyed was debate. In Germany she would allow only one person to correct her, and it is perhaps signiWcant that he was an Englishman.

4 On Germany

I

n April 1803, writing to Pictet-Diodati, Stae¨l described her wanderlust, an urge that was easy to understand. Whatever pleasure she took in making new acquaintances, she felt stiXed in Geneva. ‘You say that at our age one cannot conceive fresh aVections. Not French ones, perhaps, but English, yes. They show me a truly touching aVection here, one without which I should not have endured the days of exile and the stultifying gossip that is so unsuited to my heart and mind.’1 This yearning for renewal was both exciting and depressing. The previous month she had told Du Pont de Nemours that he was over-eager to tell her to stay and endure: being at Coppet was like living in a convent, and Geneva life in general was as far from her ideal as it was possible to imagine. I love my father with all my heart, but he is the Wrst to sense how hateful this life is to me, and I declare to you that no power on earth will force me to continue living it. Think for a moment about your own position thirty years ago, even now when you are still young at heart, and ask yourself whether you would resign yourself to playing whist every day for three hours, and to not having proper talk with anyone outside your immediate circle. Just reXect that since my childhood I have lived among the most distinguished men and discussed the most noble concerns, and ask yourself what it must cost me to hear nothing from morning to night but whether Miss Such-and-Such, who bores me, will marry Mr Such-and-Such, who has the same eVect on me.2

The love of France, she told her correspondent, was ‘the malady of my entire life’, yet ‘there is something in French blood that stops aVections lasting, even robs qualities of their reality. Ah! how much more Old 1 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.622 (12 Apr. 1803). 2 Ibid. 596 (7 Mar. 1803).

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England moves me!’ Yet despite all that, ‘one’s childhood friends, one’s native land, one’s own language—ah! there is nothing like France!’3 So she chafed at having to stay put in Coppet. Her father’s health, however, made it seem unthinkable that she would leave, as did the griefs she had recently endured—Eric de Stae¨l’s death, ‘that terrible event’, so quickly followed by that of Gerlach.4 Yet her sense that life was passing her by was no less upsetting. As she conWded to Hochet on 3 March 1803, to be forgotten about would mean losing everything. She disagreed with his counsel of relying on time and absence to heal the pain of exile, for ‘my defence is my brilliance, and if I let it dim all I shall have left are my faithful friends, people will grow used to the idea of my exile and be surprised at my wild idea of escaping from it’.5 Everything in her cried out for a resolution, a bold attempt to break free from the humdrum routine of Swiss life. Postponement, with its inevitable accompaniment of vagueness and unknowing, was anathema to her. She had a psychological need to decide her fate for herself, not to be left awaiting someone else’s decision. It was time to renew herself with a fresh writing project. She conceived the idea of a country or nation whose essence she thought might be captured in one of the fertile literary contrasts she had used to such eVect in De la litte´rature, but before exploring it wanted to investigate a diVerent possibility. This was the scheme she broached in the same letter to Hochet, namely winning over Napoleon by the very expedient she had just rejected—resignation. ‘If I wrote the Consul a letter in which I gave my word of honour to renounce whatever talent I possess for speaking and even writing, and give myself up entirely to a life of obscurity, what eVect do you think that would have on him? Is it not reasonable to prefer keeping me under his thumb in Paris to letting me loose in London with my wit and resentment . . . ?’6 Reasonable or not, neither Stae¨l nor Napoleon would have countenanced the idea of such local repression. They both knew that she was incapable of silence (while she remained on French soil), as she was incapable of tact (wherever she was). This new project, like others of hers, rested on a false belief about what might impress or move her adversary, and on a misrepresentation of her identity as a writer. It was altogether fantastic to hope that the Napoleon who had been outraged by aspects of Delphine might start regarding her, for no good reason, as politically harmless, just as 3 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.2.613 (12 Apr. 1803). 4 Mistler, Lettres, 29. 5 Ibid. 47. 6 Ibid. 47–8.

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it would be idle to think (as she later did) that De l’Allemagne might win her back his favour. Yet De la litte´rature had persuaded readers that its author understood the nature and consequence of literature very well. What, then, was she to do? Her plans to get away from Switzerland remained, though she continued to worry about her father. He in turn worried about her: ‘[My] daughter . . . is agitated by her situation, and I am the person who has to put up with it,’ he wrote to Madame Necker de Saussure.7 Simonde de Sismondi’s mother had been shocked at Jacques Necker’s physical decline on meeting him in December the previous year: ‘Monsieur Necker I found much altered from what I had seen. He is very big, and really I believe swelled, his legs are exceedingly so, but I believe he is swollen all over. His Wne eyes are become small, and he has something apoplectic that pained me very much.’8 Still, this time Stae¨l was determined to leave him. She revealed her intention to escape to France just before going there, telling her father on 15 or 16 September 1803: ‘I beg you to take particular care of your health . . . I do not know whether Providence, because of you, will grant me the wherewithal to Wnd some support that prevents me from killing myself if I lose you . . . I know I should die in convulsions of grief from the despair of it, if I lost you.’9 This high-pitched declaration would be answered by a reassuring letter from Necker on 4 November 1803, a few days after she had left France for Germany. I do have waking moments when your letters worry me, but I easily get over these impressions during the day, and I hope, with the grace of heaven, that I shall not be put to harder tests than the ones I have undergone. I do not even suVer palpitations of the heart like the ones I sometimes had last winter. So as far as my health is concerned the time looks propitious for my little travelling pigeon’s project.10

He could not have implied more tactfully and lovingly that the little pigeon, in reality a strapping matron of a certain age, was at least as bad for his health when she was at Coppet as away from it. The idea of travelling to Germany did not come to Stae¨l immediately. When she left Coppet in mid-September with Albertine, Auguste, and

7 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.42. 8 King, ‘Sismondi’, 56 (English in original). 9 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.15. 10 Quoted in comte d’Haussonville, Madame de Stae¨l et l’Allemagne (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1928), 4.

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Mathieu de Montmorency, depositing Albert at his Geneva school, she simply headed for France. The fact that Napoleon seemed almost to encourage her journey made it appear predestined. Indeed, he let it be known late in the summer that he would not interfere if she chose to settle somewhere quietly, precisely the eventuality that she had anticipated in her letter to Hochet of 3 March. Did Napoleon not know, though, that there was little chance of her settling quietly in this way—that returning to France would encourage her to return to Paris and start stirring up trouble again? His conditions had speciWed a minimum distance from the capital of 10 leagues, and initially she obeyed, at least ostensibly. She rented a house in MaXiers, fairly near Constant’s property Les Herbages, though in fact MaXiers was only 612 leagues from Paris (and in letters to friends she calls it 7). But she waited there only long enough to decide that she would challenge Bonaparte’s conditions, telling her father that she was moving to the capital very shortly on the pretext of Albertine’s being ill. ‘I am’, she deWantly told him, ‘like the Irishman who kept coming back until he was thrown out of a fourth-Xoor window’11— and, she might have added, like the daughter Jacques Necker knew of old, someone who found challenge and excess invigorating rather than terrifying. He must have sighed and feared. In the meantime she boldly rented a house in the rue de Lille, determined to stay put in ‘depressing’ MaXiers only long enough for an answer to her latest salvo to Napoleon, which put the case for her unavoidable presence in Paris (‘family matters’). Madame Necker de Saussure summed up the essence of Napoleon’s mistrust of her cousin, which explained why she was bound to be disappointed on this occasion as on others: simply put, he could not endure being goaded by her. As Napoleon himself remarked in a letter of 3 October to the Minister of Justice, Re´gnier: ‘The arrival of this woman, like a bird of bad augury, has always been the sign of some trouble or other brewing. It is not my intention that she should stay in France.’12 There was nothing to be hoped for, then, from her invoking his manly better self: ‘Citizen Consul, it is not in your nature, this impulse that causes you to persecute a woman and two children: it is impossible for a hero not to be the protector of the weak.’13 11 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.23 (27 Sept. 1803). 12 Ibid. 52 (17 Oct. 1803). 13 Ibid. 55 (7 Oct. 1803).

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Besides, she was already deWantly taking risks that proved how right he was to remain cautious. When a spy of his, Madame de Vaines, told him that MaXiers was only 6 leagues away from Paris, he declared that she must either move further out or return to Coppet. Stae¨l’s anger was of no avail. Not even her inXuential friends, including Napoleon’s brother Joseph, could break the First Consul’s will, and she realized that she had to go. In ordinary circumstances this would not have appeared cause for utter desperation, but the circumstances were not ordinary. As she wrote to her father on 7 October 1803, There is not a day when someone doesn’t come to tell me: ‘The First Consul is going to send you some gendarmes even here, whether you take an empty house near Paris or go to Paris to take your daughter to a pension.’ This life is unbearable: people can’t open the door without my going pale, a man can’t ride on horseback down the street without my thinking he’s a gendarme. This life is unendurable.14

Even her letters, she became convinced, were being tampered with. That same day she left to hide in the house of a slight acquaintance, Madame de La Tour, moving after a couple of days to Juliette Re´camier’s house in SaintBrice. This was nearly fatal, because she was so overwhelmed by her hostess’s sweetness and goodness15 that she fell more in love with France than ever. ‘I feel that I cannot live outside [it]: what charm in conversation! how well people understand each other!’16 Protesting innocence of intention, she asked Napoleon if his purpose was to make her leave the country, in which case she needed a passport to Germany. Napoleon’s intention, however, was simply to banish her again under more draconian terms. The ten years of exile that provided the title for her posthumous account had begun. Stae¨l stayed a week at Saint-Brice, inexplicably thinking that Napoleon had forgotten her. She then moved back to MaXiers. At four o’clock on 15 October a man in a grey suit—the most literary among the members of the Versailles gendarmerie, in mufti—arrived on horseback. As she moved towards him, ‘the scent of the Xowers and the beauty of the sun struck me. The sensations we perceive as a result of society’s dispositions are so diVerent from those of nature!’17 The gendarme, who respectfully complimented her 14 15 16 17

Ibid. 50. Ibid. 57 (to Jacques Necker, 10 Oct. 1803). Ibid. 67 (to Jacques Necker, 17 Oct. 1803). Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 153.

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on her oeuvre, told her that Napoleon’s order was for her to move 40 leagues from Paris within twenty-four hours. She insisted that she needed three days in Paris before she could comply, and took up residence in what is now 121 rue de Lille. On 18 October she wrote to her father that she was living in a charming apartment, surrounded by friends, knowing she had to leave—‘it’s like a miniature version of death’.18 She was, as usual, playing with Wre, determined to postpone her departure by as many days as possible, bent on challenging authority as far as she could, trying to be optimistic; for ‘Exile acts on the imagination, and always presents itself as an obstacle to all desires, all plans, all hopes’.19 And exile, she declared, was the kind of terrorism Napoleon most successfully practised for the purpose of bringing the French upper classes to their knees, because of the same heartfelt devotion to sociability as would prompt her own Wnal return from England in 1814. Yet it looked a moderate punishment in comparison with others, which is why it suited despots so well: it enabled them to create the maximum disturbance with the minimum fuss.20 Stae¨l’s friends in high places stood by her. On her way out of France Joseph Bonaparte and his wife had her to stay at their country property, Mortfontaine; but she found the forced mingling with political men there painful in a way she would never have done in her childhood or as a young salonnie`re in the rue du Bac. The question then arose whether to go to Coppet or proceed elsewhere. For Stae¨l it was not really a question at all, despite her concerns about her father’s health: ‘I feared the disgust of returning, sent back to a country I was accused of Wnding a triXe monotonous.’21 She adds the extra motive of wanting to provoke Napoleon by being feˆted in Germany and so demonstrating how gracious ‘old’ dynasties—regal, sanctioned by habit as well as years, untainted by the tinplate currency of ‘new’ republicanism—could be. ‘This impulse of self-pride got the better of me,’ she remarks philosophically—‘unfortunately.’ Might she have sensed just how unfortunately, even then? It seems unlikely. She was easily intoxicated by praise and old-fashioned courtesies, and when she was in this state, as her stay in England ten years later would conWrm, she lost the ability to view herself dispassionately. Without stopping to wonder how likely it was that Bonaparte would ever be impressed 18 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.74 (18 Oct. 1803). 19 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 156. 20 Ibid. 155. 21 Ibid. 157.

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by a foreign assessment of her worth when he had reached his own Wrm conclusions about her—that she was supremely talented but fatally meddlesome, a nuisance he could easily dispense with—she acted swiftly on Joseph’s information that his brother would not hinder her from removing to Germany. Joseph provided her with letters of recommendation to ease her journey. She suspected that Germany would fail utterly to resemble France in its amenities and pretensions to high culture, but was determined to paint a picture of it that would make the First Consul sit up. The fact that she did so would not, however, have the consequences she imagined. She set oV once again on 24 October with the two children and Constant, whose birthday it was. He was equally unhappy at leaving France, but saw that his duty for the moment was to ‘lift by his astonishing powers of conversation the burden that weighed me down, at least for a few moments’.22 By 7 November Stae¨l was writing to Hochet: ‘What madness it is to imagine that a journey can ever be enjoyable! I have no curiosity at all, and every new object jolts the pain about and makes me feel it more.’23 The progress from France had been agony, ‘every turn of the wheel hurt[ing]’,24 and Stae¨l worrying about her father’s health along with her own future. The 40 leagues demanded by Napoleon had been covered quickly and, despite Constant’s eVorts, in brooding near-silence. ‘The swiftness of the horses which made an adored land disappear, the haste of the postilions, boasting about the speed they were going at and counting on the gratitude it was meant to inspire in me, all the circumstances of life seemed to me like a variation on the same motif of pain.’25 At Chaˆlons Constant ordered champagne, ‘and managed to squeeze from it a few moments of gaiety, which revived me a little. I was young then, and misfortune, a new experience for me, had not yet identiWed itself with my nature.’26 At Metz they met Charles de Villers, one of her main initiators into matters German, whose articles on German culture had been published in the Hamburg French-language periodical Le Spectateur du Nord. He and Constant undertook to divert her, giving her some ‘delicious hours’, or hours that would have been delicious had she not had the feeling that everything which made her life worthwhile was about to end. As mild 22 23 24 25

Ibid. 158. Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.99. Simone Balaye´, Carnets de voyage de Madame de Stae¨l (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 9. Ibid. 23. 26 Ibid. 24.

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paranoia overtook her, she wrote to Mathieu de Montmorency that people were acting towards her as though she was a plague victim. Her surroundings became nightmarish—the tombs she saw in a cathedral, the cries she heard in a synagogue; ‘I felt an indescribable terror of life. It seemed to me that death was threatening my father, my children, my friends, and it is sensations like these that must combine to produce disorder of the mental faculties.’27 Being the woman she was, she still managed to engage in some mild Xirtation with Villers, who despite an existing relationship wrote her a heartfelt cry of longing: ‘what use will they be to me, these days of ravishment, illusion, these days of purple and gold that have just passed?’ When Stae¨l and her party left Metz on 8 November, they left him ‘transWxed’, suVering ‘the blindness that aZicts the eyes when they have been dazzled by brightest sun’.28 But she was reassuring to her father: ‘Don’t think me capable of any of the things that worried you. But wish these things for me—a support and an interest to round oV Coppet. My life is wretched. Benjamin’s feelings and character are too incomplete to satisfy me. The life which suits my needs, Paris, is riddled with arrows.’29 They proceeded to Frankfurt, which served only to intensify her despair: ‘there are relics of gothic habit which are neither convenient nor agreeable and which will change with time, because it is not reason that defends them against frivolity, but habit against reason. For example, who can conceive of this unfortunate habit of smoking, which makes the head heavy and poisons the room for half the day? The intellectual faculties must be aVected by it.’30 Despite everything, Constant was her lifeline. As she told Jacques Necker, so long as she remained with him he would prevent the whole weight of Germany from falling onto her. He had, she believed, remained invisible while she kept him hidden away ‘in a private charterhouse’31 at her inn (in fact he had been seen and associated with her there), and she concluded that their life would be pleasant were its end not approaching. A week later, however, her mood had changed. ‘I detest Germany.’32 Frankfurt, she had decided, was ‘a town without any resources as far as enlightenment is concerned, and everything material in Germany is unbearable—beds, 27 28 29 30 31 32

Balaye´, Carnets 25 (28 Oct. 1803). Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.100. Balaye´, Carnets, 25. Ibid. 33. Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.109 (to Jacques Necker, Frankfurt, 5 Nov. 1803). Ibid. 119 (to Jacques Necker, 22 Nov. 1803).

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food, heating, all sensations are painful . . . ’.33 Yet a few days later she described to Villers an experience that to her epitomized the duality of the culture they had entered, and hence her mixed response to it. ‘Stopping at an inn in a small town, I heard the sound of a piano cutting through the smoke in a room where woollen garments were being warmed up on an iron stove. It seems to me that it is the same everywhere: a concert in a smoke-Wlled room. There is poetry in the soul, but no elegance in forms.’34 Next the physician Soemmering incurred her displeasure. She had asked the celebrated anatomist, who conclusively demonstrated the diVerence between male and female skeletons, and wrote a work describing the damaging eVects of stays on women’s bodies (corsets and tight lacing caused anatomical deformities of the thorax and abdomen),35 to attend the indisposed Albertine. He instantly diagnosed scarlet fever. Speaking in English, he also told Stae¨l that a girl had died of the same disease in the house next door a few days earlier. In fact Albertine had simply caught a bad cold, which her mother blamed on the overheated rooms favoured by Germans (something that also made the ubiquitous tobacco smoke intolerable). She found the boorishness of the Frankfurters and the natives in general repellent, though she most uncharacteristically preferred the women to the men. The state of exile imposed upon her had grave repercussions for others who suVered banishment for the crime of having oVered her hospitality or company. Constant once again found himself shackled to a woman and a cause that wearied him, but which for reasons of pity and humanity, as well as political rage, he could not abandon. They proceeded on the journey plunged in gloom. Where travelling stimulated others, and would stimulate Stae¨l again in the future, she now felt deadened by it—aggrieved not so much by the appalling roads, poor inns, and inedible food, which she only periodically mentions, as by the simple fact of having been driven from her homeland by a tyrant and forced to make a virtue of necessity by carefully logging every new impression, passing conversation, or hospitable hour on her involuntary journey. If she was less despairing than she makes herself sound in her notebooks, her sense of injustice still coloured everything. ‘There are characters and imaginations for whom a journey is a salutary, 33 Quoted in Haussonville, Madame de Stae¨l et l’Allemagne, 5. 34 Ibid. 10. 35 See e.g. K. B. Roberts and J. D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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agreeable distraction; personally I feel seized by a profound sadness when I travel. Time advances more rapidly, yet every hour is longer. One is agitated without being occupied.’36 At least Constant was being supportive. His cousin Rosalie disapproved of his accompanying Stae¨l, all the same: ‘poor Benjamin is letting himself be dragged very much despite himself all over Germany. I feel sickened when I see his name in the papers, often with some snide comment about the woman. How badly she is behaving, playing fast and loose with his fate and other people’s . . . He will never learn to do anything worthwhile for himself.’37 For Constant as for his later Wctional character Adolphe, pity was an absolute rule of conduct, the ultimate necessary human response, through which he experienced the consolation of feeling, through sympathy, that he was doing his duty. But there were other consolations too. ‘I thought I was making a great sacriWce for her, and I was indeed doing so. Yet for me it had the advantage of discovering that a great part of Europe was open to me, and showing that far from Paris I can still Wnd much of literary, scholarly and philosophical interest.’38 Stae¨l would make the same discovery throughout her exile. The distinction between life and art was no clearer for her than for him: both adapted personal experience to literary (especially Wctional) ends. When in Constant’s Ce´cile the hero accompanies Madame de Malbe´e to Germany he does so out of compassion; for the real Constant, leaving Stae¨l at Leipzig provoked the more positive reXection: ‘There is nothing so good so loving, so witty, so devoted [as she is].’ Knowing that she was ‘more susceptible to grief than anyone’, he could not endure the thought that he might be causing her more. On the other hand, the wandering life, for all the new horizons it oVered, was contrary to all his deepest needs. ‘Every day I feel the requirement for rest and domestic life more strongly. I feel a kind of pleasure in returning home to the country . . . It would make me happy to have shared interests with a sweet creature whose education and ideas were similar to mine . . . ’39 There are similar passages of longing in Adolphe, where the hero conjures up an innocent, idealized beauty as his companion, a young and unsullied creature to contrast with the older, compromised

36 Balaye´, Carnets, 52. 37 Ibid. 38 B. Constant, Journaux intimes, 271 (7 Dec. 1804). 39 B. and Rosalie de Constant, Correspondance 1786–1830, ed. Alfred and Suzanne Roulin (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 40 (B. Constant to R. de Constant, 22 June 1803).

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Elle´nore. But neither Adolphe nor his creator could stay unmoved by the suVering of a once-loved woman. That is how Constant justiWed his conduct with respect to Stae¨l to his disapproving cousin: You would have seen it as obvious, I think, that despite my resolutions this summer I did not hesitate to be as helpful as it was in my power to be towards a person to whom I cannot stop being attached by the most sincere friendship, in the most painful circumstance of her life . . . So without wanting to think about it I followed the impulse of my feelings, and I take some pleasure in telling myself that I was some use to her in this circumstance.40

He wrote this in Frankfurt in December 1803. Over two months later, on 27 February 1804, he returned to the theme, defending his actions even more strongly: I simply want to tell you that I do not believe there is the merest hint of weakness in my behaviour. It would have been easier to blow one’s best friend’s brains out than abandon her in her need this winter. There are things it is impossible to judge without having seen them: there are kinds of grief it is impossible to appreciate without having complete knowledge of the character of the person feeling them. Everything I respect on earth is contained in this grief, and I would die rather than reproach myself for standing up against it. I feel in my conscience that not only have I done my duty, but I have done a very good and distinguished creature a service more essential than if I had physically saved her life.41

It is no doubt signiWcant that this ‘religion of grief ’ is more often seen as a female than as a male characteristic. For Stae¨l, indeed, the sex of the suVerer was an important distinguishing factor in the theory and the actuality of exile. The banished male, if not the ‘feminine’, pitying Constant, was generally able to lead his freely exploratory life, unhampered by the conventions of politeness and propriety that constrained the female. For Stae¨l as for women generally, on the other hand, losing one’s moorings was a source of destabilizing existential loss. ‘The heart of a woman is not made for this interrupted life,’ she wrote in her travel notebooks; ‘the future has to be prepared for them by the past; this existence which constantly renews itself and then breaks oV is almost always painful.’42 If Xux is imposed on them they may still cling to the unbroken thread of memory, as Elle´nore and the feminized Adolphe do; yet it is a poor substitute for real living experience,

40 Ibid. 46 (1 Dec. 1803). 41 Ibid. 47. 42 Balaye´, Carnets, 52.

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even if it is the only resort when the present oVers nothing but discontinuity. To see woman as more disadvantaged than man by rootlessness, as Stae¨l suggests, conWrms the fact that Napoleon had found a deadly weapon to use against this particular enemy. Still, giving up was not in her nature. Germany being where she found herself, Germany must yield the matter for a book. She had already done a crash course in the country’s literature and philosophy by absorbing—rather sketchily—Villers’s articles in the Spectateur du Nord, which had furnished her with most of the material for the German chapter in De la litte´rature (though her accounts there are often factually inaccurate), and had also been corresponding with him for four years before their eventual meeting in Metz. From 1800 onwards, too, she had been able to mix with royalist e´migre´s recently returned from Germany, along with members of the German colony in Paris. This would make a good start. On the other hand, she had not given priority to actually learning German. She had begun lessons with Gerlach, admittedly, and in 1800 was continuing them, she told Henri Meister, ‘with resignation, but I cannot conceive how you contrived to write French so well, knowing German so well: it seems to me that the one excludes the other.’43 Wilhelm von Humboldt helped her practise speaking the language, but by the time she reached Germany she could only read it with any conWdence. Even then, her acquaintance with German literature extended no further than the translation of Die Leiden des jungen Werther, about which she had written Goethe an excited letter on 29 April 1799. Two years earlier he had sent her a magniWcent present which seemed to suggest that she would be enthusiastically welcomed in the cultural capital of Weimar, where he, along with Schiller and Wieland, held court. As she wrote to Meister, Goethe has sent me a novel of his called Williams [sic] Meister, in the most magniWcent binding imaginable. As it is in German I have only been able to admire the binding. (Benjamin declares, between you and me, that I have had the better bargain than he, who has read it!) But you must, in all your goodness, compose a superb letter of thanks for me to send Goethe, covering up my ignorance and talking fulsomely about my gratitude and my admiration for the author of Werther.44

43 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.1.293 (Geneva, 24 July 1800). 44 Quoted in comtesse Jean de Pange, Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Stae¨l (Paris: Albert, 1938), 39.

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On 13 December she duly proceeded towards Weimar, the ‘little Athens of the north’. German classicism had been born in this small town in Thuringia, a literary mecca and one of the few places in Germany not dominated by French taste (unlike Berlin or the ‘klein-Paris’ of Leipzig). Weimar promised to bear out Villers’s wish for her to meet ‘these Germans, who unfortunately think and write in a language which is foreign to you, but who are the true Greeks of the modern world’.45 Its enlightened rulers, Wrst the regent Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, then her son Duke Carl August, had assembled a circle of literati and philosophers— Anna Amalia’s so-called Muses’ Court—that gave it a prestige out of all proportion to its size and wealth. Stae¨l was Xattered to Wnd that ‘even the lower classes of society’ there had apparently read Delphine;46 but she predictably spent all her time at the court, whose members showed her ‘an unheard-of obligingness’. The main importance of Weimar in her eyes was that it represented the successful development of a culture that owed little or nothing to France. She had, after all, professedly become jaded with France’s culture herself, seeing most French literature of the time as in thrall to Bonapartist absolutism, and could conWdently state her belief that there was no future for Germany in imitating the productions of its neighbour. Wieland still did this, but had no literary progeny. Her intention was to write a work showing the intellectual excitement present in contemporary Germany, a fact that might, and in due course did, seem a calculated insult to Napoleon, who was predictably outraged when Stae¨l hired August Wilhelm Schlegel—the man whose Berlin lectures dared to rank Racine below Euripides—to be tutor to her children and her own intellectual companion and mentor at Coppet. Her accommodating attitude towards the host culture did not mean that she expected the Weimarese to converse with her in anything but French, but it did qualify her old assumptions about the absolute superiority of things Gallic. She was convinced that other nations should develop their own distinct identities, since these were the product of geographical, political, and social circumstances that did not obtain elsewhere (the thesis of De la litte´rature). Goethe had arrived at this conclusion before her, owing it in large part to the philosopher and theologian Herder’s investigations into 45 Villers to Stae¨l, 25 June 1802, in Madame de Stae¨l, Charles de Villers, and Benjamin Constant, Correspondance, ed. Kurt Kloocke (Frankfurt etc.: Peter Lang, 1993), 18. 46 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.167 (to Hochet, 26 Dec. 1803).

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folk tradition. Stae¨l’s great achievement in De l’Allemagne would be to articulate such nationalism as a matter of intellectual principle, something whose viability and potency she paradoxically became aware of through being exiled from what she regarded as her own rightful national territory. Studying German literature and the German mind, for all their occasional rebarbativeness, gave her the strength to resist being ‘eaten up’, as she put it, by the grief of alienation, while the work they were to feed would, she hoped, contribute to the end of her exile.47 But her case was unlikely to be helped by the thesis she develops in De l’Allemagne, and which Bonaparte deemed unpatriotic, namely that adopting French models had done great harm to other cultures. Her experiences in Germany led her to note again the correspondence between national originality and individual integrity that she had Wrst explored in De la litte´rature. ‘[The] esteem which the friends of enlightenment accorded to the French mind was one of the causes of the mistakes that, over so many years, have brought Germany down,’ as she wrote to Meister.48 Later, at a ‘French’ masquerade in Berlin in honour of Queen Luise, she would observe: ‘All these eVorts at the French style seem to me so far from the true merit of the Germans! It is not an imitation of Paris but an original way of being that I like to Wnd outside France.’49 These are leitmotifs of Dix anne´es d’exil and a major theme of De l’Allemagne. Their centrality owes much, of course, to her own perceptions before, during, and after her exile of another culture in danger of losing its identity and integrity through authoritarian abuses of political power, though ironically this would be the culture of her beloved France. Equally ironically, Germany would then become a template for the birth and renewal that France must itself seek in the post-Napoleonic, post-consular, and post-imperial age. Stae¨l’s often muddled and undiscriminating enthusiasm risked incurring the ridicule of the very natives whose culture she dared to enter, as Heine’s waspish comments in the Gesta¨ndnisse conWrm, but there was no doubting the sincerity of her convictions. She dined at court the day after her arrival in Weimar, performing to such eVect that according to Henriette Knebel (the governess-companion of Anna Amalia’s daughter Caroline) all the guests present wondered how

47 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, 147 (to Charles de Villers, 15–16 Dec. 1803). 48 Quoted in Allstadt-Schmitz, Exil, 64. 49 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.275 (to Grand-Duchess Luise of Saxe-Weimar, Berlin, 13 Mar. 1804).

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they would do without her in future.50 She undoubtedly Wlled a need. Many of Weimar’s former stars either were waning or had waned for good: the poet Klopstock had died the previous March, Herder would follow on 18 December 1803, and Kant in February 1804. Schiller, too, had barely a healthy day left. Anna Amalia was in despair, and Stae¨l was a godsend. She thought Weimar less a small town than a big castle, though its poised but living elegance—which it still retains—impressed her. In turn, as Henriette Knebel conWrms, she made a vivid impression. According to this witness: ‘She has absolutely nothing precious or pedantic about her, which is so often fatal to our learned women; nothing overdone . . . her conversation only enlivens, never tires.’51 This was a more generous estimate of her qualities than some, but the governess had clearly been smitten. Madame de Stae¨l went to balls, she reported on another occasion, very tastefully dressed, and danced very prettily, ‘as she did everything’.52 With equal satisfaction, Stae¨l noted in a letter to Hochet: ‘They treat me like a divinity, and it is said that they have never been for anybody else what they are being for me. Germany is a country where people read so much that even the lowest class tries to see me.’53 Not everyone was kind, of course. However enthusiastic Henriette Knebel manages to sound about her dress sense and general demeanour, Heine would later pour scorn on the Wgure Stae¨l cut, both Wguratively and literally: She had an enormous turban on her head, and now wanted to present herself as the Sultana of thought. She passed our literature in review, as it were, and parodied the great Sultan of matter. As he addressed people with a ‘How old are you? How many children do you have? How many years’ service’ etc., so she asked our intellectuals, ‘How old are you? What have you written? Are you a Kantian or a Fichtean?’ and suchlike things, hardly waiting for an answer . . . 54

George Ticknor’s story of her meeting Fichte and submitting him to this degrading technique of extracting wisdom cannot disguise her sheer intelligence: 50 Lady Blennerhassett, Frau von Stae¨l, ihre Freunde und ihre Bedeutung in Politik und Literatur, 3 vols. (Berlin: Gebru¨der Pa¨tel, 1887–9), III.36. 51 Ibid. 14. 52 Ibid. 36. 53 Mistler, Lettres, 61. 54 Heinrich Heine, Gesta¨ndnisse, in Werke, 5 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1974), V.331–93, at 339–40.

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After talking with him for a little while, she said, ‘Now, Monsieur Fichte´, could you be so kind as to give me, in Wfteen minutes or so, a sort of idea or aperc¸u of your system, so that I may know clearer what you mean by your ‘‘ich’’, your ‘‘moi’’, for I am certainly in the dark about it’. The notion of explaining in a petit quart d’heure, to a person in total darkness, a system which he had been his whole life developing from a single principle within himself, and spinning, as it were, out of his own bowels till its web embraced the whole universe, was quite shocking to the philosopher’s dignity. However, being much pressed, he began, in rather bad French, to do the best he could. But he had not gone more than ten minutes before Madame de Stae¨l, who had followed him with the greatest attention, interrupted him with a countenance full of eagerness and satisfaction: ‘Ah! c’est assez, je comprends parfaitement, Monsieur Fichte´. Your system is perfectly illustrated by a story in Baron Munchhausen’s travels’. Fichte’s face looked like a tragedy; the faces of the rest of the court, a good deal like a come´die larmoyante. Madame de Stae¨l heeded neither, but went on: ‘For, when the baron arrived on the bank of a vast river, where there was neither bridge nor lorry, nor even a poor boat or raft, he was at Wrst quite confounded, quite in despair; until at last, his wits coming to his assistance, he took a good hold of his own sleeve and jumped himself over to the other side. Now, Monsieur Fichte´, this, I take it, is just what you have done with your ich, your moi; n’est-ce pas?’ There was so much of truth in this, and so much esprit, that, of course, the eVect was irresistible on all but the poor Fichte himself. As for him, he never forgot or forgave Madame de Stae¨l, who certainly, however, had no malicious purpose of oVending him, and who, in fact, praised him and his ich most abundantly in De l’Allemagne.55

At least she could do Fichte the justice of recognizing the power of inwardness that his idealist philosophy exalted, and she made it into the very deWnition of German writing and thought. ‘The distinctive character of German literature is to derive everything from inner life; and as this is the mystery of mysteries, endless curiosity becomes attached to it.’56 And this: ‘There is in Germany such a tendency towards reXection that the German nation may be considered the metaphysical nation par excellence.’57 The inXuence of Kant, with whose propagandist Huber Constant had been acquainted for a decade, certainly helped this tendency. Stae¨l departed, though, from Kant’s opinion that the individual’s highest moral duty is to tell the truth, on the grounds that it would, rigidly interpreted, make social life impossible. (Charrie`re devoted most of a novel, Trois femmes, to this 55 George Ticknor, Life, Letters and Journals, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1876), I.498. 56 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, III.324–5. 57 Ibid. IV.152–3.

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subject, arriving at the same opinion.) No other conclusion could have been drawn by someone so absolutely devoted to sociability. More worldly, more dispassionate observers were not necessarily more critical than Henriette Knebel. Rather against the odds, Goethe felt drawn to the new arrival. ‘There is something charming about her presence, both in the spiritual and in the physical sense, and she seemed not displeased when one showed one’s impressionability in the latter respect too. How often she tried to unite sociability, well-meaningness, inclination and passion! Indeed, she once said, ‘‘I have never trusted a man who hadn’t once been in love with me’’.’58 Although Thomas Mann’s novel Lotte in Weimar quotes this Olympian observer inveighing against ‘that cackling de Stae¨l woman’, there were other paradoxes to resolve in his attitude to her. He had admired her literary gifts long before she came to Weimar. When her youthful works were published in Lausanne and Leipzig in 1795 and 1796 he had resolved to acquaint himself with them, and Schiller undertook to provide commentaries. Goethe himself translated Wfty-Wve manuscript pages of the Essai sur les Wctions, which he published in Die Horen; he also called De l’inXuence des passions an extraordinary piece of writing, and suggested printing sections of it in the same periodical. On the day of Stae¨l’s arrival Goethe, whom Carl August had summoned back to Weimar, wrote to Schiller from Jena: ‘If Madame de Stae¨l wants to visit me . . . she shall Wnd a bourgeois table; we will really see one another and talk, and she shall stay as long as she wishes . . . I wish for no more than to see and know this remarkable and deeply honoured lady, and I wish for nothing so much as that she should make this journey of a few hours and visit me.’59 Schiller had warned Goethe at the end of the previous month that she was soon expected in Weimar: ‘if only she speaks German, I have no doubt that we will soon be her masters, but to present our religion to her in French phrases and prevail over her French volubility is too hard a task.’60 Goethe was not destined to Wnd it plain sailing either. Although he described her as ‘this remarkable, revered woman’,61 he also complained about ‘logically coherent conversations with her, but during which she was tiresome in her own way, refusing to allow even a moment of quiet 58 See Blennerhassett, Stae¨l, III.52, who dates this statement 16 Jan. 1804 (to Schiller). 59 Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, in Goethe, Sa¨mtliche Werke, 21 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–98), VIII 1.924–5 (Jena, 13 Dec. 1803). 60 Ibid. 952 (Weimar, 30 Nov. 1803). 61 Ibid. 955 (Jena, 13 Dec. 1803).

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reXection on the most important issues, but periodically demanding that one treat pressing circumstances, the most important subjects, as lightly as if one were trying to catch a shuttlecock’.62 Of course she was tiresome, however much of a draw she unquestionably was. If Goethe had initially hoped to see her in Jena, where he was busy working, Stae¨l would have none of it: ‘people here say it is not correct for me to come and Wnd you, and that it is ungallant of you not to come and see me . . . If I did not succeed in taking you back in a coach, I know I should be very hurt.’63 He reconsidered and came. She did not always seem appropriately grateful for the eVort the great man had made, however. On 26 December 1803 she wrote to Hochet: ‘Goethe is no Werther, he grows fat, which between ourselves is the fault of Germans, to the extent of losing all his looks, but he is a man who is slowly very witty.’64 On the Wrst evening she spent in his company, at a reception given by Anna Amalia, she allegedly remarked on how inconceivable it was that such a superior mind should be lodged so ill, and told Goethe oV for his rotundity. Charlotte von Stein, however, credited her with giving him the desire to have more cultivated women about him than hitherto. In the meantime Stae¨l reWned her perceptions of him: There is a double Goethe, the poet and the metaphysician. The poet is the real man, the other his phantom. But it seems to me that the real man is often frightened of his other self, just as people talk about visionaries who see themselves as doubles. When this phantom appears before his eyes Goethe, as the real man, shows himself up inside himself; may a benevolent genie deliver him from this treacherous doubleness. Because without it he is and will always be the greatest of men in originality and pure conceptions in all Germany.65

If this suggests a certain meekness on her part towards Germany’s greatest living writer, the impression is misleading. She was, for example, initially unwilling to accept that her judgements on him should ever be corrected or revised. Crabb Robinson described how, when alone with her, he himself tried to make her feel ‘the transcendent excellence of Goethe. But I failed. She seemed utterly incapable of realizing wherein his excellence lay.’66 62 Blennerhassett, Stae¨l, III.55. 63 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.150 (Weimar, 18 Dec. 1803). 64 Karl Bo¨ttiger, Morgenblatt fu¨r gebildete Leser (1855), 659, quoted in Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.166–7. 65 Blennerhassett, Stae¨l, III.35. 66 Crabb Robinson, Diary, 176.

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When she spoke rudely about Goethe’s play Die natu¨rliche Tochter he told her in French, ‘Madame, you have not understood Goethe, and you never will understand him’. Her eye Xashed—She stretched out her Wne arm, of which she was justly vain, and said in an emphatic tone, ‘Monsieur, I understand everything that deserves to be understood; what I don’t understand is nothing’. I bowed lowly. This was said at table. After dinner she gave me her hand very kindly. ‘I was angry for a moment,’ she said, ‘but it is all over now.’ I believe I owe the favour I experienced from her to my perfect frankness, and even freedom.67

So he tried his luck again, criticizing her reading of Goethe’s poem Die Braut von Korinth. ‘The most material point—indeed I might say the peccant point she had not perceived, and it was therefore left out.’ Everyone but Crabb Robinson clapped when she Wnished; she challenged him; he wondered aloud whether she had understood, then read the words ‘signiWcantly’. Bo¨ttiger, whom Crabb Robinson had earlier recorded talking of Stae¨l as of one ‘from whose lips Xow spirit and honeyed speech’,68 began to praise her hypocritically, but she halted him with the words: ‘All of you praised me—only Robinson corrected me: Robinson, I thank you,’ thus eVectively conceding that she did not always understand everything that deserved to be understood. Madame de Stae¨l, Crabb Robinson notes, ‘did not aVect to conceal her preference for the society of men to that of her own sex’,69 an observation that many others had made and would continue to make over the years. He was shocked, ‘not knowing Parisian customs’, by his Wrst encounter with her, when she was ‘by no means a captivating spectacle’, receiving visitors while still in bed, wearing a nightcap, and with face bare of cosmetics. Returning later, however, he found a diVerent creature, the accomplished and Xirtatious Frenchwoman surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Given the evidence of Goethe’s impressionability and admiration, one wonders whether Crabb Robinson was correct in declaring that both he and Schiller regarded Stae¨l’s visit to Weimar as an aZiction.70 According to this witness, Schiller would not go near her, but that seems not to have been altogether true. One particular irritant for Schiller was her lack of any sense for poetry (which her response to various works of Goethe’s also suggests);

67 Ibid. 177–8. 69 Ibid. 174.

68 Ibid. 173. 70 Ibid. 177.

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otherwise the only really tiresome thing he mentions was the extreme readiness of her tongue—‘one has to transform oneself into a listening organ to be able to follow her’.71 Although there were vast diVerences of nature and philosophy between them, Schiller said, he felt at ease with her, or as much at ease as the requirement to speak and listen to French permitted. On one occasion, he remarked, just as the drama he was then writing was absorbing all his energy and thoughts, the devil chose to bring him ‘the French female philosopher, who is the most excitable, argumentative, and loquacious among all the living creatures I have ever encountered. But she is also the most cultivated and stimulating female creature, and even if she were not truly interesting, she would still be welcome.’72 What was really painful, he thought, was to see the contrast between this dizzying example of French wit and sophistication and the stolid German souls of Weimar, even though her naive pleasure and kindliness made her truly welcome there. (Pushkin’s Roslavlev would later make the same observation about Muscovites when Stae¨l was in their city.) Schiller’s own diYculties with the French language meant that, as he put it, he spent some ‘really diYcult hours with her. But one has to esteem and revere her for her acute understanding, her liberality, and her wide-ranging receptiveness.’73 Yet as she seemed to be proposing to spend three more weeks in Weimar, his patience began to wear thin. ‘Despite all the impatience of the French she will, I fear, discover in her own person that we Germans in Weimar are also changeable people, and that one has to know when one’s time is up . . . yesterday I saw her here, and today I shall see her again at the dowager Duchess’s.’74 Little did he know that she was actually desperate to leave Weimar and Germany. She wrote to Hochet on 28 February 1804: ‘There is a German word (Heimweh) which refers to the painful need to return home, the malady of the Swiss: I am well aZicted with it. Our [French] spirit of sociability is nowhere to be found here, and yet it constitutes the habitual sweetness of life.’75 When she did eventually move on, it was to Berlin, which she intensely disliked. 71 72 73 74 75

Schiller to Goethe, Goethe, Sa¨mtliche Werke, VIII 1.957 (21 Dec. 1803). Undated; see Blennerhassett, Stae¨l, III.49. Undated; see ibid. 50. Schiller to Goethe, Goethe, Sa¨mtliche Werke, VIII 1.963 (14 Jan. 1804). Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.250.

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The Queen of Prussia, Luise von Mecklemburg-Strelitz, was a passionate opponent of the French Revolution and a declared enemy of Napoleon, which was enough of a recommendation for Stae¨l to anticipate meeting her with pleasure. She was also at least as beautiful as Juliette Re´camier. It would later be alleged that she forced her husband, Friedrich Wilhelm III, into a disastrous war with France that ended with the rout at Jena in 1806, and that she had an aVair with one of Stae¨l’s future heroes, Alexander I of Russia. She charmed the visitor, however, by welcoming her to the Berlin court with the words: ‘I hope, Madame, that you regard us as possessing enough taste to be very Xattered by your arrival in Berlin.’76 Yet Stae¨l wrote Goethe a rather depressed letter from the city about the deadening eVect of Prussian militariness, which forced a relentless diet of regularity and ordinance on the natives, and made the receptions she attended stiV and deadening—‘whatever liveliness and youth there is in my perceptions is virtually suVocated here’.77 But she had come supplied with a recommendation from the Weimar court, and the newspapers wrote her up. Apart from the Queen, she met at least one woman in Berlin. The Jewish hostess Rahel Levin (later Varnhagen) would remark disobligingly on her obtuseness, but was the essence of discretion to her when they met. To Stae¨l’s ‘I think that if I stayed here I should become jealous of your superiority’, she diplomatically replied: ‘Oh no, I should love you so, and that would make you so happy that you would be jealous only of my happiness, for who could ever inspire such feelings in you?’ Privately, however, she said the next day: How these people travel, these rich people, these society ladies, these women of letters who can talk only French and want only to hear their own language everywhere. Poor woman! She has seen nothing, heard nothing, understood nothing . . . And then she doesn’t know how to see. She makes her three new ideas strut around like a squadron all over the most ancient civilisations of Europe. Has she no shame?78

Perhaps Levin was the jealous one. She would loathe De l’Allemagne, a work of which her future husband Karl Varnhagen von Ense was also critical: ‘Much of it angered me, the obvious incapacity in the discussion of philosophy was exceeded only by the presumption with which the restless

76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 314 (7 Apr. 1804). 78 Quoted in Haussonville, Madame de Stae¨l, 176–7.

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woman thought she had grasped everything she touched on, in the discussions of aesthetics you could see the one-sidedness of the second-hand remarks she had taken on trust.’79 Stae¨l’s habit of demanding quick digests of intellectual matter, gobbets that she would later insert in the great work, continued to alarm and irritate others as it had the hapless Fichte. Nonetheless, Varnhagen would concede that the eVect of De l’Allemagne had been enormous, its inXuence massive. In any case, Stae¨l was spared hearing these disobliging comments; little or nothing was publicly said in Berlin to upset her, and there was much that was gratifying despite her own feelings of alienation. The greatest cause for delight was meeting August Wilhelm Schlegel, another of her future unrequited adorers, to whom Goethe had given her a letter of introduction. Unknown to her, at the very time she was writing De la litte´rature he and his brother Friedrich had been developing the theory of Romanticism. The consequences of the encounter for De l’Allemagne would be epoch-making. On 23 March 1804 she wrote to her father with the triumphant boast: ‘I have met a man here who in the Weld of literature has more knowledge and wit than anyone I know: he is Schlegel. Benjamin will tell you that he has a reputation in Germany, but what Benjamin doesn’t know is that he speaks French and English like a Frenchman and an Englishman, and that he has read everything in the world, though he is only thirty-six.’80 By 27 March she was sounding slightly disconsolate: ‘Schlegel won’t stay with me; he has too many means for that.’ In case her father had misunderstood the nature of her regret, she entered into some detail: ‘he is small and fairly ugly, though with much expression in his eyes; but Benjamin and I have no more wit than he does, and Benjamin himself is less knowledgeable. People have no idea what the Germans know when they set about it. They seem to have forty-eight hours in every twenty-four. Their secret is to have no social life. That secret is hardly to my taste, but literary genius depends upon it.’81 Schlegel’s divorce from his wife Caroline had become Wnal in May 1803; she then immediately married Schelling, of whose notion (sometimes misattributed to Goethe) that architecture was frozen music Stae¨l had been extremely scornful. By the time of their meeting Schlegel had won fame as the translator of Shakespeare, but what she saw in him was 79 Karl Varnhargen von Ense, Denkwu¨rdigkeiten des eignen Lebens, ed. Joachim Ku¨hn, 2 vols. (Berlin: Wegweiser-Verlag, 1922–5), II.266. 80 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.284. 81 Ibid. 292.

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the ideal guide to the new literary movement on which she would need instruction for De l’Allemagne. That, and the post of tutor to Auguste and Albert, seemed little enough in exchange for all Schlegel would be forfeiting in leaving Berlin—his reputation as translator, a scholar, and a promoter of the new literature through the pages of Das Athena¨um, the learned periodical he had founded with his brother Friedrich. But Stae¨l’s charms were magnetic, and the salary she oVered probably attracted him too. Schlegel had Wnished the course of lectures he had been giving; the Musenalmanach for which he had been writing was to be discontinued; his Shakespeare translations were an uncertain source of income; and Caroline’s money departed with her. He was, in fact, deeply in debt. Stae¨l’s oVer of 12,000 francs plus a pension after her death was therefore tempting. In fact the Wnancial arrangement was less advantageous to Schlegel than it appeared. His pension would be a modest 3,000 francs, though he retained the use of his apartment at Coppet for the rest of his life, and in Stae¨l’s will he would be given the charge of publishing her manuscripts, in particular the Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise, from which he would proWt to a maximum of 500 louis, or 8,000 francs. In the end he gave up his rights to all other works of hers, published and unpublished, though he could have claimed them all (a codicil of 21 June 1817, less than a month before her death, speciWed that: ‘My literary papers belong to Monsieur Schlegel’). Impetuously or not, he agreed to the salary oVered, the teaching hours, and the removal from Berlin. He cannot have known that he would become, like Constant, one of Stae¨l’s necessary but isolated and exploited lifelines, alternately infuriated and submissive to her will. Had he known, there is every chance that he would still have agreed to serve her. For her own peace of mind, she needed to be absolutely sure that he would not leave while he could still be useful to her. Hence the following document: You wanted a written promise, my adorable friend, you thought I would hesitate to give it to you. Here it is: I declare that you have all rights over me, and that I have none over you. Have power over my person and my life, order, forbid, I shall obey you in everything. I aspire to no other happiness but that which you condescend to give me; I want to possess nothing, I want to owe everything to your generosity. I would gladly consent to think no longer of my celebrity, to put whatever knowledge and talents I have at your disposal. I am proud to be your private property. I shall take on no new commitment which could separate me from you,

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and I hope that I may always fulWl, with your agreement, the obligations that old commitments impose on me. I do not know if I am wrong in these feelings and resolutions, if one should give oneself up so completely to another human being. But you have a supernatural power over me, against which it would be vain to struggle . . . I wasted part of my life seeking, I have Wnally found what is imperishable and will leave me only in the grave . . . I beg of you, never banish your slave from your presence.82

Domineering women sometimes provoke this kind of self-abasing, masochistic lyricism from men. It does not increase their regard for whatever, or whomever, they humiliate; in fact it may lessen any respect they once felt. There is little evidence that Stae¨l did particularly abuse the sway she held over Schlegel, but the fawning devotion she inspired in him shows how easily she moved from a position of vulnerability in which she craved male support to one of power. The power derived from the same ambiguous femininity as made men want to protect her. It was a version of the eternal feminine, woman’s instinctive ability to transcend, and it provided her with devotees, or at least addicts, for life. As an exile she may have felt particularly entitled to deploy whatever female weapons she had at her disposal; after all, it was partly her sex that had brought misfortune on her in the Wrst place, and she needed few lessons in sexual bargaining. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why she always gravitated towards men in society. After all, men traditionally possessed power, even though wily females could divest them of it. The kind of devotion she could inspire was utterly diVerent from the sort Juliette Re´camier might command; apart from anything, as a woman who lacked conventional beauty Stae¨l needed to captivate by being interesting, intellectually provocative, or in some other way arousing. Her mental gifts were unquestionably what drew Constant, Schlegel, and (unwillingly) Napoleon. The greatest man she had ever known, though, was about to leave her for good. When her father died on 9 April 1804 while she was still travelling through Germany, she experienced a loss of the stability and protection he had always represented for her, and it was inevitable that in the immediate aftermath she should retreat into the kind of passivity that made other men want to protect her. But the passivity never lasted and was never the whole story. She required men to understand her chameleon character and assume 82 Archives de Broglie (letter dated 18 Oct. 1805), quoted in comtesse de Pange, Schlegel, 153–4; also Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, V.682.

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a certain responsibility towards it. The problem was that she demanded for herself the same right of changeability that she refused to grant to the men with whom she became involved, from Louis de Narbonne onwards. So when Schlegel described himself as putty in her hands, he was speaking more accurately than he knew: denied one kind of weapon by virtue of her sex and her rootlessness, Stae¨l unabashedly laid claim to others, including the female quality of inconsequentiality. It was, she thought, her right in a world in which the dice were so heavily loaded against her. She would still cling to her father beyond the grave, without adopting his old practice of regularly visiting the family mausoleum. To her readers she proclaimed, as a more meaningful act of pietas, the exceptional nature of the bond between father and daughter, a love matched in no other relationship she had experienced. ‘People do not understand the inconceivable nature of your most intimate friend’s dying, the person you have spent all your life with, who is so much a part of yourself that it seems impossible anything in your own existence warned you of his end.’83 She goes on, conWdingly: ‘The diVerence in age between us often disturbed my happiness while I still possessed him, and now it seems to me that if he was restored to me I would be content with just six months out of all my years.’84 And again: Several times, in our conversations, my father had gently complained with me at seeing the years speed past; once he said to me:—why am I not your brother! I would protect your whole life . . . Sometimes it was a cruel situation to be in, loving so much a man older than yourself, being able to do nothing about the invincible necessity that would separate us one day, breaking your soul against this barrier, feeling that he wanted to live with you, live to love you . . . 85

Necker’s ultimate desire for his daughter, at least as she saw it, is conveyed in the bas-relief she commissioned for the mausoleum, which pointedly comments on Suzanne Necker’s exclusive but frustrated longing for her husband: she is Xying heavenwards and dragging him after her, while he, with eyes averted, is turned towards Germaine, who kneels on the ground weeping. Her father’s death on 9 April 1803 may have devastated her, but, a Necker through and through, she soon threw herself into writing up her grief, working on the essay that both Albertine and Constant thought displayed her talents and her self to best advantage. Du caracte`re de Monsieur 83 Stae¨l, Du caracte`re de M. Necker et de sa vie prive´e, in Œuvres comple`tes, XVII.3–127, at 113. 84 Ibid. 116. 85 Ibid. 118.

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Necker et de sa vie prive´e (1804) is a panegyric describing Necker’s industrious early years, sage marriage, prosperous maturity, political apogee, and calm retirement. Of course, Stae¨l herself, as well as the political climate, had stopped it being as calm as he might have desired, but writing the worshipful account seemed to some onlookers to have given her a new placidness. Yet Constant knew that what she really felt was a deep, ravaging grief, the desperate mourning for a companion she had somehow assumed was immortal. It could not but change her. All the same, she seemed to some onlookers to belie the true sense of mourning, adopting a way of life that appeared frivolous or at least without focus. Constant complained in his diary about her need for distraction, but saw that social activity was her response to losing a Wxed centre. ‘What a strange combination, this deep, searing, genuine grief that weighs down on her and overwhelms her, united with this need for distraction, this incorrigible nature that leaves her with all her susceptibility to self-regard and her need for activity.’86 Perhaps her social persona had always covered a gaping hole. Yet she had been a thoroughly social being, though not a dissipated one, during her father’s lifetime. Where was the divide between conviviality and collectedness? If her life at Coppet from 1804 looked like a continuous brilliant feˆte, appearances were in some respects deceptive; it had also been, as Napoleon morosely remarked, a time for building up a ‘veritable arsenal’87 against him. Politics would continue to matter to Stae¨l as much as it had ever done to her father; both, after all, had suVered exile on its account. But their conceptions of exile, and resistance or otherwise to its demands, were radically diVerent. The daughter’s attitude, broadly speaking, was one of indignant revolt and sedition, the father’s of pained incomprehension. While he could not get over the ingratitude of the country he believed he had saved from economic and moral bankruptcy, fury stirred her to action. Constant, in the meantime, felt desperation rather than rage. He wrote in November 1804: ‘I am not a completely real person. There are two persons in me, one observing the other and knowing with certainty that its convulsive movements will pass. I am very sad: if I wanted, I would be, if not consoled, then so distracted from my pain that it would be almost nothing. But I don’t want that, because Minette [Stae¨l] needs not just my help, but 86 B. Constant, Œuvres comple`tes, VI.129 (19 May 1804). 87 Las Cases, Me´morial, II.450 (21 Oct. 1816).

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my grief too.’88 There could be no better summary of the mixture of selXess devotion and empathy that she exacted from those who loved or had loved her. He went on to reXect that her stunned response to the news of her father’s death must inevitably be succeeded by consciousness, which entailed more lasting grief. It is a lucid analysis of a condition that would dog her, and therefore him, for years to come. One problem kept resurfacing, intimately connected with her bereftness as well as her imperious nature. The question of marriage between Stae¨l and Constant arose, as it periodically did, and Constant reXected that it was the inevitable consequence of her neediness and his helpless, reluctant devotion (whose most negative form was devastating pity). His insight is, as usual, remorseless: ‘As she thinks she would be degrading herself in marrying me (yes, degrading is the word), I should prefer not to marry her. But in that case I don’t want to live with her in her home. If the isolation she now lives in makes it too painful for her to separate from me, I shall have to resign myself to passing over her least repugnance and make her marry me.’89 The prospect was alarming, not least because, as he noted in his diary, her constitutional need for agitation and success, coupled with a self-regard her father had nourished, would mean that he inevitably played second Wddle in their relationship.90 His nascent feeling of self-disgust at having wasted so much of his life not writing the great work that would make his reputation rebelled against this certainty, but his endemic irresolution prevented the sense of rebellion from Wnding concrete expression. ‘I shall have to marry her. If she refuses it is not my fault.’ That exile did intensify Stae¨l’s need for moral and social reinforcement is clear. It is equally beyond dispute that she had always been an egotist, incapable of seeing that answering her demands might not be everyone’s Wrst concern. This character trait was particularly visible in her dealings with Napoleon, but Constant, disabused, also perceived it clearly: I have never seen a better woman, one who had more of a kind of grace, more wit, more good nature, more friendship and devotion, but I have never seen one who was more continuously demanding without noticing it, who took up the life of people around her more, and who with all her qualities had a more emphatic personality. All of existence, all the hours, minutes, and years have to be at her disposal, or there is an explosion . . . 91 88 B. Constant, Œuvres comple`tes, VI.104 (11 Apr. 1804). 89 Ibid. 115 (27 Apr. 1804). 90 Ibid. 117–18 (1 May 1804). 91 Ibid. 155 (28 June 1804).

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And at another time: ‘never did egoism scruple less to weigh down on others or sacriWce them to itself.’92 Nonetheless: ‘In my thoughts I veer towards marriage . . . Every other relationship has the disadvantage of degrading the woman, which is unbearable to me, and threatens the man with an utterly shameful subordination.’93 He would, in fact, get married furtively four years later, but not to her. Stae¨l’s gypsy life would continue, and her demands of Constant and others remain as imperious as ever. In her own way, though she would never have acknowledged it, she was quite as authoritarian as the despotic Napoleon. 92 B. Constant, Œuvres comple`tes, 157 (1 July 1804).

93 Ibid. 160 (6 July 1804).

5 Corinne or Italy

S

tae¨l had carried Schlegel back to Coppet as a kind of trophy, a living, physical mark of her triumph over Germany, a symbol of national conquest as complete as Bonaparte’s, the spoils of a diVerent but no less total war. The power that ruled this little world was absolute. The pretence may have been kept up that Coppet was less a court than a permanent house party, particularly with the loss of the elderly Wgurehead Necker, but no one doubted who presided. While her father was alive Stae¨l spent more time there than she wanted or would have freely chosen to do, which had the eVect—an eVect Napoleon desired—of making each return itself seem to her more of an exile from a world of comparative delight, another act of increasingly self-depleting renunciation. Certain remedies, however, helped to disguise this state of aVairs. Heightening the festive atmosphere was one, though it sat rather ill with the stolid ordinariness of the chateau itself. It mattered in this regard that the hostess seemed to attach so little importance to what in other contexts would have looked like work, writing in particular. Exceptionally active by nature, Stae¨l encouraged others to play as hard as she did, acting, talking, plotting, and Wtting in a hundred activities that elsewhere would each have Wlled the days, weeks, and months of absence. This insomniac, unable to endure boredom, had the chronic non-sleeper’s urge to keep others as alert as she was throughout the night and day. If the natural state of Coppet was to be remote from society and therefore dull, her solution was to bring society to it, so ensuring constant conviviality. Byron would later write to John Murray that Stae¨l made Coppet as agreeable as society and talent could make any place on earth. It is true that Napoleon did not see matters in this light. Coppet, to him, was more like a pocket of resistance than an escape: ‘people came there to take up arms like knights, she would busy herself stirring up hostility against me, and she fought against me herself. It was exactly like Armida

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and Clorinda [from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata] . . . ’ Often, he continued, ‘people around me, hoping to bring me to their point of view, tried to persuade me that she was a fearsome enemy and could become a useful ally. Certainly if she had adopted me instead of denigrating me as she has done, I could probably have proWted from it, for her position and talent put her at the head of the various coteries, and we all know how inXuential they are in Paris.’1 And he added: ‘Despite all the bad things she says about me, not to mention everything she will say in the future, I am certainly far from thinking her, from considering her, to be an evil woman: it is simply that we have scrapped with each other, that’s all.’ Later on Stae¨l’s friends would tell Las Cases, who reports these remarks of Napoleon’s, that others had traduced her to him, and in particular that ‘expressions of hostility towards Napoleon had been attributed to her which had absolutely nothing to do with her, especially that of his being ‘‘Robespierre on horseback’’ . . . ; they added that Madame de Stae¨l sometimes, in private conversation, showed herself to be much more favourable than her writings suggested, always barbed, it has to be said, with resentment and spite . . . ’2 It emerged that she had liked Napoleon’s comparison of her with Armida and Clorinda, especially since she had previously likened the vanquisher of Italy to Scipio and Tancred.3 The intensity of social life at Coppet could only mask her perennial need to escape, however, not remove it altogether. And yet she spent relatively little time there between May 1804 and October 1810—about twenty months out of seventy-eight.4 In between there were the periods of restless, fruitful, bustling travel. Constant was critical of her for allowing herself to be constantly and fatally drawn back to the Xow of Paris, as he noted in a journal entry of 23 September 1804 that records the anniversary of her arrival in the capital against his advice and that of all the friends whom she did not so dominate as to force them to speak against their conscience.5 The inevitable happened: the slander-mongering and meddlesome Madame de Vaines told Napoleon that Stae¨l was forever being visited at MaXiers by a crowd of people, among whom he was only too ready to imagine the traitors and dissidents who worked tirelessly at sapping and gradually dismantling his authority.

1 Las Cases, Me´morial, II.450–1. 4 See Herold, Mistress, 281.

2 Ibid. 589. 3 Ibid. 590. 5 B. Constant, Œuvres comple`tes, VI.218–19.

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In Weimar, as though she had not enough to do with planning how to give literary form to the material she was gathering on Germany, she had conceived the idea of writing a book about Italy. In a sense, Germany was spoiled by its conclusion, Jacques Necker’s death: the whole trip might be seen retrospectively as an act of desertion, an irresponsible fugue, the more so since her neglected father had supplied so much of her sense of identity. Germany had been possible because she had left him: she had left him and so he had died. One can see how Stae¨l came to assume a sense of guilt that would, ever after, equate being absent, even in exile, with killing one’s father. All the same, by 1805 Jacques Necker was thoroughly dead, and Xight no longer marked real distance from him. To call it Xight was in any case to dignify the eVects of Napoleon’s tyranny in an unacceptable way. If it were renamed travel (nowadays it would no doubt be called research travel) it might be neutrally reinterpreted as nothing more than work experience, the work of the author-persona she had long since become. It consoled Stae¨l, indeed, to regard her wandering life as voluntary information-gathering, the kind of indefatigable Wnding-out that had already resulted in one book, De la litte´rature, had produced the wherewithal to make another, De l’Allemagne, and would later yield the posthumous Dix anne´es d’exil and Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise. Such an outcome was the more vital to her in that it made absolutely apparent to Napoleon to what degree the punishment he wanted to inXict on her was actually a prompt to her dissident genius, a spur to Wnding liberty and life outside his empire. This she would demonstrate to particular eVect by leaving intact in Corinne’s Italy the artworks he had in fact transported back to France (and which English tourists like the Greatheeds came to Paris to see in 1803): it was as though his dominion, so easily refuted by the power of words, had never been. Of course such insolence merely meant that he denounced the novel as unpatriotic, which got the author into more trouble, though he still found the story extremely readable. It is no doubt a paradox that the Stae¨l who descants in Corinne on Italy’s masterpieces of painting, sculpture, and architecture herself had little taste or eye for the visual arts. Bonstetten told the Danish poetess Friederike Brun that ‘beauty which is not wit or eloquence does not exist for her’.6 She had no close artist friends, unless one counts Vige´e Le Brun, though she would 6 See Diesbach, Stae¨l, 443.

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spend some time in Rome attending the salon of the Swiss-Austrian artist Angelica KauVman and being sketched by her. Lacking familiarity with Italian literature had not stopped her writing about it in De la litte´rature, however; she had simply made use of secondary sources. Could she not do the same for Italy’s masterpieces of painting and sculpture? As Crabb Robinson had discovered, it was occasionally possible for others to put right her own wrong-headed interpretations, however ungraciously she accepted correction, and however prone to assert (like Benjamin Jowett) that what she didn’t know wasn’t knowledge. InXexible artistic opinion would have got her nowhere in Italy, where she was patently a novice. Still, the fact that Corinne would be a novel meant that it would be about human love as well as artefacts. Constant’s view that it was at once a journey or travelogue and a novel,7 and Schlegel’s that in it the subjects of Corinne and Italy were so closely intertwined as to be inseparable,8 have already been mentioned. Stae¨l was inclined to agree with both. She wrote to Madame de Tesse´ that people who had never been to Italy seemed to prefer the novel to the travelogue, and those who had been to Italy the reverse. ‘To me it seems that the one is necessary to the other.’9 But it was also, of course—though this was Xatly denied by Albertine Necker de Saussure10—a Wction about politics, and thus an indirect assault as well as commentary on the territorial ambitions of Napoleon. That being so, it is worth emphasizing that she did not write it as a result of going to Italy. She had had the idea before going, and went with a purpose. The point of departure was possibly an opera she saw in Weimar in 1804, Die Saalnix, about a nymph abandoned by a knight who prefers an ordinary mortal to her, though Stae¨l’s heroine is considerably more complex and interesting, and is, in fact, partly Stae¨l herself. The story of Corinne begins by describing how Oswald Nelvil, a young Scottish peer mourning the death of his father, travels to Italy for the sake of his health, witnesses the crowning of the poetess Corinne on the Capitol in Rome, and is immediately drawn to her. As their relationship develops she undertakes to introduce him to the cultural and historical glories of Italy, but suspects a fatal lack of resolution in him and tries to loosen his growing hold on her. 7 B. Constant, Recueil d’articles, 84. 8 Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, 327. 9 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.265 (10 June 1807, Coppet). 10 ‘ . . . this is perhaps the only work by Madame de Stae¨l that is entirely divorced from politics’ (Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. cxl).

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Oswald feels guilty about his attraction to someone so diVerent from the submissive young Englishwoman, Lucile Edgermond, whom his father intended him to marry, and also attempts to withdraw. Corinne tells him that she was born in Italy, the daughter of Lord Edgermond and his Italian Wrst wife, but left for England after her mother died and lived in Northumberland with her father and his new wife (whose child, Lucile, is therefore her half-sister). When her father in turn died and her stepmother disowned her she returned to Italy to cultivate her artistic talents. Despite a feeling of foreboding about their relationship, Corinne and Oswald spend a year together in Italy until Oswald is recalled to rejoin his regiment and rapidly reverts to the life of sterile conformity which Corinne’s love had challenged. He discovers from Lady Edgermond that his father had considered and rejected Corinne as a suitable wife for him, but decides that he can no more wed her half-sister than her. Corinne follows him to Britain, suspecting the worst, becomes convinced that he will marry Lucile despite his protestations to the contrary, and releases him from his engagement. He duly enters into an unfulWlling marriage to Lucile, comes to feel that he has wronged Corinne, and Xees wife and child for four years’ military service abroad. Eventually he goes back to Italy and Wnds Corinne mortally ill. She pardons him with the reXection that men are ignorant of the ill they do, but discards her miniature portrait of him for an image of Christ. However generally derivative Corinne may be, for much of the novel Stae¨l is quoting herself, sometimes in the form of quoting Delphine. The playwright Marie-Joseph Che´nier said that Corinne was an improved, independent, talented version of Delphine;11 but in the end she gives up all for love, just like Delphine and just like the stereotypical woman one might have expected the independent-minded Stae¨l to despise. There are some important diVerences between her and Delphine, all the same. One of them is the fact that she is an experienced woman who does not blush to consummate her love. Only in England, it is suggested, would her loss of virginity have mattered, which points to one of the central contrasts in the novel: the north–south divide is shown as much less Xattering to the north than in De la litte´rature. Corinne’s Italy is as generous to lovers as its land is generous to the pauper-barons of Naples, the lazzaroni, and its philosophy 11 See Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, in Portraits de femmes, Œuvres, 2 vols., ed. Maxime Leroy (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), II.1123–4.

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of dolce far niente is more defensible than the benighted gloom of Protestant countries (though Stae¨l, of course, rarely admitted this in any but a literary context). Initially captivated, Oswald will turn against the life of fruitfulness and indolence to reembrace the Protestant ethic of work and eVort, despite the fact that his class releases him from experiencing them as need. Become fastidious again, he rebels against the psychology created by the easeful campagna felice, sustaining the kind of shock Stae¨l herself sustained when she stayed in Naples.12 (Goethe had been far more tolerant of the native laissez-faire during his own life-changing Italian journey.) Corinne devotes many pages to showing how and why Oswald’s initial uncritical acceptance of Italy’s creativeness becomes a radical rejection fuelled by stern northern rectitude. It cannot help dwelling on another way in which the north–south opposition of De la litte´rature is turned on its head: Corinne’s talent withers in provincial England (though perhaps the provinciality is the real problem). Stae¨l’s Anglophilia turns out to be no match for her instinctive feeling that sunshine fertilizes genius. Or does she simply mean Corinne to express her own duality, the inherent contradictions of her thought? More importantly, Corinne embodies the vexed issue that lies behind Stae¨l’s exile: how is it possible to be politically aware, politically active, and yet a woman? The matter is of course present to a degree in Delphine,13 but Delphine herself cannot be called an activist except in the moral sense: she conducts herself in a spirit of moral liberalism that may be related to the Revolutionary principles of freedom, equality, and fraternity, but is rarely able to connect them with any larger sphere than that of private life. The embodiment of reformist enlightenment spirit has to be the man, Lebensei, and he is even endowed with the life-giving quality woman might have assumed to be primarily hers. (‘Leben’ means ‘life’ in German, and ‘sei’ ‘let there be’.) But is Corinne anything more than a symbol of female emancipation? Perhaps. Like Stae¨l, she has broken the bounds of convention as a woman and an artist, and the art is possibly, like Stae¨l’s, the expression of a political state that may come to prevail in her country, for it is free, spontaneous, and governed by native rhythms. Her nationality, too, gives

12 See Genevie`ve Gennari, Le Premier Voyage de Madame de Stae¨l en Italie et la gene`se de ‘Corinne’ (Paris: Boivin, 1947), 78. 13 See Henri Coulet, ‘Re´volution et roman chez Madame de Stae¨l’, RHLF 87 (1987), 638–60, at 655–8.

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her an advantage, because Italy at least seems, unlike France, to be without the jealousy towards distinguished women that De la litte´rature had deprecated: ‘As soon as a woman is marked out as a distinguished person, the general public is prejudiced against her. The crowd only ever judges according to certain common rules that can be adhered to without risk.’14 To the Italians Corinne is a source of national pride, a symbol of the freedom and fulWlment they look forward to themselves, artistically great even if politically repressed. As this suggests, Corinne is even less an unpolitical work than Delphine. Yet if it is anti-French in the sense of being antagonistic towards Napoleon—Stae¨l was advised to insert a eulogy to him into the book, but declined—it could also be called anti-English. It is true that Oswald (a Scot) is heroic and upstanding, apparently willing to Wght against the French once hostilities have been declared; and it is also true that England is endowed with a certain grandeur and strength15 (Stae¨l tactlessly apotheosizes the British navy, for example, in the wake of the defeat at Trafalgar), standing for a tradition of liberalism such as Lebensei imbibed at Cambridge. But if it embodies the kind of political progress Italy might envy, its society is both repressive and stultifyingly puritanical. Lord Edgermond has only to return home after his Italian wife’s death to marry an inhibited, joyless Englishwoman and become as conformist as his fellows, and Oswald reverts to national type in the same unquestioning way. At least Lord Edgermond’s Wrst marriage demonstrated a spirit of cultural and emotional adventure which the young Lord Nelvil lacks. Stae¨l paints a devastatingly satirical portrait of English provincial mores, epitomized by the second Lady Edgermond and her circle. Corinne is shocked by the institutional gloom, the devaluing of intellect, the boorishly physical existence of most English landowners—so diVerent from the Lockes of Norbury Park—and above all the sheer repression of women. Nothing can equal the horror she feels at the insipid and prolonged teapreparing ceremony her stepmother presides over as the women wait for the men to join them. ‘My dear, do you think the water is boiling enough to make the tea?’—‘My dear, I think it would be too early, because the men are not yet ready to join us.’—‘Will they stay long over their port tonight, do you think, my dear?’16 and so on. This agonizing scene recalls 14 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 339. 15 See Balaye´, Lumie`res, 119. 16 Stae¨l, Corinne, ed. Simone Balaye´ (Paris, 1985), 367.

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one Chateaubriand witnessed during his emigration in England, when he was obliged to take tea ‘in the old way’ at the house of Mrs O’Larry, an Irish widow with whom he lodged for a time;17 it may also put us in mind of Austen’s Emma and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. ‘I had been in Italian convents,’ Corinne exclaims; ‘they seemed to me full of life in comparison with this circle.’18 Yet such is the society Oswald cherishes. His contact with Italy has changed him, but not radically. It has altered him suYciently to ensure that his marriage to Lucile will be dreary and unsatisfying, but not enough to prevent him yielding to the attraction of domestic order. Lucile is someone ‘who has never left her mother’s side’ and ‘knows only Wlial tenderness’,19 as though she were to compensate for Oswald’s own lack of devotion and displace Corinne in her abiding innocence. She is progressively angelized in the references to her ‘heavenly purity’,20 her ‘angelic face’,21 her ‘glance which seemed to retain the memory of heaven’,22 and her ‘angel’s form’,23 until she is eventually deiWed as the ‘image of divine pity’.24 Remembering how Oswald described England as ‘this sanctuary of modesty and delicacy’,25 we realize how impossible it will be for the sexually experienced, half-Italian, and emotionally impetuous Corinne to withstand the gentle force of Lucile’s being. While he was in Italy Oswald could more or less willingly accept Corinne’s diVerence from the pre-established model of womanhood he had made his ideal— ‘he was always well aware that Corinne was not the feeble, timid woman uncertain of everything except her duty and feelings whom he had chosen in his imagination as his life companion . . . yet could one compare anything to Corinne?’26—but in England matters are diVerent. Corinne’s position is therefore irretrievable. The absent, irregular, older woman (Oswald is a year her junior) has little to Wght with, little she can deploy against Lucile’s charms, the inXuence of Oswald’s native land, the memory of his father, and the urge to Wnd conventional happiness.27 She has, we are told, to Wght ‘the nature of things’, by which all the power of social ordinance seems to be meant—although Oswald, in a letter, claims

17 Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Molinier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), I.384. 18 Stae¨l, Corinne, 368. 19 Ibid. 450. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 454. 22 Ibid. 455. 23 Ibid. 456. 24 Ibid. 455. 25 Ibid. 153. 26 Ibid. 166. 27 Ibid. 469.

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that fate is what defeated them.28 Corinne demurs at this, knowing that the real fault lies with men. Not only are they ignorant of the hurt they inXict, but they are easily persuaded by society ‘that it is a game to Wll a heart with happiness and then plunge it in despair’.29 The nature of things, evidently, is less a matter of fate than one of social custom and sexual convenience. In an unconstitutional Italy, a ragbag of diVerent principalities and states, Corinne’s glory is precarious, a situation symbolized not by the permanent art of the written word, but by the evanescent performing art for which she and the other female improvisers of her time are known. Italy as it stands has no public opinion nor, like Corinne’s sex, any political independence. One of the ironies of the book is that Oswald, coming from a free, assimilated country, ought to be in a position to understand this, yet he is unable to perceive the link between Corinne as a (creative) woman and an unstructured Italy, which similarly lacks civil rights and a clear sense of identity. Despite his love for her and exposure through her to a concept of personal freedom he has never encountered before, he cannot envisage any role for her as his wife beyond a domestic one—and this before he even knows that she is precisely the woman his father had rejected as a suitable wife for him. In this respect he both resembles Napoleonic man and stands as his antithesis. In the Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise Stae¨l would describe the semi-conscious bigotry of the English male with reference to the opposite sex as follows: In England, women never raise their voice to intervene in discussions; men have not accustomed them to take part in general conversations: when they have withdrawn after dinner the conversation becomes all the more lively and animated. The mistress of a house does not think herself obliged, as in France, to lead the conversation, and above all to ensure that it does not languish . . . Women are, in this respect, extremely timid; for in a free state men reassert their natural dignity, and women feel themselves abandoned. Ministers would not imagine that a woman could address them on any subject you could name, unless she was without brother, son, or husband to take on the task . . . 30

28 Ibid. 570. Lori Jo Marso points out that Corinne can only be a public persona or Oswald’s lover, not both: he cannot bear to witness her public success, which gives her a kind of happiness he feels belongs to the realm of private emotion, yet when she cuts herself oV from society to devote herself completely to him, she feels suVocated (Lori Jo Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens: JeanJacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Stae¨l’s Subversive Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 119–21). 29 Stae¨l, Corinne, 585. 30 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 556.

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The reference to men reasserting their natural dignity may be dismaying (unless it is meant ironically), but it seems to indicate Stae¨l’s perennial ambivalence about the status of her own sex relative to the opposite one. She surely cannot have felt happy admitting that women are naturally abandoned in ‘civilized’ environments such as England’s, since apart from anything it seems to exonerate Oswald in his behaviour towards Corinne. Another possibility, however, is that Stae¨l wanted to provoke Bonaparte by suggesting that in the people he regarded as his natural enemy women embodied the very qualities of deference and passivity that he thought most desirable in their sex. Equally, she may have wanted him to perceive that the woman writer he most reviled was essentially diVerent in character from English women, however highly she rated the English in general. It was certainly provocative to allow Corinne to say, rather ungrammatically: ‘Domestic virtues are the glory and happiness of women in England, but if there is one country where love subsists outside the sacred bonds of marriage, among those countries the one which pays most attention to women’s happiness is Italy.’31 And this may be because Italy in its present and future plight resembles a mistress or queen in comparison with the patriarchal militaristic might of the Napoleonic empire,32 just as it does the paternalistic and aristocratic force of England. This England is not the liberal land Stae¨l admired at other times, but the country at war with France after 179333 which, despite harbouring ‘constitutionalist’ French e´migre´s such as Narbonne and d’Arblay, threatened to restore the ancien re´gime in the form of the ideologically bankrupt Bourbons. Perhaps Stae¨l is further muddling the issue in describing Corinne’s crowning on the Capitol as she does, since it is reminiscent of nothing so much as Napoleon’s crowning as emperor; but perhaps not, if she is simply substituting a female principle for the male one invested in Bonaparte. To maintain this female sovereign principle is to support the sway of feeling and imagination over the power of musket and sword, and Napoleon can hardly have avoided taking the hint as an attack on his rise to power and defeat of Italy, whose king he named himself in 1805. Even so, in another calculated insult,

31 Stae¨l, Corinne, 163. 32 See Joan DeJean, ‘Portrait of the Artist as Sappho’, in Gutwirth, Goldberger, and Szmurlo, Germaine de Stae¨l, 132. 33 See Doris Y. Kadisch, Politicizing Gender (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 22.

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Corinne refuses to show Italy undergoing such a defeat. Yet in the end imagination is overcome by force of arms, as ‘the nature of things’ inevitably conquers physical weakness and evanescent creativity. After all, Oswald’s shock had been great when he observed women’s sexual freedom in Italy: ‘one might almost say that women are the sultan and men the seraglio.’34 Clearly, such a state of aVairs could not be allowed to continue. Incredible as it may seem, Stae¨l was unable to see how irritated Corinne was bound to make Napoleon, just as Delphine had done. The proof is in a letter she sent Madame Re´camier from Lyon on 5 May 1807: ‘You have Corinne at present. Tell me what you think of it. Tell me what you hear people say about it from a literary point of view, and whether there are any rumblings on the government side. Because it’s from there that I expect the easing of my sad situation. It seems to me that such an innocent occupation should disarm, if anything can disarm.’35 She was still oblivious to the fact that her huge successes almost always worked against her in political terms. A copy of the book was unguardedly forwarded to the Minister of the Interior, Champigny, and as a result she was incarcerated at Coppet at the very time Corinne became a European best-seller. Predictably enough, she achieved the ‘right’—that is, suitably moving and tragic—ending for the book by the simple expedient of showing the female as victim, a norm represented by any number of eighteenth-century novels (and notably those written by women).36 Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote feelingly to her about her decision to describe the heroine as enduring terrible suVering: ‘I had become so attached to this poor Corinne that I only dared to read a little at a time for fear of being separated from her too soon, and even more for fear that you had destined her to be unhappy. How did you have the courage to make her suVer so?’37 But one would have had to be an even more determined Anglophile than Stae¨l was to attempt showing lesser kinds of female subordination, such as the retreat to the drawing-room while the men smoke and drink, as empowering tokens of female solidarity. Are the women really demonstrating the superiority of their sex by leaving at the moment when alcohol loosens male 34 Stae¨l, Corinne, 157. 35 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.236 (Lyon). 36 See Madelyn Gutwirth, Madame de Stae¨l, Novelist (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 15. 37 From Devonshire House, London, 6 July 1807: Coppet Papers, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, II.373.

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tongues and tempts them into indecency? It hardly seems likely.38 Stae¨l prefers to focus on the ennui which such withdrawing would have spelt for any Frenchwoman, and on the unnaturalness of segregating the sexes for the purpose of gratifying men. Sexual exile, the female state of being apart, intensiWes the need for company. Yet Corinne contends that domesticity, which might seem like a prison for free spirits in other races, appears to the English so sacred that even adulterers pay tribute to it. Equally, however, and more tellingly, Oswald tires of domestic life in Lucile’s company. Of course Corinne’s otherness is part of her attraction in his eyes, and her revulsion at the norms of conventional English domestic life the reason for her return to Italy. It may seem that unlike Stae¨l she chooses a kind of exile, but in fact going back to Rome for her means regaining the mother country. Like Stae¨l she Wnds foreign culture a stimulus to renewed artistic expression, but not when the foreign land is her father’s birthplace, England. Oswald takes fright at the extent of her otherness and the evidence it provides of her likely unsuitability to be his life partner. Indeed, once she has become identiWed as the woman his father forbade him to marry, it is clear that she cannot help him in his quest ‘both to Wnd the memories of his native land again and to receive via the imagination a new life, be born again for the future without breaking with the past’.39 At the start of their relationship he had mistakenly believed that Corinne and her art would make it possible for him to reconcile his various emotional conXicts, but now sees his error. Magnanimously or self-interestedly, he had been prepared temporarily to suspend the criteria by which he would have judged a woman of her kind in Britain, because ‘he did not apply to Italy any of the social conventions’.40 Corinne’s type of woman is quite unknown to him: having discarded her real name and appearing at Wrst to be without a background, she is as strange and exciting as Italy itself. Like Stae¨l, but more completely, she has broken with prevailing opinion and social norms, preferring to follow the demands of art and glory wherever they lead her. She has called herself Corinne after the Greek poetess who was a friend and rival of Pindar, and although she seems to be like a priestess of Apollo her poetic genius is uncontested. Yet she is bound, like Sappho (the subject of Stae¨l’s unWnished tragedy), to be unhappy, committing a kind of moral suicide that resembles Sappho’s

38 See Paul Langford, Englishness IdentiWed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113. 39 Stae¨l, Corinne, 69. 40 Ibid. 51.

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physical one. To be outside the world, according to Corinne, is inevitably to court and then meet destruction. In literature, perhaps; in life, surely not. In life it was art as much as anything that saved Stae¨l. However obsessively she thought about suicide in the course of her career, associating it with a particular form of melancholy, the energy generated by writing, along with her ingrained sociability, prevented her from committing it. Although the tradition in Wction was to show exceptional women as doomed, in the real world Stae¨l always managed to stay aXoat, advertising the fact that she had survived by being vocal, using literature to proclaim the message that could not be obliterated by petty tyranny or other kinds of exclusion. True, male initiative had proved insuYcient to win happiness for her, and she tirelessly translated into Wction the vacillation and irresolution she associated with the opposite sex, but men’s eVorts could never stop her Wghting. Nothing Napoleon did would eVectively halt her or the danger she represented to his system. Brinkman, who had replaced Eric de Stae¨l as Swedish charge´ d’aVaires in Paris between 1798 and 1799, before moving to Germany, England, and Wnally back to Sweden, wrote a letter about Corinne during Stae¨l’s stay in Stockholm between September 1812 and May 1813. In it he describes the typical reader’s solidarity with Corinne and disaVection with the ‘unworthy’ Oswald, recognizing that a certain type of woman will become obsessed with a man whose desires are fatal to her but remain unable to see the illusory nature of her attraction to him. Oswald pleases readers of neither sex, according to Brinkman: women cannot take him to their hearts, and men Wnd him unendurable.41 Yet his sort, in many ways like the Wgure of Adolphe in Constant’s short novel, was typical of its age, when young men were concerned with self rather than other, full of stray impulses to do good while lacking the constancy to see these impulses through, deriving pleasure from the enjoyment of a woman’s love at the same time as feeling that they did enough in merely paying her attention. The enervation of such anti-heroes makes them a danger to all who come into contact with them, though they themselves are blind to the threat they embody. In 1807 Stae¨l sat to Vige´e Le Brun, who wanted to depict her as a declaiming Corinne. This was not necessarily a good idea, particularly as the act of improvising is hard to represent pictorially. (Although KauVman also did 41 See Stae¨l to Brinkman, Stockholm, 3 May 1813, in Brinkman, ‘Lettre’, 149–51.

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portraits of two improvvisatrici in Rome, neither picture is any better than Vige´e Le Brun’s at translating mani´a, the divine madness of the ancients.) The French painter’s work is a deliberate allusion to Stae¨l’s novel, published the same year, and in a footnote to the fourteenth book the author denies, not altogether convincingly, that her inspiration for the heroine was the celebrity improvvisatrice Corilla, alias Maria Maddalena Morelli. Mrs Thrale/ Piozzi, travelling on the Continent, remarked of this woman: She no longer exhibits the power she once held without a rival, yet to her conversations [i.e. conversazioni, the Italian version of polite social intercourse a` la franc¸aise] everyone still strives for admittance, though she is now ill, and old, and hoarse with repeated colds. She spares, however, . . . no labour or fatigue to obtain and keep that superiority and admiration which one day perhaps gave her equal trouble to receive and to repay. But who can bear to lay their laurels by?42

As with Corinne, ‘the Capitol will long recollect [Corilla’s] being crowned there’. In fact Corilla’s crowning marked the moment of her Wrst decline in public regard, with her jealous rivals claiming that she was an inadequate mother, a plagiarist, and a sexual opportunist—all familiar themes in the male attack on gifted women, whether painters, poets, or artists of any other kind. Corinne builds on such hostility to elaborate its warning about the ephemeral nature of female glory in a male-dominated society,43 for such a society could not accept the justice of a woman’s receiving the laurels that had been awarded only three times in Italian history, and exclusively to men (Petrarch, Tasso, and the improviser Perfetti). Casanova, in the same tradition, disparaged Corilla for having a purely ornamental (and thus quintessentially female) talent, though it is hard to take any such verdict from a celebrated pleasure-lover and womanizer seriously. The worst most of her critics found to say against her was that she breached accepted norms of ‘proper’ behaviour. Art may redeem crushing or unfulWlling experience by re-presenting it in transmuted form. The female artist Stae¨l used her experience of travelling in Italy as a way of demonstrating how creation—literary in her case, pictorial or oral in others’—helps to elevate or intensify reality, even that of extreme repression. She herself was attacked in Rome for Xouting the rules of 42 Hester Lynch Piozzi, Journey through France, Italy and Germany, 2 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1789), I.318–19. 43 See Paola Giuli, ‘Tracing a Sisterhood: Corilla Olympica as Corinne’s Unacknowledged Alter Ego’, in Szmurlo, Novel, 165.

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etiquette as well as for her volubility, though a secretary at the French embassy, Artaud de Montor, wrote on 5 February 1805 (one or two days after her arrival) that she was ‘very gay and very happy’ at Wnding herself in Rome.44 She was, perhaps predictably, unimpressed by most of its monuments and architecture—though she graciously made an exception for St Peter’s—and this determined negativity reXected her original intentions in writing Corinne:45 not to eulogize Corinne’s country, but to take issue with it, possibly according to the thesis developed in De la litte´rature concerning art, life, and the southern lands. Practical considerations, however, made her change her mind. When she was negotiating a contract with her publisher Nicolle, it suddenly occurred to him that he knew virtually nothing about the book she was writing, which he had accepted simply on the basis of its author’s reputation. Having recently published an anti-Italian account of the country and its people, the Voyage en Italie et en Sicile by Creuze´ de Lesser, he was dismayed at Stae¨l’s answer to the question whether her novel was for or against Italy: Against, Monsieur, against! After paying all due respect to Italy’s beautiful sky, talking about the beautiful collections of pictures and sculpture it possesses, indicating the majestic ruins everybody has talked about, what do you want me to say in favour of Italy, this country without morals, without government, without policing, this country where the only people with any energy are the brigands who infest the thoroughfares, where the spirit of conversation is as conWned as a box in the theatre where Italian society pays and receives its visits? This country where all you can see is a faded luxuriousness, where the palaces are in a progressive state of delapidation, where the inns are appalling hovels? Yes, what can you say for such a country?46

On reXection, Nicolle was still more horriWed: how could he bring out two hostile accounts in the space of a single year? She saw his point. ‘Well, since I must . . . ,’ she nobly agreed. Hence, in part, the oddness of the narrative she produced, with its constant see-sawing for and against Italy, and where, despite everything, criticism of it always seems more eloquent than praise. Yet she had been primed by some genuine Italophiles. When she was in Weimar, for instance, she caught much of Anna Amalia’s infectious enthusiasm for the country. The Dowager Duchess had made her own Italian journey in the wake of Goethe, whose letters to the Weimar court had 44 Balaye´, Carnets, 464.

45 Diesbach, Stae¨l, 347.

46 Ibid.

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awakened her appetite. She travelled there in 1788, became friends with Angelica KauVman, and felt, as she put it, ‘new-born’.47 When Corinne shows Oswald the glories of Rome, it is with the hope of exerting the same inXuence: she wants to restore his taste for life. She also hopes that, having aroused his enthusiasm, she will be able to stop him returning to Britain. After visiting Naples Stae¨l went back to Rome, this time conceiving a warmer regard for it. Typically enough, this was a consequence of an infatuation. The new object of her desires was Pedro de Souza, the future Duke of Palmella, a strikingly handsome young Portuguese nobleman whose fetching sadness seems to have inXuenced the portrayal of Oswald. Like Stae¨l, and later Oswald, he was mourning the death of a father, a coincidence which Stae¨l seems to have taken as a positive augury for their relationship. Accordingly, she wrote him letter after romantic letter, which he proceeded not to answer, or not to answer as she would have wished. Indeed, he seemed to belie his southern blood with an almost Anglo-Saxon phlegm, which Stae¨l found more than provoking. In Naples she had felt more alive than initially in Rome, despite her famous statement that she would rather travel 500 leagues to have a good conversation than throw open her windows for a view of the sublime sweep of its bay. According to Rosalie de Constant, however, she did become provisionally reconciled with nature there through the terrifying and humbling spectacle of Vesuvius erupting.48 The volcano was a stimulus to art, whether in writing (Stae¨l, Chateaubriand) or painting (Vige´e Le Brun, Volaire). Its appeal to the nascent forces of Romanticism could not have been more obvious, and those travellers who failed to be greeted with Wre, lava, and pillars of smoke issuing from the crater were apt to feel rather cheated. Vige´e Le Brun wrote that Vesuvius ‘adored’ her, ‘for it feˆted me and welcomed me in the most grandiose fashion’, outdoing ‘the Wnest Wrework displays, not excepting the great girandole of the Castel Sant’Angelo’.49 To feel, in the process of inspecting it, that one was at the gates of hell was all part of the experience, and trying to domesticate the savage, as Vige´e Le Brun did, was to miss the point: the correct Romantic response was one of sheer awe at its sublime, untameable wildness. Chateaubriand would be impressed by the way this natural spectacle dwarfed and humbled 47 See Angelica Goodden, Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica KauVman (London: Pimlico, 2005), 256. 48 Balaye´, Carnets, 117, n. 6. 49 Vige´e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, I.209.

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the eVorts of man; he experienced terror and a sense of powerlessness at sight of it, diminished rather than enhanced as a human being. His reXections match Stae¨l’s thoughts about the puniness of great human endeavours, such as Napoleon’s, in the face of elemental force: In eVect, what do the famous revolutions of empires count for in the light of these accidents of nature, which can change the face of the earth and the seas? Men would be happy, at least, if they did not devote the few days they have to spend together to tormenting each other! Vesuvius has never once opened up its depths to devour cities without its fury surprising people in the act of spilling blood or shedding tears. What were the Wrst signs of civilization, the Wrst proofs of man’s passage to be found in the dead cinders of the volcano? Instruments of torture, skeletons in chains.50

Stae¨l left Auguste and Albertine behind in the inn where the party was staying and ascended Vesuvius in the company of Schlegel and Sismondi, later reworking the impressions she jotted down in her notebooks for inclusion in Corinne. The description of the symbolic land of Xames in Book 11 is both stirring and faintly ridiculous, as Oswald’s passion nearly overcomes him in the burning heat while Corinne remains surprisingly oblivious to the diYculties he is experiencing. The ‘land of Xames’ threatens to engulf him as his ardour reaches a paroxysm: Vesuvius obediently erupts, but Corinne is safe. The Xow of lava seems to the lovers like the rivers of hell, and the scene owes much to Dante’s Inferno; but there is an echo of Virgil too in the description of their approach to the lava Xows, which recalls Aeneas’ descent into the underworld accompanied by the Sibyl, the oracle of Cumae.51 Just as Aeneas has to Wnd his father in the underworld and receive his advice, then leave his lover Dido, so in Stae¨l’s novel Oswald must ‘Wnd’ and consult Lord Nelvil (that is, establish the truth about his father’s prohibition of Corinne) and then resolve—however unconsciously—to leave the woman he loves. Both literally and Wguratively, the couple stand on the edge of the volcano, but it is Corinne, not Oswald, who will be consumed by it. Both in Corinne and in the course of Stae¨l’s Italian journey, travel becomes a via dolorosa. For Stae¨l this was the inevitable-seeming disappointment of unreciprocated infatuation, for Corinne the related slow progression 50 Chateaubriand, Œuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard, 2 vols. (Paris, Gallimard, 1979), II.1469. 51 Maija Lehtonen, ‘Le Fleuve du temps et le Xeuve de l’enfer: themes et images dans Corinne de Mme de Stae¨l’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 68 (1967), 225–42, 391–408; 69 (1968), 101–28: at (1967) 392; also Vallois, Fictions, 144.

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through love, disillusion, and desertion towards nothingness. For her, the Wrst threats to the durability of love were felt in Rome and Naples; Venice marked separation; and Florence brought death. Though Stae¨l herself was warmly received in Venice, she felt ambivalent about the place, as did many at the time. She found it melancholy and surprising rather than attractive, Chateaubriand thought it against nature,52 and others sickly and decadent; Byron, though, regarded the city as a unique paradise. Florence concentrates Corinne’s unhappiness, which Venice’s dense compactness then symbolically expresses. Returning to the place where she had spent some years after her mother died, Corinne Wnds nothing but horror there—murder (she sees Michelangelo’s statue of the assassinated Julian and his brother plotting vengeance), war, fortresses, and everywhere the sickly note of premeditated death. She is also made aware of the sway of violent individualism. It has sometimes been said that Corinne itself is concerned with individualism or autonomy,53 but this seems only partly true. Before she meets Oswald, admittedly, Corinne is self-directed, a woman at the apogee of fame whose art raises her above ordinary humans and is apparently suYcient for her happiness; but as she falls in love, so she will be destroyed by her lover’s hidebound conformity and lack of resolution. This later Corinne is a pale version of her creator, who doggedly continued active and working— producing essays, treatises, novels—in the midst of personal turmoil, despair, and an acute sense of displacement. To achieve such self-mastery is to be beyond the reach of exile’s pain: nothing more can profoundly damage you. In Corinne’s case displacement corresponds to an internal sense of being fractured, but lacks the inevitability, if not the scale, of Stae¨l’s own exile. This might seem to make Stae¨l the more autonomous heroine, for all her celebrated and often frenetic sociability, ever the artist in the face of personal unhappiness and social disapproval. Corinne founders because her art becomes inseparable from herself, and her state of mind is necessarily connected with the goodwill and compassion of others. The Wgure of the woman abandoned, as Corinne is abandoned, is a constant in Stae¨l’s writing, reXecting her conviction that the female deprived of essential (male) support sustains personal and social damage all the more devastating for the lack of institutional props which society oVers her sex. De la litte´rature had already 52 See Gennari, Voyage, 105. 53 See Showalter, ‘Corinne as Autonomous Heroine’.

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given an impressively dispassionate description of this condition, and Stae¨l’s correspondence with Narbonne and other lovers a more anguished one. But whereas in art, as Mirza, Pauline, Delphine, Corinne, and others show, one goes under, in life one Wghts on. For tragedy is a literary convention as much as a human reality, overcoming the bonds that in the social world may tie real human beings to life. As Stae¨l’s reXections on suicide imply, taking one’s own life seemed to her a reaction of impatience as much as one of desolation, something that calm reXection would reject were calm reXection at all possible in the situations generated by intense despair. Where the young author of De l’inXuence des passions exalted self-destruction as a proud declaration of autonomy, the mature writer preaches resignation to fate as the truly elevated response.54 The original Delphine takes poison (the subsequent one merely dies of a broken heart), and Corinne allows herself to expire in the manner that will most devastate Oswald, in the process showing the pride that according to De l’Allemagne taints any decision to destroy oneself. Committing suicide out of love, as the Wrst Delphine does, may be justiWable, but it lays bare what the Re´Xexions sur le suicide calls a lack of resolution or a want of spiritual resilience. In real life the heroic woman endures suVering, sparing others the pain of her irremediable loss. It is what Stae¨l herself did, though few would call her an altruist on that account. Yet however egotistical she remained, she was ever conscious of how her actions might compromise or interfere with the well-being of people she loved. In any case, she was rarely lastingly disaVected with life. In the longer term persecution and deprivation had a galvanic eVect on her, stimulating her energies rather than sapping her resolve. The temptation to renounce life would not prevail when so many things were worth Wghting for. As the Re´Xexions sur le suicide has it: ‘Suicide caused by disgust for life is merely the bloody mourning for personal happiness.’55 Given Corinne’s end, it is easy to understand Byron’s disapproving verdict on the novel. According to him, it was dangerous in its inculcation of the belief ‘that genius, talent, acquirements and accomplishments, such as Corinne was represented to possess, could not preserve a woman from 54 Stae¨l, Re´Xexions sur le suicide, ed. Andre´e Mansau (Paris: E´ditions de l’Opale, 1983), 29; also Starobinski, ‘Suicide’, 242–64. 55 Stae¨l, Re´Xexions sur le suicide, 64.

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becoming the victim to an unrequited passion, and that reason, absence and female pride were unavailing’.56 The conclusion he drew from this opinion, however, was unconvincing. ‘I told her [Stae¨l] that Corinne would be considered, if not cited, as an excuse for violent passions, by all the young ladies with imaginations exalte´, and that she had much to answer for. Had you but seen her! I do wonder how I had courage to go on, but I was in one of my humours, and had heard of her comments on me one day, so I determined to pay her oV.’ Stae¨l retorted that Byron was the last person who ought to talk of morals, as no one had done more to damage them. To this he responded that it was normal to depict vice as alluring, as he had occasionally done, but that, unlike Corinne, he had never shown virtue as dull and severe. Stae¨l was infuriated and astounded—‘What an idea! Upon my word! Just listen! You are making me impatient!’—and it was only by his own volubility, Byron claimed, that he had kept her silent. (This was the more important, he later remarked, because she believed she had convinced any opponent when she had silenced him.)57 Nor was she any happier with his opinion that Adolphe should be given as an antidote to young women who had read Corinne, being ‘the truest picture of the misery unhallowed liaisons produce’. Was Stae¨l’s annoyance sharpened by the suspicion that Constant’s story owed more than a little of its plot to Corinne? Or had Constant’s work inXuenced hers? Adolphe was written in 1806, and both writers had had leisure to discuss their work in progress with each other. Both, it is true, had also been inXuenced by Charrie`re’s Caliste, the second part of Lettres e´crites de Lausanne, one of the novels by women singled out for praise in the Essai sur les Wctions, and which shows the fatal eVect of male irresoluteness on the vulnerable loving female. According to Byron, Stae¨l was on no safer ground when she alluded to Napoleon’s fear and disapproval of her ‘dissident’ Wction. She took, he said, peculiar satisfaction in impressing on her auditors the severity of persecution she underwent for Napoleon . . . and a certain mode of enraging her was to appear to doubt the extent to which she wished it to be believed this had been pushed, as she looked upon persecution as triumphant proof of her literary and political importance, which she more than insinuated Napoleon feared might subvert his government. This was a weakness but a common one. One half of the clever people in the world believe they are hated and persecuted, and the other half imagine they are admired and beloved. Both are wrong, and both false conclusions 56 Blessington, Conversations, 26.

57 Ibid. 91–2.

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are produced by vanity, though that vanity is the strongest which believes in the hatred and persecution, as it implies a belief of extraordinary superiority to account for it.58

Yet she was perhaps right to believe in her extraordinary superiority. On a charitable day even Byron, like Napoleon, accepted it. As well as being incensed by the way it ignored his conquest of Italy, Napoleon was enraged by what seemed Corinne’s anti-Frenchness, epitomized in the character of Oswald’s travelling-companion, the insouciant aristocrat d’Erfeuil.59 This feckless and light-headed character appeared the distillation of those ancien re´gime values which Bonaparte, along with other former Revolutionaries, held in disdain, and which Chateaubriand attacked when he encountered them in the joyeux e´migre´s of England. (On the other hand, it is undeniable that in her hour of need d’Erfeuil shows Corinne a compassion Oswald lacks.) In 1819 the fallen emperor was still irritated by Stae¨l’s determined silence on the subject of his conquests: ‘It would have been easy for her to insert one or two chapters, to speak about me. She would have told the truth . . . She could have mentioned the change there had been. That would have got her recalled [to Paris]. Not a word about me.’60 If such mutterings accurately reXect the state of his mind a few years earlier, her determination not to compromise her principles does her great credit. Paris was a goal she would have sacriWced almost anything to regain. Some critiques of the novel, predictably, were attacks on woman as represented by the main character. Even Oswald can barely comprehend Italy’s gloriWcation of a female artist, ‘a woman illustrious only for having the gift of genius’. It is clear to others, however, that Italy’s celebration of an outstanding woman is glorious in being without the taint of disapproval De la litte´rature describes: ‘As soon as a woman is singled out as a distinguished person, the public in general is prejudiced against her. The vulgar herd only ever judges according to certain common rules that it is safe to cling to . . . ’61 To the Italians Corinne is a source of national pride, a symbol of the freedom and fulWlment to which they look forward themselves, artistically great even if politically captive.

58 Ibid. 25. 59 Carlo Pellegrini, ‘Corinne et son aspect politique’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe, 265–72, at 266. 60 Simone Balaye´, L’E´clat et le silence (Paris: Champion, 1999), 30. 61 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 339.

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All this seems straightforward enough. Nor is the summary of the novel Constant provides in Le Publiciste of 12 May 1807 at all controversial: ‘No work delivers more clearly this important message that the more brilliant the faculties one has, the more one must strive to overcome them; that when one presents such open sails to the wind, one must not hold a weak tiller in trembling hands; that the more natural, dazzling and various the gifts one has, the more mistrustfully and cautiously one should walk among men.’62 Particularly, he might have added, if one is a woman. Constant, obviously forgetting a youthful vote he had cast for women’s ‘learned education’ at the Edinburgh Speculative Society, appends the observation that they should be kept guarding their hearths, as closely conWned as in a pasha’s harem, restricted to ‘a humble, obscure, and narrowly circumscribed sphere’. One rather wonders, in that case, what he had ever seen in Stae¨l. His view was also essentially Napoleon’s, and it is fair to say that Stae¨l never explicitly maintained the reverse, determinedly though she lived it. After all, De l’Allemagne would state that nothing was more foreign to the natural vocation of women than to set them up as rivals to men,63 despite the fact that the author eVortlessly demonstrated her right to be such a rival. Equally, throughout her life she set a high premium on devoted conjugal relationships, starting with the familiar declaration at about the time of her Wrst marriage that: ‘A woman should have nothing that is exclusively her own, but derive all her pleasure from the man she loves’, as well as her regret at not having joined her fate to that of a great man, which ‘is the only glory a woman can have on earth’.64 Yet she, who knew that the greatest man of her acquaintance, her father, was unavailable to her, had been an impenitent adulteress. Her novels make plain that, given the clear inferiority of their partners, it is all the more important for women to preserve their freedom of action unless—as in her own case—political circumstances conspire to deprive them of it. At the same time, the theme of renunciation, symbolized in Corinne by the performance of Allegri’s Miserere that Corinne and Oswald hear in the Sistine Chapel, is woven into the texture of both books. Albertine Necker de Saussure wrote that her cousin was penetrated with a deep pity for the lot of women, especially those women who were endowed with exceptional faculties, because they had more to sacriWce.65 Although 62 Constant, Recueil d’articles, 86. 64 Stae¨l, Journal de jeunesse, 37, 38.

63 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, III.368. 65 Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. ci.

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Delphine’s loss is lesser than Corinne’s, both women stand apart from the herd of conformists in their society; they are less dependent on male initiative than earlier heroines such as the Ce´cile and Caliste of Lettres e´crites de Lausanne, though this spares them not an ounce of grief. Both of Stae¨l’s women suVer from the sexual double standard and the weakness of the men to whom they are so fatally attached; they know they are devoting themselves to the wrong cause, but they cannot help it. Worst of all, they realize that they cannot stably possess the men they love. Their lucidity about this hopeless situation is every bit as agonizing as the disillusioned ‘passion re´Xe´chissante’, the love that knows itself but cannot help itself, described in De la litte´rature.66 In their clear-sightedness and suVering they seem to epitomize the impotence of women in early nineteenth-century Europe, unwisely loving, caring too much, destroyed by the grief that follows disappointment, and perfectly embodying the futility of the only kind of reason credited to them, that of being able to analyse their feelings but not uproot them. Only women, according to the same work, possess this destructive and desolating capacity; but those who possess a greater degree of detachment from what makes them suVer, whether spatially or through intellectual control, avoid being destroyed. Stae¨l came to accept being thus excluded under Napoleon’s apartheid system, and worked within its limitations. That is what saved her. Corinne was twice translated into English in the year of its publication. As we know, George Eliot admired it, and Elizabeth Barrett, born the year before it appeared, declared it to be ‘an immortal book, and deserves to be read three score and ten times—that is, once every year in the age of man’.67 (By 1832 she herself had read it three times.) For Aurora Leigh she invented a Florentine mother, an English father, and an Italian homeland to remember throughout the years in which a spiteful aunt, like Lady Edgermond in all but her spinsterhood, brought her up in England. Burney told Mrs Ruxton that she was ‘provoked by the absurdities [of Corinne]’ as well as ‘dazzled

66 Stae¨l, De la litte´rature, 259. 67 Barbara B. McCarthy (ed.), Elizabeth Barrett to Mr Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 176; see also Gardner B. Taplin, Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London: John Murray, 1957), 41, 97, and Moers, Literary Women, 173.

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with the genius’ of it.68 Stae¨l had been a presence in the female intellectual consciousness of England from the 1790s, both because she lived in the country for a part of it and because of the fame and admiration that the Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau had won her as possibly the Wrst formal critical study of a male writer ever published by a woman. An extreme feminist reading of Corinne, one arguing the total inability of a man to comprehend and then sympathize with Corinne’s artistic drive, would be misguided.69 Stae¨l was not attempting to demonstrate that men should simply adapt themselves to the needs of exceptional women, whether or not that was what she often thought. Instead, as might have been expected in the author of De la litte´rature, she wanted to show how national diVerences create divergent and irreconcilable assumptions about how women should behave, in extreme cases as well as more conventional ones. Although the Scottish Oswald could have saved both Corinne and himself untold pain by adapting his assumptions about the nature of women to the Italian model, it is never suggested that he possesses, by birth or upbringing, the sensitivity and Xexibility needed to bring this about. Men, Stae¨l suggests, are not good at changing, though they may oblige their womenfolk to change: Richardson’s Clarissa, a book that had greatly moved Stae¨l in her girlhood,70 had made this clear in the character of Lovelace, and Oswald is barely diVerent. His adaptation to Italian culture and mores is relative, since it is only in Italy that he regards free loving on the part of the (unmarried) woman as admissible: it shocks d’Erfeuil that Oswald and Corinne should travel together, but Corinne makes it seem legitimate to her lover by pretending that it conforms to native custom. Once he has reacclimatized to English ways, Oswald too deems such behaviour unacceptable. Given all of this, the older Lord Nelvil had clearly been perfectly right to call Corinne an unsuitable wife for his son. Whatever Lord Edgermond’s Wrst marriage may have suggested, the fact remains (according to Stae¨l) that the diVerent values of diVerent cultures create impossible tensions when played oV against each other. A manuscript note by Maria Edgeworth at Coppet describes both the male and the female members of her family being consumed with grief at the unfolding of Corinne’s story, during a reading that continued until the 68 Letter of 16 May 1808, quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 210. 69 See also Moers, Literary Women, 207. 70 See Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. xxix.

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small hours: ‘we repaired to the kitchen after the rest of the family had retired and there we remained till two o’clock in the morning, Wnishing that wretched story which makes my uncle so truly unhappy he forbids us to read it before him.’71 The scene is as drenched in sensibility as many in the novel itself: I wish you could have seen us hovering over the dying embers of the wood-Wre with the lamp down close to the hearth. On one side sat Bessy, her lovely face looking the image of misery. On the other side sat Henry, pale and choking with emotion, winking away his tears and reading with a trembling voice ‘le dernier chant de Corinne’, little Susan sobbed under a kitchen table-cloth which she Wrst put round her shoulders but afterwards down over her head to hide her pale cheeks and streaming eyes, whilst I gave myself up to crying audibly and concealed my disWgured face in my handkerchief.

On this and other evidence, men could be as deeply aVected by Corinne as women. On 11 June 1808 Stae¨l’s future champion Sir James Mackintosh wrote of reading the Wrst volume: ‘I have not yet received the original; and I can no longer refrain even from a translation.’72 He wolfed down the successive tomes, reading the second and third a mere two days after the Wrst (although he still claimed, ‘I swallow Corinne slowly, that I may taste every drop. I prolong my enjoyment, and really dread the termination’).73 And two days after that, on 15 June, fourth and Wfth volumes of Corinne. Farewell Corinne! powerful and extraordinary book; full of faults so obvious as not to be worth enumerating; but of which a single sentence has excited more feeling, and exercised more reason, than the most faultless models of elegance. To animadvert on the defects of the story is lost labour. It is a slight vehicle of idea and sentiment . . . The grand defect is the want of repose—too much and too ingenious reXection—too uniform an ardour of feeling.74

He discovers another obvious blemish, that there is some repetition, or at least monotony, in Stae¨l’s reXections on the monuments of antiquity: ‘The sentiment inspired by one is so like that produced by another that she ought to have contented herself with fewer strokes, and to have given specimens rather than an enumeration.’75 Like many other readers he emphasizes Corinne’s superiority to her creator, without considering the creator’s to her: ‘In the character of Corinne, Madame de Stae¨l draws an imaginary 71 Archives de Coppet; see V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.59. 72 Sir James Mackintosh, Memoirs, ed. Robert James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1835), I.405. 73 Ibid. 406. 74 Ibid. 406–7. 75 Ibid. 405.

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self—what she is, what she had the power of being, and what she can easily imagine she might have become. Purity, which her sentiments and principles teach her to love; talents and accomplishments which her energetic genius might easily have acquired . . . ’76 It is likely enough that Stae¨l herself would have agreed with this assessment. What raised her above Corinne, however, was pragmatism. She faced essentially the same problems as her heroine: both suVered because the men on whom they depended lacked initiative and resolve, a characteristic of the opposite sex Stae¨l refers to in a letter of 16 August 1807 to Friederike Brun: ‘There is a huge part of weakness in men’s characters, and I am tempted to believe that women have greater strength of soul and will: they are more concentrated in their aVections, and their lives have a single goal.’77 The Wnal statement hardly applies to Stae¨l herself, close though it is to Byron’s ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, j ’Tis woman’s whole existence’.78 But it is because she had ‘greater strength of soul and will’ that, for all the extremes promised and threatened in her correspondence with past lovers, she would never have allowed herself to die Corinne’s death. Yet the issue of male unreliability continued to obsess her throughout her life and therefore throughout her writing career. Her last work, Sappho, about the conXict between an exceptional woman and a less gifted man who deserts her, merely revisits a perennial theme. If men had the qualities of women, in her view, love would simply cease to be a problem. To friends who could not understand why she had made Oswald so unworthy of Corinne she simply replied: ‘I wanted to highlight the misfortunes which certain qualities create for a woman, and what misfortune could there be for a woman if she was perfectly loved by a man worthy of her?’79 Her late second marriage to the much younger John Rocca was to a man who ‘perfectly loved her’, though whether he was worthy of her is another matter. In a variant to De l’Allemagne she would remark that she had thought of writing a novel showing a man in all his perfection and strength, but the thought never became a reality. No doubt this too is signiWcant.80 The radical nature of her undertaking in writing novels that contained clear social and political critiques cannot be too strongly emphasized. If 76 Mackintosh, Memoirs, 406. 77 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.293. 78 Byron, Don Juan, canto 1, stanza 194. All references to Byron’s poetry are to Jerome J. McGann’s edition of the Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–6). 79 See Balaye´, ‘Coppet et les amis’, 148. 80 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.93–4.

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she had conWned herself to describing the diYculty of relations between the sexes she would scarcely have infuriated Napoleon as she did (though the type of women who interested her, strong characters and dissenting individuals, would still have irritated him). It was her attack on the institutional subjugation of her sex, as well as her praise of English values, her discussion of delicate issues such as divorce, and her refusal to glorify him in her writings, that did the damage. This makes it all the more astonishing that she could so wholly have miscalculated the eVect that Corinne, a book she described to a correspondent as ‘certainly the best thing I have done’,81 would have on Napoleon, and so have believed, erroneously, that his response to it would be favourable. She wrote to Suard that the most important aspect of the novel was the knowledge of Italy it revealed, both in itself and in its anticipated eVect on Bonaparte, ‘the man my exile depends on’.82 This was a bewildering assumption, given that Napoleon’s main concern about the Italy she depicted was that it failed to proclaim him as its master. Other features of the book, too, struck many readers apart from him as dubious. Not that Corinne, any more than Delphine, is always tolerant of the nonconformity it seems to glorify, and if Stae¨l’s presentation of frank spontaneity versus selfconcerned adherence to the norm implies a preference for the former it does not go without criticism. Quelques Re´Xexions sur le but moral de ‘Delphine’ seems to accept, after all, that society and the political establishment have a right to expect conformity rather than mould-breaking independence. At the same time, it argues, society’s punishment of the individual’s faults is grossly disproportionate, its disapproval the product of jealousy as much as principle. Stae¨l’s moral sympathy is as apparent in this respect as her social pragmatism. She does not suggest that it is right for the unprincipled or morally weak to Xourish in the world because they respect superWcial proprieties; nor does she imply that society ought to be more severe towards faults deriving from altruism or emotional spontaneity than towards faults of deceit, egoism, or spiritual meanness, although it is habitually more severe towards the former. Through the sympathetic portrayal of the selXess and inspired, and the relatively unsympathetic portrayal of the time-serving, self-obsessed, or mindlessly conformist, she implies a ‘right’ reading of the moral issues her Wction presents, but prefers the reading to be implicit 81 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.191 (to Franc¸ois Gautrier de Tourmes, Acosta, 5 Feb. 1807). 82 Ibid. 244 (Coppet, 15 May 1807).

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rather than overt. As a realist she knew that she had to show the world upholding (social) form against (moral) fond because that is what the facts of human nature indicated, but in highlighting the apparent need for men to behave diVerently in society from women she was not sanctioning their behaviour. She could not think it natural for one kind of moral conduct to be incumbent on men and a totally diVerent type on women, remarking apropos of Corinne that she had wanted to reveal in it ‘the misfortunes that ensue from certain qualities in a woman’. In a man those misfortunes might simply not have existed, nor the good qualities that brought them about. Both Delphine and Corinne, Wnally, are individual in focus. Stae¨l seems deliberately to frustrate any critical eVort to Wnd clear general truths in the dilemmas their characters face (notwithstanding the great human issues the novels present), perhaps because she regarded it as being in the nature of persons to be fallible and various, not representative types. Four years after remarking that her Wrst novel ‘makes its moral intention too obvious’, therefore, she refrained from imposing a similar didacticism on the second. It is the heroine, not the narrator, who calls Oswald ‘unworthy’ (though admittedly it is the narrator, not the heroine, who calls him ‘so culpable’ towards Corinne).83 The good may not be gratiWed, exceptional women may be thwarted, but their opponents are no happier. Religious fanatics such as Mathilde die tormented, confused conformists such as Le´once face the Wring-squad, and obedient souls such as Oswald, lacking moral Wbre, are condemned to emotional unfulWlment and a lifetime of guilty regret. The society that persecuted Delphine gains no lasting satisfaction from it, and its days are numbered, while the enemies of female emancipation and genius gain no new energy from Corinne’s death. It seems that Stae¨l came to mistrust the retributivist, northern (and Protestant) conception of morality as much as its association of suVering with virtue and reward. She wanted both Delphine and Corinne to be ‘romans-questions’, presenting no obvious conclusions and lacking any deWnite goal, and wanted them to be attentively read. She might have added that those who scanned her work with half an eye or read it in the form of pre´cis or extracts, as Napoleon did, should never have allowed their careless prejudice to injure the author. Both of Stae¨l’s novels, entirely characteristically, deal openly and primarily with this scandalous victimization of her sex. It was more than enough to explain the Emperor’s hostility. 83 Stae¨l, Corinne, 581.

6 From Ennui to Enterprise

S

tae¨l’s writing of Corinne may have beneWted from the periodic torpor of her life in exile. On 4 February 1807 she wrote dispiritedly to Friederike Brun from Acosta, a chateau she was renting in Meulun, near Versailles, that her existence was wholly deprived both of the arts and of nature (whose beneWcial eVects she had, however, only recently discovered).1 From late 1805 she had sought variety by arranging and performing in amateur theatricals, hiring part of an old building in Molard, the commercial district of Geneva near the port, for the purpose. But she felt crushed by ennui as soon as the rhythm of everyday life re-established itself, and realized that it could not be attributed simply to her conWnement in Switzerland. In late May 1806, having moved on, she sent a desperate-sounding letter to Pedro de Souza, from either Auxerre or Vincelles, protesting: ‘I cannot stay here, I am too bored . . . My health is so wrecked by everything this month that I am no longer at all nice . . . What possessed me to come to France, where everything is hard for me?’2 The answer was probably that Switzerland had seemed more unbearable still. The ‘wrecked’ health was treated, as it would more and more frequently be treated, with opium; it was the only drug that could make her sleep, though in more inspiriting times she had hardly seemed to need any rest. Now, she told Juliette Re´camier, she was always on edge, never hearing the sound of a whiplash without jumping, and drugging herself to insensibility. It was diYcult for someone who was used to being at the centre of things to accept the daily grind of a life where nothing very much ever happened, and where sleep took up far more of the night than it had ever needed to when it came more naturally. Now she slept because it was a way of cheating time. But was it preferable to live in the midst of an ‘empty, 1 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.188.

2 Ibid. 90 .

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spinning whirlwind’, as she would describe herself doing in a letter the following year to Friederike Brun?3 In Switzerland, and in the company of Juliette Re´camier (whose daring in sheltering Stae¨l had already won her exile), she threw herself at the mineral world—at glaciers, alpine rocks, wild places associated with La Nouvelle He´loı¨se—and at the polite, stultifying social world, the provincial train-train of Lausanne that had already attracted the satirical attention of Charrie`re in Lettres e´crites de Lausanne. It all seemed to no avail. ‘Fatigue and sleep follow one another without a single thought entering our heads; feeling itself seems dulled by this urge to run after time or let oneself be pursued by it.’ She was very fond of Juliette, she added, but could not be happy living with her for any length of time; ‘our tastes are too diVerent’.4 This remark puts in context her other professions of love for her—the expressions that Balzac found so unambiguously erotic,5 the feelings that Stae¨l herself informed Madame Re´camier were those their sex normally had for men. She always hoped that travel would be a panacea for ennui. The trouble with Coppet, quite apart from a pervading dullness that seemed inseparable from anything Swiss, was its proximity to a city where she was mistrusted and disliked, and whose inhabitants she mainly held in contempt. ‘She treated provincials, and especially the Genevese, with the most disdainful indiVerence,’ said Madame de Boigne; ‘she did not trouble to be impertinent, but regarded them as complete nonentities.’6 For a time she hoped that the United States of America would provide her with a fresh focus for her energies, as well as a new source of sympathy for her plight,7 but Thomas JeVerson did nothing to welcome her vaguely worded suggestion that she might cross the Atlantic with her family to settle in pastures new (although he did manage to sound enthusiastic about Auguste making the voyage). This evasiveness was probably politic: his administration did not want to provoke Napoleon. So when Stae¨l told Gouverneur Morris that she wanted to buy more property in America and have the naturalized Auguste oversee it, Morris succeeded against enormous odds in making the New World 3 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.292–3 (Lausanne, 16 Aug. 1807). 4 To Friederike Brun, ibid. 5 Honore´ de Balzac, Lettres a` Madame Hanska, ed. Roger Pierrot, 2 vols. (Paris: Robert LaVont, 1990), I.665 (19 Mar. 1843), quoted in Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.ix. See also Stae¨l, Lettres a` Madame Re´camier, ed. E. Beau de Lome´nie (Paris: Domat, 1951), and M. Levaillant, Une Amitie´ amoureuse, Madame de Stae¨l et Madame Re´camier (Paris: Hachette, 1951). 6 Boigne, Me´moires, I.176. 7 Herold, Mistress, 365.

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sound as stultifying as Coppet, at least in isolated pockets, with a society no more stimulating than that of Geneva. So for the time being she suspended thoughts of emigration. The idea of going to Austria then presented itself as a temporary alternative, partly because it would enable her to extend the coverage of De l’Allemagne. She set oV at the end of November 1807 accompanied by Schlegel, Albert, Albertine, and her servant Uginet. En route in Munich, according to the comte de Clairembault, ‘She showed great disdain towards women, trying to converse only with men. Her costume was the height of ridiculousness, which in combination with her ugliness made her even more hideous.’8 Meanwhile in Berlin the Fichte whose metaphysics she had so blithely and comprehensively dismantled a few years before was lecturing on a subject close to her heart, indeed a theme central to De la litte´rature, De l’Allemagne, and parts of Dix anne´es d’exil: that of national character. Although Stae¨l would declare in the last of these that exile had made her European, the works she wrote both before and after the watershed year of 1803 could easily be seen as promoting a national pride and consciousness that in certain circumstances—one thinks of the pan-Germanism of the 1930s and 1940s—might become a distasteful and fatal brand of nationalism. Fichte’s lectures, entitled Discourse to the German Nation, called on Germans to purify themselves of all foreign inXuences and rehabilitate the concept of Germanness, but they seemed to avoid such extremism by arguing that universality and cosmopolitanism were the very essence of the national spirit. Or did Fichte really mean something else? Whereas August Wilhelm Schlegel had argued in 1803 that the European patriotism of the Middle Ages should be reconstituted to create a cosmopolitan centre for the human mind, Fichte’s fourteen-week course hammered home a Germanic theme that saw the nation rebuilding principles, mores, and character out of the ruins of defeat. It was a powerful message to be delivering at the very time when French troops were marching through the streets of Berlin, their drumbeats drowning the lecturer’s words. Schlegel, under Fichte’s inXuence, was beginning to talk the same language. Vienna was a city indelibly hostile towards Napoleon. Despite the fact that she stayed there for only Wve months, for years after the Viennese would refer to 1808 as the year of Madame de Stae¨l’s visit.9 The observation 8 Quoted in comtesse de Pange, Schlegel, 214. 9 Ibid. 360.

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was not necessarily meant Xatteringly, but she was oblivious to the scorn that her large personality and total lack of self-consciousness provoked. She was courting danger, too, simply in daring to come to the capital of an empire whose ruling family had good reason to mistrust her. She had, after all, reputedly supported a Revolution that had claimed the life of MarieAntoinette, the late Empress Maria Theresa’s daughter. (The mitigating fact that she had also tried to help the royal family to safety was probably unknown to the Habsburg dynasty.) Accordingly, Dix anne´es d’exil records that she was constantly bothered by the police during her stay. De l’Allemagne’s reference to the comparative torpor of Austrian society10— a product, according to Stae¨l, of the calm and wealth of the nation—sounds like a thinly disguised challenge. What the natives really needed, she decided, was a shock, an intellectual and social upset of the kind she felt particularly well placed to deliver. This was not the general Austrian view, but the average Austrian saw no need to prefer ‘inquie´tude’ to the settledness she discerned and deprecated in them. ‘Felicity in sleep,’ she rather ominously remarked, ‘is deceptive.’11 She was restless not merely because she had been evicted from her true home, but because restlessness was the essence of her mental energy. Only swirling passions, she believed, could lead to real happiness. This notion has a very Enlightened, very eighteenth-century ring to it, whether associated with the theories of Diderot or with the philosophy of such libertines as Wgure in Les Liaisons dangereuses, where a placid, virtuous woman is persuaded by a rake to forgo quiet marital contentment for exciting, illicit love. The further extension of these theories, of course, is to be found in the novels of the Marquis de Sade. What had Corinne’s inspired genius manifested but a closely related version of such passionate ferment? Stae¨l wanted to urge some or all of these truths upon the staid and comfort-loving Viennese, but somehow failed. She consoled herself with cold reason: ‘In a country where all movement is diYcult, in a country where everything inspires a profound tranquillity, the slightest obstacle suYces to ensure that nothing is done, nothing written or even thought.’12 Not even she, it is true, found inertia everywhere, but where the Viennese were galvanized into taking an energetic stand it was often for quite the wrong reasons. They banned Schiller’s tragedy Don Carlos, for instance, because of Carlos’s irregular love for Elisabeth, while his Jungfrau 10 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.99, 105–7.

11 Ibid. 107.

12 Ibid. 106, 134.

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von Orleans was so adapted that Agnes Sorel became Charles VII’s lawful wife. Yet although Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois was forbidden to circulate via the public library, Cre´billon Wls’s licentious tales were freely available and widely read.13 It was all very puzzling. She concluded, damningly, that only serious work was banned, while everything else remained common currency. The remedy was obvious: ‘the evil that bad books do can only be corrected by good ones.’14 This, too, is a respectably Enlightened view, and it was exactly the kind of crusading sentiment she was bound to be guided by. She was also convinced, again in the spirit of Rousseau, that it sometimes takes an outsider’s vision to perceive and promote what the insider cannot see, a truth both salutary and painful for an exile to articulate. But although she knew that distance often adds clarity to the view, and spoke, wrote, and published accordingly, would France heed her any more than Austria seemed prepared to do? The auguries were not good. She continued to suVer from the stultifying eVects of Viennese society, feeling all the more provoked for knowing that her own skills could, if given free rein, transform it into an agreeable one. All the same, it was a pleasant surprise to discover women playing an active part in social life. This, she decided, was less because of an acknowledgement of their superiority than because men of any elevation withdrew from a milieu in which they felt stupeWed.15 Yet the female touch, she implies, alleviated such stupefaction, and she enjoyed watching women converse charmingly and wittily, ‘despite the life they have to lead’, reporting that other foreigners also admired their elegance and nobility of manner. Mrs Thrale/Piozzi, some years before, had found Viennese women remarkable for their intellectual freedom: ‘The ladies here seem very highly accomplished, and speak a great variety of languages with facility, studying to adorn the conversation with every ornament that literature can bestow; nor do they appear terriWed, as in London, lest pedantry should be imputed to them, for venturing sometimes to use in company that knowledge they have acquired in private by diligent application.’16 Yet they lacked in general what Stae¨l could supply in particular, ‘something to say, something to do, a goal, an interest’.17 She was the type of woman who could make ‘the day seem diVerent from the day before’, without such variety breaking the chain of aVections and habits. ‘Monotony in a life of retreat calms the 13 Ibid. 110. 14 Ibid. 110–11. 15 Ibid. 134. 16 Piozzi, Journey, I.373–4. 17 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.135.

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soul; monotony in the world fatigues the mind.’18 Was this a cri de cœur? Her inability to see how she herself tired the world was both tragic and touching. She pursued one of her doomed love aVairs, a relationship that had begun in Venice. The object was Count Moritz O’Donnell von Tyrconnel, an aristocratic soldier fourteen years her junior who had been on sick leave in 1805. In Venice they had simply been friends, but in Vienna Stae¨l’s feelings grew stronger. Her relationship with him, which quickly became possessive, followed the hopeless pattern of her other amours, but without the satisfaction of intellectual companionship such as Constant had given her, or the sheer romance of her infatuations with Ribbing and de Souza. ‘There are so few people on earth who speak the sort of language without which none of the strings of my heart can be plucked.’19 O’Donnell, who certainly could not, remained her goal in Vienna, and the near-nightly trysts continued. She chafed at the need to make them clandestine, however, ironically complaining about the secrecy that her very celebrity made impossible to preserve. ‘What would be the point of the sort of existence fame gives me if I could not do here what would be completely straightforward in France?’ (which, in truth, it would not have been). In Vienna the police tracking and reporting continued. In other words, in a paradox Stae¨l perceived only too clearly, fame oVered her potential advantages in exile that exile, which fame had won her, at a stroke removed. If she had somehow stayed in Paris, equally, it would have been at the price of losing her freedom, since Napoleon would have stopped her doing all the things she wanted to do. The irony of her situation might have struck her even more forcibly if she had known just how closely she was being watched. The aVair petered out, and some rustic relaxation seemed in order. This seemed to indicate a return to Coppet. However imprisoned she felt in Switzerland, in 1808 she was, again ironically, involved in a celebration of that country’s own national identity. The occasion was a festival at Unspunnen, near Interlaken, to mark the Swiss way of life and 500 years of Swiss liberty (a relative liberty that for her had little meaning when set against the despotism prevailing in her beloved France). She attended with Mathieu de Montmorency and Louise Vige´e Le Brun, who regularly found Swiss sublimity more exciting than her hostess did—so exciting, indeed, that it persuaded her to turn temporarily 18 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.135.

19 Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, VI.xi.

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from portraiture to landscape painting.20 Even Stae¨l would remark in De l’Allemagne, rather detachedly, that the Swiss ‘are not a poetic nation, and one is understandably amazed that the admirable aspect of their country has not Wred their imagination more’.21 On the way to the festival the celebrants had to cross a typical lake in whose waters, she noted, ‘the beauties of nature are reXected, and which seem to have been placed at the foot of the Alps to multiply their ravishing image’. En route she was also able to enjoy one of the most stereotypical experiences of sublimity Switzerland was able to oVer: ‘Stormy weather made the mountains look less distinct to us, but they were all the more fearsome mingled with the clouds. The storm intensiWed, and although I was seized with a feeling of terror I liked the rolling thunder which confounded man’s pride.’22 The young Parisians who had also been tempted to Switzerland to observe proceedings, however, seemed to be having an experience resembling her own more habitual one in exile— de´paysement and a sense of alienation from the world of nature: ‘suddenly transported to the Swiss valleys, they could hear nothing but the roar of torrents, they could see nothing but mountains, and they asked themselves whether they could get bored enough in these solitary places to return to the monde with still keener pleasure.’23 Things that reminded her of Swissness could not but recall, rather unpleasantly, the more stimulating life from which she was excluded, and what she says about another Swiss institution in De l’Allemagne conWrms it. She writes with a characteristic reservation of the ranz des vaches, an air played on mountain horns: [it] made such a powerful impression on the Swiss that they would leave their regiments when they heard it to return to their homeland.You may imagine the eVect this air can produce when it echoes oV the mountains; but it has to resound in the distance; close to, it does not create a very pleasant sensation. If it were sung by Italian voices, one’s imagination would be quite intoxicated by it; but perhaps such a pleasure would generate ideas which were quite foreign to the simplicity of the country. One would start wanting arts, poetry, love, whereas one actually needs to be satisWed with rest and rustic life.24

Yet her rustic Swiss retreat was frequently less than tranquil, a state of aVairs for which her demanding nature was usually responsible; rather, a febrile 20 For further details see Goodden, Sweetness, 274–7. 21 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.281. 22 Ibid. 284. 23 Ibid. 286. 24 Ibid. 286–7.

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emotional atmosphere often prevailed. All the same, and whatever hopeless love aVairs she was attempting to recover from there, she had to acknowledge someone else’s emotional needs as well as her own. Constant was, it seemed, to be a permanent feature in her life, which was hardly a recipe for serenity. On his way to Coppet in 1807 he had felt the old, useless terror of the approach, the return to renewed subjugation, though then he aVected more resolution than he had done in the past. ‘Shall I stay? The future is no longer bearable, and this way of dominating while threatening to harm herself ends up being counter-productive . . . There is no reason why I should not be made to go to China, when I am written to with the message that she has drunk thirty drops of laudanum.’25 Yet despite a new attachment—to Charlotte von Hardenberg, whose ‘angelic character’ he found it natural to contrast with Stae¨l’s often demonic one—he retained for ‘my friend’ Germaine, ‘for she is, and must remain so’, ‘a profound feeling that is the torment of my life, and which makes her happiness more necessary than my own to me’. For the whole of the summer before her decision to go to Austria he had remained in a ‘deplorable’ situation, worn down by her repeated threats to poison herself: ‘I cannot tell you the anguish and all the painful feelings [her] conduct has Wlled me with. Life is not endurable with this despotism, and the last scraps of aVection I keep as the precious remains of twelve years are crushed beneath this weight . . . of a tyranny that is accessible neither to reason nor to pity.’26 The following month she had at least seemed to have reached some kind of resolution: She now says to anyone who will listen that if I demanded it, and rather than give me up, she would prefer to marry me. But at the same time she says that the hatred my opinions have brought with them would make any marriage between us a great inconvenience for her, that she would no longer have a refuge anywhere, or her children a career, that her place in society would be diminished etc., so that the result of such a union would be that everything annoying happening to us would be attributed to a demand on my part that she would call indelicate and ungenerous.27

It was a double bind, as he saw: if he left her he would be called a monster, if he married her an egotist. What he does not say is that Stae¨l felt herself, and would continue to feel herself, devoid of a place in society for as long as her exile lasted—Geneva society did not count, and she was even less likely to be tolerated in French than Constant. As was natural to her in these years of 25 Mistler, Lettres, 126 (13 July 1807). 26 Ibid. 128 (16 Aug. 1807). 27 Ibid. 132 (10 Aug. 1807).

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frustration, she was discontented with whatever oVered itself outside Paris, yet she still insisted that being with Constant was vital no matter what kind of life she had to lead. However winning and seductive she remained, though, Constant saw no promise of hope in the future: ‘A mistrust, probably deserved in some respects, has taken root in her heart . . . I say again: the future is more than ever covered in dark night for me.’28 Even so, he refused to allow her to be much blamed: ‘I accept that there is some fault on her part in the pain our relations cause each of us. But there is certainly much that comes from my character.’ The passage of time, which might have been expected to help resolve these diYculties, merely underlined their absurdity and intractability. The sex-crazed and lecherous illuminist playwright-poet Zacharias Werner, who had been a guest, left Coppet at the beginning of November 1808, beseeching Constant, ‘do not leave that poor woman’;29 but Constant had eVectively ‘left’ her long since. Although he carried on living at Coppet, he had been married to someone else for Wve months, and the real ‘poor woman’, it might be felt, was his new wife Charlotte von Hardenberg. Her husband, from whom she was forcibly separated throughout the early days and weeks of their marriage, could simply not face telling Stae¨l the truth, and Charlotte often wondered what made the chaˆtelaine of Coppet so much more deserving of Constant’s company than she was herself. The answer is that Stae¨l was not more deserving, but more insistent, as well as ignorant for at least part of that time of the true state of aVairs. Constant had always had a tendency towards evasiveness, but now he had brought prevarication to a Wne art. At the beginning of the new year he and his wife went together to Paris. From there Constant wrote to his cousin Rosalie: There are things that hurt me. It is not my external situation, it is my interior disposition that discourages me. I have a deep wound in my heart, and even when the outside scar has healed the pain will probably remain forever. It seems to me impossible that I should be happy . . . Oh! if only I had found someone who wanted to make me happy early enough, instead of looking at me solely as though made to be a part of her happiness! But everything happens too late in life.30

Stae¨l had naturally been left behind. After a few months she began to feel so bored and angry that anything seemed better than enduring exile without 28 Ibid. 133. 29 Herold, Mistress, 375. 30 B. Constant and R. de Constant, Correspondance, 87.

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him. She expected him back at Coppet in May, at which point the married couple would, they agreed, tell her the truth. Stopping just outside Geneva, Charlotte wrote Stae¨l a note asking her to come urgently. (In the meantime Constant retreated to the safety of Ferney.) On 9 May Stae¨l arrived at Charlotte’s hotel room and learned the facts. As a fair return for her forebearance in listening to them, she asked Charlotte to continue keeping the marriage a secret. Charlotte somehow agreed. Her husband went back to Coppet, to a woman who had only recently been protesting undying love to Moritz O’Donnell. It was all as incredible as the more novelistic passages of Delphine and Corinne, and it was all true. For Stae¨l’s sake Constant continued to keep quiet about the marriage. He tried to explain the logic of the situation to Rosalie, invoking his pity for Stae¨l and her situation at Coppet, cut oV from most of the people, and the one place, she really wanted. ‘I do not want . . . this attachment [to Rosalie] which is so precious to me to make you too critical of a person to whom a relationship of Wfteen years has given me such an attachment [sic]. I have to hope particularly that she may be spared all unfavourable judgement because my life and hers are separate, and all that remains in my heart are memories, tenderness . . . ’31 This was written in mid-July. At the beginning of September matters had not progressed: life seemed to be imitating art, the art that had itself been drawn from life, as Constant’s reader remembers the paralysis of will that prevented the hero of Adolphe from being frank with Elle´nore about his loss of love and resentment for the chances in life he feels she has made him miss. ‘I have positively promised Madame de Stae¨l not to announce the matter at this moment . . . One reason I have not suYciently emphasized is that my poor wife, in the midst of all the confusion I have plunged her into, and which I shall be so happy to repair, thought it best to announce the marriage as something arranged, not already done, to lessen the oddness of the situation.’32 But Constant himself did nothing to mend matters when he allowed certain friends to know the truth and then complained if they leaked it to others. Auguste de Stae¨l conWded that Rosalie had herself informed an acquaintance of what had happened, which led to Constant being ‘suspected of an odious deceit, not only by Madame de Stae¨l, but also by his friends’. ‘To see one’s character so ill-used, one’s intentions so distorted, to see oneself accused of treachery for not having been able to resolve to hurt someone, dear Rosalie, there is too much 31 B. Constant and R. de Constant, Correspondance, 92.

32 Ibid. 98.

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pain in all of that for me to bear, after so much other pain, if I don’t succeed in quelling rumours I had wanted to spare Madame de Stae¨l.’33 It is impossible to know how far Stae¨l’s position as a proscribed woman in a culture that she felt to be alien intensiWed Constant’s pity, but it is safe to say that her familiar possessive selWshness made his guilt sharper and more intractable. He was in what he described as a state of agony, probably both psychologically and physically, but at the same time he knew that his condition was to a degree self-inXicted. Stae¨l’s need for him was only as real as he let her persuade him, or allowed himself to believe, it was. He was addicted to her, and the addiction was no more pleasurable for being so complete. This meant that his attraction to Charlotte, an attraction of opposites (Charlotte was ‘simple, even-tempered, delicate’, unlike Stae¨l), was likely to remain strong only as long as it represented everything that Stae¨l was not and that he therefore wanted. If he freed himself from Stae¨l it seemed fated to lose all its own power; it would, quite simply, have lost its raison d’eˆtre. Stae¨l’s provincial life continued. She wrote most of De l’Allemagne from late 1809, a year in which, promisingly, Napoleon’s domination of Europe seemed increasingly under threat, with the war against Austria and revolt in part of Germany. Yet the autumn would usher in the worst year in her life. She felt half a prisoner between Coppet and Geneva, most of her friends kept at a distance, and the best among them exiled on her account. She wrote to Madame Re´camier: ‘I do not believe I shall ever recover from what I feel; nothing interests me any longer; I take no pleasure in anything; life for me is like a ball when the music has stopped playing and everything except what has been taken away from me is colourless.’34 It was this sense of deprivation that made her suVer most. Feeling at breaking-point, she wrote to Meister on 25 May 1810: What is certain is that this situation of being an exile could not continue. It had already broken the most sacred bonds of friendship; it made me live oV other people’s sacriWces, as well as my own. You must believe me when I tell you it couldn’t continue. My sons need to leave the family nest, my daughter to settle in a country where she can always live . . . It was in the presence of my tutelary angel, and the heavens where it has its abode, that I decided to leave the continent, and there was nothing that wasn’t noble and proud in my decision. One thing alone 33 Ibid. 100.

34 Quoted in comtesse de Pange, Schlegel, 321.

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could change it: when my book on Germany has appeared in two months, my children will go to the Emperor to ask for my recall. If he grants it, I shall stay; if not, I shall leave with emotion, but with Wrmness . . . 35

And she later told Simonde de Sismondi, who discouraged her from imagining that life on a new continent, in a new world, would radically improve her state of mind, that precisely such a revolution in her circumstances was what she needed because living under the dead weight of the past had become unendurable: I think it will follow me, but if it does this expiation will console me . . . Albertine is made to be married over there. You don’t know the extent to which everything is diYcult for me on this continent. Consolidated exile is a horrible situation and will constantly be getting more unpleasant. I am still pleasant: do you want me to wait till my face has stopped expressing anything to change country? I have exhausted my friends’ sacriWces . . . 36

‘Consolidated’ exile was the state of banishment that consisted in accumulated and variegated forms of lack, where variety was multiple torture, compounded deprivation, rather than the alleviation of it. It was the product of absence, regret, and a feeling of powerlessness. For such an active woman, mentally agile and an enemy of repose, it resulted in desperate claustrophobia. She tried to alleviate it by a change of scenery, moving her household to Chaumont, a chateau on the Loire which she rented from her American agent LeRay, and where she intended to work on the Wnal section of De l’Allemagne together with its Wrst set of proofs.37 (The printing was being done nearby in Tours.) In August LeRay wrote to say that he was in France and intended to return to Chaumont with his family, whereupon she moved into another chateau on the Loire, Fosse´, where she put the Wnishing touches to the book, postponing a planned trip to the United States of America despite having Wnally been granted a passport, and even though preparations for it would allow her to cross France legitimately without going anywhere near Paris on her way to the Atlantic ports. She imagined, however, that the journey would need to be put oV only until the following spring. Then the storm broke. In later September 1810 Prefect Corbigny came to Fosse´ with an order from the Chief of Police, Savary (later the duc de Rovigo), for her to hand over her manuscripts and all proofs for De l’Allemagne before making for a 35 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, ed. Georges SolovieV (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 395. 36 Ibid. 398 (Chaumont, 14 Aug. 1810). 37 Stae¨l, Dix Anne´es, 196.

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port and setting sail to America. She gave Corbigny one set of proofs, claiming that no more existed, and a hastily prepared manuscript copy. The origin of this putsch then became clear: a set of proofs had unguardedly been sent to former Queen Hortense of Holland, with Stae¨l’s improvident request that she hand them in turn to Napoleon. He had read enough to fall into a violent rage and order that most of the pro-English passages be excised. Stae¨l’s supporters badgered him to be lenient, but in the process so taxed his fragile patience that it broke altogether. Savary, new at his job and ruthless, was brutally clear. He informed Auguste that De l’Allemagne was not the purely literary work that had been claimed, but carried a strong political and polemical charge. For example, ‘Do you think . . . that we waged war on Germany for eighteen years so that a person with a name as well known as your mother’s can publish a book without speaking of us [i.e. Napoleon]? This book will be burnt, and we should have put its author in Vincennes [ jail].’38 In fact De l’Allemagne was pulped for cardboard rather than burnt, and Stae¨l was remarkably phlegmatic about the fact: Albertine Necker de Saussure reports her as saying, ‘I hope he [Napoleon] at least thinks of sending me the cardboard boxes for my hats’. The cardboard, according to Stae¨l, was of a pure whiteness (or blankness) ‘on which no trace of human reason remained’, and was sold for cash, though it fetched a mere 500 francs. She sent Nicolle, the publisher, 1,500 francs of her own money as consolation.39 Savary’s brutal note signalling the fact that she had incurred Napoleon’s grave displeasure—‘Your latest work is not French; it is I who have stopped the printing’40—would be turned against him in the 1813 London edition of the book; for the time being he cautioned that she should not seek the cause of the order he had delivered to her ‘in the silence you have kept with respect to the Emperor . . . , that would be a mistake, he could Wnd no place in it worthy of him; but your exile is a natural consequence of the conduct you have been pursuing for several years. It seemed to me that the air of this country failed to agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seeking models among the peoples you admire.’41 With hindsight this may all appear a double irony, given the enmity between Germany and England in the 38 Ibid. 201. 39 De l’Allemagne, I.4, and letter to Camille Jordan, Coppet, 1 Nov. 1810, in Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 412. 40 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.6 (preface to London edition, dated 1 Oct. 1813); also in Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 200. 41 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.6.

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twentieth century; but in the nineteenth the two countries felt united by their shared Anglo-Saxon heritage, and their Wnest hour would be at Waterloo. All the adversarial conduct was between Germany and France, or France and England, which is why De l’Allemagne appeared a surprising and, to Bonaparte, deeply oVensive work of Germanophilia rather than Germanophobia. It ushered in an age of sympathy, understanding, and conciliatoriness that would, at least for several decades, replace the deeply disturbed relations between the two cultures, and thus could not fail to enrage the French Emperor. The book blazed a trail which would lead, unlikely though it seemed, to a French as well as English discovery of Deutschtum. Heine would jeer, but saw how powerful was Stae¨l’s image of the ‘Land der Dichter und Denker’; and the cultural awakening she eVected led to a wave of Germanophilia that would later be visible in the cults of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Hegel and Marx—and no longer of Napoleon—all over Europe. As well as minds, it reproduced a country (if a loose confederation of states, dukedoms, principalities, and kingdoms, including Prussia, Saxony, and much of present-day Austria, can be called a country) that had most recently been known to its audience as the scene of great battles, but little else; and the book thus came to be as closely associated with a fully valued German sense of identity as de Tocqueville’s De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique would later be with the American. Stae¨l’s treatment of a land and people in terms of national character, thought, art, literature, and religion was as inXuential as it was original (apart from its anticipation in De la litte´rature), making its readers discover, albeit at second hand, a world that they felt they had never experienced before. In giving European currency to the term ‘Romanticism’, it oVered a previously undreamt-of synthesis from the scattered agendas of non-German writers such as Wordsworth and Chateaubriand, and so created a global coherence out of what even in its homeland had seemed relatively inchoate (though German Romantic thought was already highly developed when Friedrich Schlegel set out his epochal Classic–Romantic distinction in 1800). Perhaps most potently, it created through words the entirety of a Volk that Napoleon wanted annihilated. That is what gave the work its political force, and that is why he had it pulped. Even Stae¨l’s synopses of works of German literature, her most neutral-seeming philosophical discussions and descriptions, repeatedly allowed for controversial political interpretation,

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and some of De l’Allemagne’s most blatantly inaccurate accounts of matters German, whether literary or political, carried a disguised polemical charge.42 In dismantling the ediWce of Classicism to which Napoleon had attached so much of his cult, the gloriWcation through art, the exaltation through literature of a military strategist who thought in terms of the same geometrical structures for battle-plans as for tragedies a` la Racine, Stae¨l gave the lushness and poetry of Romanticism its fullest and most devastating value— unforgivably in the Emperor’s eyes. Is this perhaps to present too stark and absolute an opposition? After all, Napoleon was as addicted to the fog and gloom of Macpherson’s Ossian as to the neoclassical images of Ingres. But Stae¨l’s analytical approach to capturing the spirit of Germany still worked by highlighting a more or less consistent divide between two movements in art, history, philosophy, religion, and society; hence the attacks by writers such as Leopardi, whose consciousness of a national Italian heritage was of a continuum leading back to the Latin classics, and who therefore carried the torch for a form of nationalism dependent on rediscovering and maintaining bygone tradition.43 (Even so, Leopardi ranked Stae¨l with Descartes, Pascal, and Rousseau among the greatest of modern philosophers.) The evidence presented by Germanic culture, however, was of something quite diVerent. On 30 September Stae¨l wrote in desperation to Juliette Re´camier: Dear friend, I have fallen into a state of dreadful sadness. Departure has gripped my soul, and for the Wrst time I have felt all the pain of what I thought was easy. I was also counting on the eVect of my book to sustain me; now six years of study and travel are practically wasted. And can you imagine the bizarreness of this whole business? It is the Wrst two volumes which the censors had approved that have been seized . . . So I am sent forty leagues away for writing a book that has been approved . . . And that is not all; I could have had my book printed in Germany, but instead I submitted it to the censorship of my own free will; the worst thing that could happen to me was for my book to be prohibited. But can you punish someone for voluntarily handing herself over to her judges . . . ? Dear friend, Mathieu is here, my friend of twenty years . . . , and I must leave him. And you, dear friend, who have loved me in my misfortune, you who make my life so sweet, I must leave you too. Oh, dear Lord! I am the Orestes of exile, and the Fates are pursuing me . . . 44 42 On this see John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Stae¨l’s ‘De l’Allemagne’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 43 See SoWa Ravasi, Leopardi et Madame de Stae¨l (Milan: TipograWa sociale, 1910). 44 Archives de Coppet, quoted in Levaillant, Amitie´, 258.

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It was not simply the passages exalting other nations that seemed to Napoleon oVensive, however; legend suggests that he saw himself parodied in De l’Allemagne’s portrait of another tyrant, Attila the Hun, and perhaps he was right to do so. Stae¨l, however, would protest the perfect purity of her own pro-French sentiments, noting in the 1813 preface: ‘I have shown only too clearly my regret and longing for a place Wlled with so many objects of my aVection, where those I love are so dear to me.’ And she rehearsed her often-heard complaint about being mistreated despite being the daughter of Jacques Necker, the saviour (as she saw it) of an ungrateful nation. Letters she wrote after the catastrophe show her completely unable or unwilling to grasp its full signiWcance, or to realize that her desperate pleas for clemency were music to Napoleon’s ears. Thus this missive: The disgrace that Your Majesty reserves for persons who are its object brings such disfavour in Europe that I cannot move an inch without encountering its eVects: some fear to compromise themselves by seeing me, others think they are Romans in surmounting this fear, but the simplest social relations become services which a proud soul cannot endure . . . I have spent my life for eight years between the fear of not receiving sacriWces and the grief of being their object.45

Exile was an illness, she told Claude Hochet, from which one did not recover.46 On 28 September 1810 she wrote to Napoleon from Blois, inaccurately: ‘I am conscious that there is not a single word [in De l’Allemagne] which can displease him, and I Xatter myself that for a century no one has published a literary work more inoVensive and moral in France.’47 From Fosse´ she kept up the attack, writing to the Emperor on 2 October: People have told Your Majesty that I missed Paris because of the Museum [i.e. the Louvre] and Talma. That is a Wne joke about exile, a misfortune that Cicero and Bolingbroke declared to be the most unbearable of all. But even were I to love the masterpieces of art that France owes to Your Majesty’s conquests; were I to love the great tragedies that are images of heroism; would you, Sire, be justiWed in blaming me?48

And on the same day she wrote to Hortense, both Napoleon’s sister-in-law and his stepdaughter, and as the wife of Louis Bonaparte also the former

45 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 403–4 (Fosse´, 2 Oct. 1810). 46 Ibid. 425 (5 May 1812). 47 Ibid. 399. 48 Ibid. 404 (Fosse´, 2 Oct. 1810).

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Queen of Holland, describing herself as ‘a person who for eight years has been suVering all the torments a body can endure’, and declaring: If people are astonished that I have not dared to name the Emperor in my work, I can say that in my present disgrace, deprived of my fortune and homeland, praise could only be a supplication and hence a lack of respect. I ask the Emperor for an audience of half an hour before embarking; I am sure that I shall be able to tell him a thousand things he does not know about my future resolutions, and I cannot believe that if he knew the truth he would not entirely change his opinion in my case.49

But on 3 October 1810 Savary indicated the ports at which she might embark for America—Lorient, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Rochefort. Since orders, particularly those emanating from the tyrant Napoleon, were anathema to Stae¨l, she decided to postpone the planned trip to the New World indeWnitely, resignedly returning to Coppet instead. It was the very fact of Coppet and all it implied that made her old friend Chateaubriand, himself nearly rooXess and penniless, seem so unsympathetic to her plight. He wrote: ‘I have a little cottage three leagues from Paris, but I fear I shall have to sell it. For even a cottage is too much for me. If I had a Wne chateau like you on the shores of Lake Geneva, I should never leave.’50 It pained Stae¨l that any acquaintance could be so unpitying and obtuse. Doctors advised her to take Albert for a cure of the spa waters at Aix-lesBains, but mother and son were recalled after ten days because of fears that she might proceed from Aix to England.51 It was at this point that the Prefect issued her with the order not to stray more than two leagues away from Coppet. She then discovered that Schlegel had been told to leave Coppet and Geneva, allegedly because of the unwise comparison between Euripides and Racine in the pamphlet he had written in 1806, and— ludicrously—on the grounds that his known inXuence over Stae¨l would make her increasingly anti-French in her sentiments. She knew perfectly well what the true reasons for the new restriction were, and felt the pincers of a police state closing around her. Schlegel, she asserted, was her friend, ‘and they were starting to operate the system that would become more and more visible, making a prison for my soul by depriving me of all the delights of the mind and friendship’.52

49 Ibid. 405. 50 Ibid. 411. 51 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 207.

52 Ibid. 209.

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Her next idea was to go to Sweden to explore the possibility of unseating Napoleon and replacing him with Bernadotte. The only safe way of managing such a journey, however, was by Wrst going to Russia, the alternative being to cross forbidden French soil, a prospect which even Stae¨l blenched at. For the time being she contented herself with a more local trip, exploring an institution whose inmates lived a life possibly even more restrictive than her own. This was a Trappist convent whose monastic equivalent she says she encouraged the far more spiritual Mathieu de Montmorency to investigate at the same time.53 (In fact only Auguste seems to have gone to see the monastery.) Disappointment, however, awaited her, as the porteress told her that she could enter only if she became a nun herself. It is unlikely that this woman had read Delphine and so suspected the author’s anti-conventual sentiments, but all the same, ‘I do not know from what signs this nun had become aware of my worldly disposition’.54 The possibility was speedily dismissed. Even without her penetrating the convent, in any case, Stae¨l’s sheer proximity seems to have adversely aVected it, for a few days after the expedition she was told that the property of both orders was being conWscated and the nuns and monks expelled from Switzerland.55 Other consequences of Napoleon’s dominion were unpleasantly impressed upon her when, at a loss for something better to do, she decided to continue to the Valais and inspect some cretins she had often heard about, only to realize that since the Valais was now French territory it too was closed to her. The sense of increasing entrapment gnawed at her. The coup de graˆce came after she had returned to Coppet. Mathieu de Montmorency spent a few days with her there and was immediately exiled by Napoleon, with Stae¨l herself oYcially blamed for the punishment.56 When Juliette Re´camier suVered the same fate, visiting her friend for what her hostess described as a single day, but was actually three, it became clear that the authorities were taking no chances. To be known to Stae¨l was immediately to become persona non grata, however little political inXuence one possessed. The punishment meant that Madame Re´camier had to abandon her plan to proceed from Coppet to Prussia, whose Prince August—a lovelorn

53 Dix anne´es d’exil claims that these institutions were at Orbe, but Kohler (Stae¨l, 587–9) suggests La Petite Riederal instead. 54 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 211. 55 Ibid. 214. 56 Ibid. 217.

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admirer since his own Coppet visit of 1807—was desperate to see her again. Somehow Stae¨l’s claims on people always seemed more pressing than anyone else’s. The comtesse de Boigne understood her absolute fear of solitude and boredom, to which even constant interruptions to her work were preferable: ‘It is astonishing how the most brilliant geniuses are subject to this impression [of boredom] and to what extent it dominates them. Madame de Stae¨l, Lord Byron, Monsieur de Chateaubriand are striking examples of it, and it was more than anything else from the desire to avoid it that they wrecked their lives and wanted to overthrow the world.’57 Stae¨l indeed felt desperate, and would perhaps have run aground but for the entry of a new interest, John Rocca, into her life. This handsome Genevese former soldier, invalided out of the French army after being badly wounded on active service in Spain, Wrst met her during the winter of 1810–11, and Wnally oVered the twenty-two-year-older Stae¨l the unconditional love and devotion she said she had been searching for all her life. Initially her response to the oVer was, as she described it to Madame Re´camier, that the relationship had no future, was nothing but a ‘Scottish air’ in her life. Rocca persisted, however, telling friends, ‘I shall love her so much that she will end up marrying me’. If Constant, probably predictably, was dismissive, he was also impressed by the evidence that Stae¨l had rediscovered her joie de vivre. A letter he wrote Hochet on 29 March 1811 commented that she seemed better in body, mind, and spirit, acting in plays and being celebrated in Geneva.58 For the Wrst time, he added, she was not bored there. Two months later, however, he was expressing gloom about her inner and outer health, observing censoriously that she was paying a high price in terms of the calm and repose she needed for the minor distraction of an aVair.59 Equally predictably, Geneva society had decided to become sternly disapproving of behaviour that, according to the rather inconsistent Constant, gave Stae¨l relatively little pleasure, but did not deserve to be judged as negatively as it was. Madame de Boigne claimed that Stae¨l was often acutely embarrassed by her lover. When others made clear their pleasure in Wnding her spirits apparently recovered, Rocca began to pick quarrels in public, presenting a show of jealousy that merely facilitated his ‘triumph’ over her rather than hastening her disaVection with a partner manifestly her intellectual inferior. When the countess met Stae¨l in Geneva, Rocca was enjoying 57 Boigne, Me´moires, I.177.

58 Mistler, Lettres, 174.

59 Ibid. 181.

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‘complete success’, yet was often apparently ridiculous enough to make her ashamed. After one scene Stae¨l conWded in her that ‘words are not his language’, a confession that was naturally interpreted otherwise than she had intended. ‘The statement has always struck me as the painful cry of a clever woman in love with a fool,’ she concluded.60 Yet she also noted that Stae¨l was all the more charmed at having inspired passion in a handsome young man because her own ugliness had always pained her. She could never call a woman ugly or pretty, but used euphemisms: thus, in her idiom, women were deprived of or endowed with external advantages,61 not unattractive or comely. But as Stae¨l remarked in a letter to Claude Hochet, it was more painful for her to be deprived of her friends than of beauty, harder than it would be for any other creature on earth, and no new erotic interest in her life would change that. Friends, she said, were the people one had known from one’s youth. ‘Everywhere I go people greet me with interest, and there is something about me that inspires aVection, but all the deep emotions of my soul are in the past, and I am sometimes ashamed of my incapacity to love truly anything I did not know in the past.’62 Constant, looking back in time in August 1812, was struck both by Rocca’s rapport with his own daughter Albertine and Stae¨l’s other children, and by this recent arrival’s fundamental inability to satisfy Stae¨l intellectually. He believed her to be too sensible, whatever her frequent theatricality, to take on the entire responsibility for a young man who could not lastingly please her or fulWl her longings. On the other hand, Constant admitted, he himself was so out of touch with Stae¨l that he knew neither where she was nor what she was doing.63 The fact is that she had known herself to be pregnant by Rocca since August or September 1811, and had given birth the following April. The child, ‘Little Us’, as Rocca called him, had immediately been handed over to a pastor, his wife, and a wetnurse in a village outside Nyon. Later on a new addition to the Coppet household, an impoverished English spinster called Fanny Randall who became Albertine’s governess and Stae¨l’s secretary and conWdante, would devote herself to the child to the extent of allowing it to be assumed that she was his mother. Stae¨l had tried to save appearances during the advanced stages of her pregnancy by claiming to be suVering 60 Boigne, Me´moires, I. 178. 61 Ibid. 179. 62 Mistler, Lettres, 192 (18 Aug. 1811). 63 Ibid. 221 (9 Aug. 1812).

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from dropsy—a dropsy lasting nine months and ‘cured thanks to the care of a Genevan called Rocca’, as Baron Melun, the special commissioner of police in Geneva, told Rovigo. (The police had planted spies at Coppet and were quickly informed about the true state of aVairs, ensuring that rumours spread.) Melun accompanied his report with two of the songs circulating in celebration of Stae¨l’s ‘recovery’: D’une cure aussi propice Ah ! Be´nissons les re´sultats heureux ! Il est pre`s de Rolle en nourrice

and La femme ce´le`bre Quelle femme e´tonnante et quel fe´cond ge´nie Tout en elle produit, tout est ce´le´brite´, Et jusqu’a` son hydropisie Rien n’est perdu pour la poste´rite´.64

Other songs and epigrams circulated for Napoleon’s beneWt. The Prefect told Rovigo that Stae¨l was damned in the opinion of her compatriots. Was this, as some said, why she so suddenly disappeared in 1812? Gossip was nothing new for her, and it seems unlikely; what is more probable is that after the birth of her third son she felt able to pursue the project of travelling to Sweden. At all events, when Constant was wondering about her whereabouts she was actually in Russia. To get there she had left Coppet in broad daylight on 23 May 1812, seeming all innocence as she climbed into her carriage with Albertine after arranging various household aVairs for the day and letting it be assumed that they would be returning for dinner. In fact it would be July 1814, a little over two years later, when they came back. Stae¨l had planned cleverly, and the Prefect would discover only on 2 June 1812 that she had given him the slip. By that time mother and daughter were again in Austria on the Wrst leg of a trip that would take them through Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia (then the largest province of Austria, now territory split between Poland and the Ukraine) to Russia, Sweden, and Wnally England. She was, she proclaimed unwearyingly in Dix anne´es d’exil, a victim of persecution that had been used with ever-increasing frequency and severity 64 Quoted in Gautier, Stae¨l et Napole´on, 299.

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against her, but thanks to which she had been able to perceive before the rest of Europe the full danger of Bonaparte’s despotism. This perception, she declared, would in turn be her own weapon; she would use it to save the continent as it was being devoured by the sphinx whose riddle it had been unable to answer. As she wrote to Hochet on 5 May: ‘I have been suVering for nine years, and no longer living for two. It is a rather odd state, and I am tempted to write a book called De l’exil which will, I believe, be full of new observations on the human heart. I shall Wgure in it as an episode.’65 In fact she would Wgure in it as governing principle and inspiration: everything she wrote was imbued with her distinctive energy and character. What she had learnt during her exile was the need to project herself everywhere, where necessary in transposed form. For Napoleon’s taste, of course, she would always be too publicly present, always appear too insistent. Whatever the measures he took against her, she would forever remain as visible as she was vocal. 65 Mistler, Lettres, 211.

7 A Quick Trip from Coppet

D

ix anne´es d’exil reveals that she had felt ready to faint as she escaped from her Swiss prison. Auguste gave her strength by reminding her: ‘Mother, we are leaving for England, think of that!’1 Given the months of travelling that lay before them, it cannot always have been easy to remember. If she had little left to prove to the world or Napoleon—having written best-selling treatises, successful novels, and important works of cultural and literary-historical commentary, though one remained unpublished—she still felt the weight of being a celebrity with a unique responsibility to alert others to the threat Napoleon posed: that is, a responsibility disguisedly to enter politics. Given that the logical outcome of the tyrant’s eVort at conquest and dominion would be to make the entire continent forbidden territory to dissenters, the fact that she was an exile gave an edge as well as an urgency to her warning. Her situation epitomized the dilemma of the (female) intellectual whose thoughts could be less easily constrained than her movements, but whose best thoughts were still generated by a climate that fostered sociability. She always ‘wrote’ most eVectively when she was improvising, like Corinne; what she set down on paper later was never as brilliant as what conversation and other types of oral performance could generate. She was in this respect at the opposite extreme to Rousseau, who thought and composed best in solitude: Stae¨l needed the stimulus of conviviality to create. Even when travel deprived her of regular companions, changing scenery could perform some of the same functions as human variety. In any case, she travelled with company of her own. If she was unable to derive much mental stimulation from Rocca’s presence, Schlegel, who would be joining the party in July, was a diVerent matter. Besides, when her reputation 1 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 228.

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(for brilliance, unconventionality, ‘male’ self-assertiveness) did not actively antagonize the people she met on her travels, it enhanced the excitement she inspired in them. Exile had made her a notoriety, precisely the opposite of what Napoleon had hoped. Not, of course, that she was always welcomed, even in countries where she was already known. Where her reception seemed cooler than it had been before, however, her own personality was not necessarily the cause. If the Austrians were less open and willing to give than four years earlier, it was probably because of the political and economic tribulations they had been suVering: cunning mixed unpleasantly with sloth, she thought, to produce a new character of rapacity very diVerent from the dullness, the mild benevolence mixed with gaiety, she remembered from her previous visit.2 In 1808 the gravitas of the Habsburg court had been lightened by glamour, charm, and wit; at present an alien current of mean-spiritedness prevailed. It contrasted unpleasantly with the old aristocratic ethos that held cultivating benevolence to be a duty as well as a pleasure. There had always been a streak of enlightened self-interest in the Austrian upper and middle classes; what was diVerent and alienating now was the climate of constraint introduced by Francis II, a systematic repression symbolized by the name of Metternich that would last half a century. To Stae¨l it felt nearly as depressing as the authoritarian regime she was Xeeing. Perhaps the philanthropy remained, the almost institutionalized urge to do good works that Vige´e Le Brun had noticed ten years earlier when she observed the furious activity of aristocratic women in their theatre boxes, busily knitting thick stockings for the poor, and epitomized by the foundation of the Vienna Ladies’ Society, an association devoted exclusively to charitable works; but its implications seemed diVerent. Or was it simply that Stae¨l had ceased to idealize, or had adopted a harder political stance? No more than she herself did the ladies of Vienna desire the social levelling that true republicans wanted: Francis II’s aim throughout his long reign was to preserve the status quo down to its last detail, an intention the aristocracy applauded. Stae¨l’s model of benevolent paternalism, a notion she had inherited from Jacques Necker, diVered only in degree. She was obliged to spend three rather unsatisfactory weeks in the city waiting for a passport to Russia. There had already been a whiV of danger as

2 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 235.

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she travelled towards the capital: in Salzburg she had feared arrest, but the courier she had taken to be a spy turned out to be her own servant in disguise. Once Rocca had joined her she set oV again on 26 June with him and the children, leaving Schlegel and Uginet to follow with the papers they needed. Travel ought to have given her a sense of liberation; once away from Vienna, she told herself, all the trouble stirred up by her French persecutors would be behind her, and as before the sheer fact of being on the move cleared her mind and excited her, however grim the conditions of travel. And yet she knew, even as she played the list of imagined destinations through her mind, that the world of possibility had contracted. ‘Misfortune teaches one the geography of Napoleonine [sic] Europe only too well,’ she reXected;3 the detours necessary to avoid slipping back into his power would amount to nearly 2,000 leagues. Thanks to the advance of the Grande Arme´e, even after leaving Vienna she would have to move onto Asian territory to stay clear of him. Besides, what initially seemed a goal so exotic as to represent a new enticement turned out simply to be unreachable by ordinary means. She had the notion of proceeding to Constantinople, keen on becoming the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu of the nineteenth century, but tiresome barriers presented themselves. To enter Turkey as she planned via Odessa or Bucharest, which were Russian possessions, meant getting a passport from St Petersburg. Nothing was straightforward. So she toyed with other approaches, the direct route via Hungary—which she rejected as too dangerous, given its proximity to Serbia—or the way through Greece to the port of Salonica, which would be too primitive and uncomfortable, especially for a child as young as Albertine. Her imagination was Wred by meeting an Armenian, who promised to accompany her all the way to Constantinople via Greece, Sicily, Cadiz, and Lisbon, but again she would inevitably face the barrier of frontiers and border controls en route. ‘There is no doubt about it,’ she concluded, ‘Europe, once so open to travellers, has become under the inXuence of Emperor Napoleon like a great net where one cannot move an inch without being caught.’4 Constant hindrances, perpetual checks, and all because Napoleon’s increasing power made the governments of every country he oppressed determined to exercise with equal despotism whatever remnant of power had been left them.

3 Ibid. 242.

4 Ibid.

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She decided on Galicia, with the intention of proceeding to Russia, and left Vienna with her children and Rocca on 22 June.5 She was depressed and exhausted, pursued by tyranny, feeling that freedom existed nowhere but over the seas or beyond the Pyrenees. Moravia and Poland opened up before her, but incompletely: she was cruelly unaware of the police instructions to stop her from pausing anywhere en route unless her health positively demanded it. She did manage a halt at a property owned by Princess Lubomirska, a sad and dilapidated castle where the travellers were still received as nobly as circumstances permitted.6 A horseman came to greet the party in French, while the steward, his wife, and his children hugged and kissed her before showing her into a prison-like room where they were served a simple, meatless meal with black bread, washed down with exquisite Hungarian wine. She had particularly wanted to visit Lan´cut, another Lubomirska property, famed for its art collection and gardens. Although speciWc police orders had been issued to prevent her from doing so, they simply fuelled her perennial desire to brave and thwart impertinent ordinance and impediment. Her eVorts met an unforeseen obstacle, however, in the form of an ‘imbecile’ police oYcer who escorted her into the castle and obliged the family to receive him as well as her party at table, though he partially redeemed himself later by disobeying orders to spend the night guarding her in her own room. The whole place, she concluded, breathed paradox— ‘The crowd of servants who have no bed; beauty of the place, beauty of the plants. Palaces and mud.’7 On they travelled through Galicia, where Schlegel caught them up on 7 July with the papers they needed, and entered Russia a week later. Here, too, was paradox. Though speaking French, the language of the hated invader (Napoleon’s troops having already begun their advance across the Russian empire), they were greeted with all the warmth that had so far eluded them on their journey. Besides, as Stae¨l observes in Dix anne´es d’exil, though no one was accustomed to thinking of Russia as the freest state in Europe, ‘the yoke with which the Emperor of France weighs down every state on the continent is such that you consider yourself to be in a republic as soon as you reach the country where Napoleon’s tyranny can no longer be felt’.8 5 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 246. 6 Balaye´, Carnets, 273–6. 7 Ibid. 278. 8 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 255.

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The date they arrived, 14 July, was one that continued to echo for her: ‘this anniversary of the day the Revolution started struck me forcibly: so, for me, the circle of the history of France closed, the history beginning on 14 July 1789, and when the barrier separating Austria from Russia opened to let me through I swore never again to set foot in a country that was subject to the emperor Napoleon’s power. Will this vow ever let me see my beautiful France again?’9 The further resonance of the date was of course unknown to her: she would die Wve years to the day after Wrst entering Russia. But the aftermath to the Revolutionary wars continued for the party as they tried to cross the country. To avoid Napoleon’s army they had to make a huge circuit of 200 leagues via Kiev, Tula, Moscow, and Novgorod before reaching St Petersburg. ‘What a bizarre fate,’ she reXected, ‘Wrst to be Xeeing the French in whose midst I was born, who carried my father in triumph, and then to be Xeeing them to the edge of Russia!’10 Was she in a civilized world or a savage one, she wondered. Like others before her, she noticed the superWciality or randomness of culture amongst people still wedded to rustic ways. Stopping to observe some peasants dancing in the open air, shortly before she entered Moscow, she was struck by a primitive energy—naivety, Schiller would have called it—that distanced them from the Western peoples she knew, though the happy-golucky Neapolitans shared some of their elemental joy. Its essence, she decided, was a mixture of reverie and passion, both powerful elements in characters still unformed by the polished and policed world. Their life of instinct seemed to draw them close to savage races, antithetically opposed to the enlightened principles she had been educated by. At the same time, it made their defeat by a foreign power more probable, for such peoples, who have learnt from civilization only an indiVerence towards whatever yoke they are made to bear, provided their own terrain is left undisturbed, who have learnt from civilization only the art of explaining power and reasoning about servitude, are made to be vanquished. I often think about the fate of these places which were so calm when I saw them, these sweet girls, these peasants with long beards meekly accepting the fate Providence reserved for them: they have perished or taken Xight, for none of them has entered the service of the victor.11

But the vital point was that they were too proud to accept subordination, the seemingly inevitable consequence of defeat such as Napoleon intended

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid. 259.

11 Ibid. 269.

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for them. For her this attitude was linked with the public-spiritedness and nationalism of the Russians, closely though it had been hidden during the decades when they, like the Germans, seemed happy to toady to the French and cultivate the art of imitativeness. The hatred of foreigners which Peter the Great had tried to eradicate for the purpose of cultivating his people remained, a potential source of energetic resistance to invading alien powers. Their own slavery, serfs to lords of vast domains, was a diVerent reality. At least, at this stage she seems to have considered it so; the author of Dix anne´es d’exil paints a rosier picture of it12 than the Stae¨l who told a Russian lady in London the following year that to conceive of serfs as happy members of a great family was nonsense. ‘Amongst all the deWnitions of freedom, I have never encountered that of servitude.’13 The habit of computing a man’s wealth by the number of serfs he owned meant that the underling was simply seen as an object, property like a horse or dog, and treated with no more consideration.14 Her remarks about the Russian people seeming ‘simple and proud’ have an almost patrician insouciance in this context, and she has nothing to say about the hardships endured by the pauper-victims of fabulously rich tyrants. Rather than showing her to have been shockingly unobservant, this probably simply indicates that she always saw in terms of a particular purpose. Whatever the case, it is surprising negligence on the part of a writer who had developed such an inXuential theory of cultural relativism in De la litte´rature. From rusticity she found herself suddenly in the midst of Moscow’s cupolas and splendour, which seemed to have stolen up on her all the more suddenly for the changelessness of the Xat landscape all around, the dreary expanses peopled by little else but birch trees, and where only rivers and streams lifted the soul by the poetry of their movement. But Moscow’s lyricism was of an altogether diVerent kind. The most beautiful palaces in the city, she wrote, were made of wood, because such constructions was both the quickest to put up and the least permanent, allowing swift changes to be made: sometimes, indeed, buildings were erected simply for the purposes of the moment, giving the Wlm-set eVect that Potemkin had once created in order to impress Catherine the Great on her journey to the Crimea—a series of fac¸ades fronting empty space, a Ximsy attractiveness 12 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 270–1. 13 Ibid. 270, n. 2; quoted in Kohler, Stae¨l, 623. 14 See Anthony Cross (ed.), Russia Under Western Eyes 1517–1825 (London: Elek, 1971), 208.

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designed to make everything look more prosperous than it was.15 There is a retrospective irony to Stae¨l’s observation, given that the impermanence of wood as a material for construction was precisely what made the great Wre of Moscow, which raged from 16 to 19 September 1812, so devastating. It seems to have been deliberately started by the inhabitants in order to deprive Napoleon of any refuge for his army as the winter weather set in, and resulted, unsurprisingly, in a huge death toll. Stae¨l, along with Schlegel, was the last westerner to see and describe the old city.16 The party spent Wve days there, which was long enough for her to observe and write, although she conceded that a proper acquaintance would have demanded far more time than she was able or prepared to give. When she drafted Dix anne´es d’exil, admittedly, she made use of published accounts such as Levesque’s Histoire de la Russie of 1783, Rulhie`re’s Histoire ou anecdotes sur la re´volution de Russie en 1762 of 1797, and, most of all, Masson’s Me´moires secrets de la Russie of 1804, particularly the section on ‘caracte`re national’, which contained observations on soldiers and women in particular, as well as peasants. She was enchanted by Muscovite houses, ‘houses of all colours, houses of sugar’, green, yellow, and pink, with sculpted details resembling cake decorations, ‘and these decorations are like arabesques that appear from far away like the friezes at the foot of churches’.17 Whatever sense of domesticity all this might have suggested, however, was dispelled by her other experiences of the city, a ‘Tartar Rome’ not because of its monuments but because of the mixture of campagna and magniWcent palaces, the grandeur of the city and the ‘inWnite’ number of temples. Retrospectively she revisited the crenellated walls, spires, and shining onion domes she had seen, and for a second imagined Napoleon beholding the same vista, a view that would spell destruction. Her presence in Moscow provoked a wave of hospitality. She arrived, after all, as a literary celebrity: her works had been known in Russia since their Wrst publication, and had also been swiftly translated—Mirza in 1801, Delphine in 1804, and Corinne in 1809. People could not do enough to entertain her, and as many dinners were held in her honour as her brief stay permitted. Sometimes the natives just gathered to stare, though they were not always favourably impressed by the sight they beheld. According to Pushkin’s fragmentary narrative of 1831, ‘Roslavlev’: ‘What they saw was a fat Wfty-year-old woman, dressed too youthfully for her years. They did not 15 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 273.

16 Balaye´, Carnets, 285.

17 Ibid.

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like her tone, her speeches seemed far too long and her sleeves far too short.’18 At Polina’s house, in Pushkin’s story, ‘she sat in the place of honour, furling and unfurling a roll of paper with her pretty Wngers’, but seeming in low spirits. Surprisingly, the wits invited to meet her appeared to be more interested in their Wsh soup than in her conversation; ladies barely spoke, conscious of the banality of their own thoughts in comparison with hers. All were waiting for a bon mot to fall from her lips, and Wnally she obliged with a rather daring double entendre. Everyone roared with laughter, and Polina’s father was beside himself with joy.19 Only Polina herself felt upset, cruelly aware of the contrast between the brilliant society and fascinating conversation Stae¨l had been used to and a Moscow dinner where she had had to endure three hours of torpor. ‘She understood what they needed, what these apes of enlightenment could comprehend, and she tossed them a pun . . . I was burning with shame and ready to weep.’ Stae¨l noticed her confusion and talked to her, and a few days later, when she was indisposed, invited Polina to visit. Gossip traduced what then happened, saying that the great writer was spying for Napoleon—of all people—and Polina providing her with vital information. The narrator of the story, however, knew the truth, and described the extent of the exile’s suVering under Bonaparte. Stae¨l moved on, restless even when she intended gathering material for a future work that might have justiWed a longer stay, braving a route to St Petersburg that at Wrst was nothing but sand and then became marsh. She did spend more time in the imperial city than in Moscow, but not enough to impress everyone with the thoroughness of her cultural exploration. After all, at this stage passing through Russia was for her merely a necessary preliminary to reaching Sweden. Or had it already become the nucleus of another work, a project for capturing the essence of this new foreign land? Pushkin remarked that she was the Wrst writer to do full justice to the Russian people’s heroic struggle for freedom,20 though Empress Elizabeth, the wife of Alexander I, wrote rather negatively to her mother the Margravine of Baden about the impression Stae¨l gave her: ‘An imagination like hers found much to feed on, and the result is that she plans to write a work 18 Pushkin, ‘Roslavlev’, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings, trans. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 1998), 92–102, at 94. 19 Ibid. 95. 20 See Olga Trtnik Rossettini, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et la Russie’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate (Mar. 1963), 50–67, at 65.

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on Russia; but I just wonder where she saw it, because it would be diYcult to write knowledgeably about a country one had seen so little of.’21 Yet the fact is that she was both observant and well read. Some who saw her in St Petersburg reacted as unfavourably as many Muscovites, though the disapproval might be limited to qualiWed disparagement of her appearance. The poet Arndt, for example, wrote that: ‘Physically she was not beautiful, and for a woman built almost too heavily, in too mannish a way. But what a head presided over this body! The forehead, the eyes, the nose, shedding magniWcent rays of light and the dazzling force of genius, the mouth and chin a little less beautiful.’22 And he refers to the same alertness and gift of repartee as had Wnally emerged at the Moscow dinner in Pushkin’s story. ‘Her eyes shone, [a witticism] sprang from her lips and at the same time [her face took on] a charming expression full of reason and goodness. Of reason? With every bird she knew instantly from its beak in what tone it was proper to speak, a royal gift, but one that so many kings lack.’ Whatever the natives thought about the attentiveness Stae¨l brought to scrutinizing Russia and Russian life, the incomplete Dix anne´es d’exil still devotes a third of its length to their country and Finland. Her account, as though to answer the doubts of Empress Elizabeth, is Wlled with sharp perceptions, interested questions, and detailed reports. She was particularly struck by the constant oppositions Russia presented, an opposition that existed within its people and was perhaps, she suggested, simply equivalent to the contrast between European civilization and Asiatic culture. To E´tienne Dumont she wrote in praise of the Russian character and the success of the natives’ resistance to the Grande Arme´e’s advance: ‘everywhere I saw an intrepid, proud nation which has much more public spirit than the rest of continental Europe . . . so I think that despite the setbacks of the war there will be resistance and that we can hope from this half-Asia what old Europe is no longer capable of. I would even say that I trust the Russian temperament.’23 To an extent, she needed to experience culture shock, however agreeable it was for her to Wnd echoes of Frenchness abroad: being jolted out of the rut was stimulating as well as uncomfortable, making the literal upset of travelling worthwhile. To be able to write she had to see with fresh eyes, 21 Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovitch, L’Impe´ratrice Elisabeth, 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Manufacture des Papiers de l’E´tat, 1908–9), II.534. 22 Balaye´, Carnets, 311. 23 Private collection, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, II.393.

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though if change was so extreme as to make her lose her bearings she felt uncomfortable. With Napoleon threatening from the West, of course, it might have been thought that educated Russians would stop seeing the French way of life as superior to the native one, and hence cease to copy it. Yet as her reception suggests, the current of Francophilia ran deep, at least in cities. Comte Philippe de Se´gur, who had left his post as French ambassador to Russia soon after the fall of the Bastille, said that St Petersburg united Scythian uncouthness and Parisian politesse, barbarity and civilization, the tenth and the eighteenth centuries: ‘On the one hand elegant fashions, magniWcent dress, sumptuous meals, splendid meals, theatres like those that adorn and animate the select societies of Paris and London; on the other merchants in Asiatic costume, coachmen, servants, peasants dressed in sheepskin, and with Xowing beards, fur hats, long hide mittens and axes hanging from broad leather belts.’24 The Russian habit of imitating more sophisticated nations was regarded dismissively, patronizingly, regretfully, or admiringly, depending on the point of view and mood of the observer. Gogol’s Dead Souls, for instance, mercilessly satirizes the parrotting of French style prevalent among the upper and middle classes and their addiction to parlour games such as charades, portraits, and tableaux vivants.25 Where more serious undertakings were in question criticism ought, in theory, to have been sharper, but in fact often remained surprisingly temperate: thus Ligne simply noted how eVortlessly Russians mastered arts where their model was French,26 while the actor Lekain remarked to David Garrick that natives learned and retained the principles of acting so eVectively that they would soon outshine the stars of the Come´die-Franc¸aise.27 Catherine II’s attitude in this respect had been inconsistent. Although she disliked cultural imitativeness she did little to discourage it in the performing arts, having charged the French actor Clairval as early as 1763 to recruit a troupe of actors in his own country and bring them to St Petersburg. When their contract expired Diderot helped her Wnd more.

24 Comte Philippe de Se´gur, Me´moires, ou souvenirs et anecdotes, 3 vols. (Paris: A. Eymery, 1829), II.217. 25 Gogol, Dead Souls, book 12; also Emile Haumant, La Culture franc¸aise en Russie (1700–1900), 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Oriental Research Partners, 1971), 214. 26 Prince de Ligne, Me´moires et lettres, new edn. (Paris, 1923), 238. 27 See La France et la Russie au sie`cle des Lumie`res (Paris: Association franc¸aise d’action artistique, 1986), 438.

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Nearly all the great seventeenth-century French dramas were translated into Russian, and some of the lesser eighteenth-century ones too: thus Diderot’s feeble play Le Fils naturel enjoyed far more success in its Russian version than it had ever done in France. Racine and Voltaire were particularly savoured. While Stae¨l and her party were in St Petersburg a company of French actors gave a performance of Racine’s Phe`dre which Rocca and Auguste went to see on its last day. The theatregoers returned in a state of distress, however, saying that there had been such a tumult and torrent of invective against the French nation that the performance had had to be cancelled. Stae¨l, beside herself with anger and distress, burst into tears and exclaimed: ‘the barbarians, not to want to hear Racine’s Phe`dre!’28 Yet the popular hatred of the troupe and what they represented was so intense that at the beginning of the following winter they were obliged to leave the city altogether. Things had evidently changed since the days when Catherine the Great had tried to engage Eric de Stae¨l’s mistress Mademoiselle Clairon, along with Lekain and Pre´ville, to perform in her country, and another French witness, the abbe´ Georgel, had noted that the citizens regularly had the choice of seeing French, German, or Russian dramas staged.29 Playgoing was so much a part of cultural life, in fact, that evening visits never commenced until eight o’clock, when people emerged from the theatres. It seemed particularly regrettable to the author of De la litte´rature that Russians copied the Friench style in their own writing, as the unreconstructed Germans had also done: Russia no more impressed her as possessing a national literature than it struck Vige´e Le Brun two decades before as having a national school of painting. On the other hand, while painting was frequently the work of serfs, or at least of the lower orders, writing was practised by the upper classes, even if they did seem to prefer using French to their own language. (For all that, Stae¨l observed, the language of the common people—there was no middle class in Russia, she said30—was musical and melliXuous.) Dix anne´es d’exil remarks severely that ‘wit, eloquence, literature are nowhere to be met with in Russia’,31 then immediately qualiWes the statement: ‘They [the Russians] do try nevertheless’, and the Russian language strikes even those who do not understand it by its beauty, so that ‘it must be very well suited to music and poetry.’32 28 29 30 31

Balaye´, Carnets, 310–11. L’abbe´ Georgel, Voyage a` Saint-Pe´tersbourg en 1799–1800 (Paris: A. Eymery, 1818), 196. Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 270, 291. Ibid. 270. 32 See also Trtnik Rossettini, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, 60.

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In his Journey from Moscow to St Petersburg Pushkin, another exile, slightly qualiWes Stae¨l’s view that Russian literature was the art of courtiers, saying that it was nobles above all who cultivated it. (Elsewhere he writes that in Russia some gentlemen [sic] concerned themselves with literature.)33 Whatever she thought about the social preconditioning required, Stae¨l told the natives, according to Ivanov’s History of Russian Criticism, that it was time for them to talk the language of deep emotion, and that they needed to develop a European spirit.34 With the outbreak of the French Revolution Catherine II, a German by birth, had summoned home all Russians living in France on the grounds that they would Wnd only bad examples there, though her edict simply made worldly Russians more determined than ever to re-create the Gallic spirit in St Petersburg. In 1793 Ligne could write that Vige´e Le Brun would Wnd herself as completely at ease in the city as in Paris (where, as MarieAntoinette’s favourite portraitist, she had in fact stopped feeling at home), and a decade later much of this French spirit remained, however hostile Tsar Paul had shown himself to be in the interim towards a country he regarded as the seedbed of revolutionary republicanism. His despotism, long suppressed during his mother’s reign, found brutal expression when he succeeded her, forcing the inhabitants of St Petersburg to wear prescribed clothes, go to bed at set times, paint their houses in particular ways, and avoid using certain words like ‘club’ or ‘deputy’ that were redolent of Revolutionary France. Modern chic, too, was deprecated because Paul believed that years of permissiveness under female rulers in Russia had fostered ‘soft’ attitudes, sartorially and otherwise, and made it necessary to reintroduce older styles. However, it was not merely celebrities such as Vige´e Le Brun and Stae¨l who felt that they were conferring a beneWt on their host culture in maintaining a spirit of Frenchness; almost none of the French exiles or e´migre´s in Russia ever troubled to learn a word of the native language. Why should they have done, given that theirs was the lingua franca of a culture which conquest—even a Napoleonic conquest of which they could not approve—was spreading over the entire continent? After nearly thirty years in Russia the comte de Langeron knew only enough Russian to address his dog in, and even after the Revolution many native aristocrats were said to speak French better than their own language. 33 Quoted in Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 28, n. 2. 34 See Trtnik Rossettini, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, 61, n. 4.

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It is not easy to establish the precise nature of Stae¨l’s response to the Russian people in general, though Dix anne´es d’exil provides several hints. There is some familiar elitism (of the kind that also characterizes her views on ‘republican’ France), though her observations about the upper classes can deliver a feinted blow. The hospitality of the unbelievably rich, she notes, is such as to preclude any cultivation of companionship, for the typical grandee’s huge receptions entirely swallow up the individual. As often as not, for example, Prince Stroganov barely knew the guests who dined in his palace, deriving suYcient pleasure simply from feeling how luxuriously he received them. The beginning of an acquaintance with native lords, for similar reasons, might remain a beginning up to and including its end, for they cared only about preliminary eVects and impressions.35 Along with these views, there is social compassion in Stae¨l’s account. If she can describe with equanimity the backwardness in cultural and political terms of the Russian masses, their ‘happy’ serfdom,36 she also sees their economic misery and the Xagrant abuses of elementary human rights they suVer. In many ways she was open-minded, asking the Russian diplomat Ouvarov, whom she had met in Vienna in 1808, whether she might converse with him about Russia, ‘which struck me greatly on my brief trip; nothing people said or especially wrote about it gave any idea of the reality’.37 She left with a more positive view of the natives than some other observers, whose opinions were summed up in the quip attributed (on no particular evidence) to Diderot: ‘Russians are rotten before they ripen.’38 Their vices, she maintained, had nothing to do with corruption; they stemmed from violence, and Joseph de Maistre’s mot, ‘a Russian desire could blow up a town’, summed up their primitive energy.39 It followed from this, she thought, that the Russian character was incapable of abstraction; only the tangible was of interest to it.40 For all her sympathy with the people, a sense of death and destruction beset her in their vast country, a feeling connected with the fact that while she and her party were happily enjoying cultural feasts Bonaparte was approaching Moscow. When she saw the Neva glistening in the moonlight, reXecting the marble quays and surrounding palaces, she imagined all these wonders as prey to the arrogance of one man: ‘He would say like Satan on top of the mountain: ‘‘These kingdoms are mine’’. Everything good and beautiful in Petersburg 35 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 287–8, 294. 36 Allstadt-Schmidt, Exil, 158. 37 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 25. 38 Ibid. 288. 39 Ibid. 278. 40 Ibid. 288.

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seemed to me in the presence of imminent destruction, and I could not rejoice in it without this painful thought.’41 From the moment she entered Russia Stae¨l had been preoccupied with the need to overcome the despot who was throttling Europe and threatening to spread his dominion all over the known world.42 In the West she had become all too aware of the lack of any great commander who could act as a focus in the struggle against the tyrant, but her hopes remained alive. Consular Paris may have shown her, encouragingly, that the English, though so keen to cross the Channel during the cessation of hostilities brought by the Treaty of Amiens, could not like Napoleon: they had come to Paris, like the English enthusiasts of Burney’s The Wanderer, to admire him, possibly to appreciate his noble qualities, but no more. What mattered for the present, all that counted, was to get rid of the tyrant, whether by English, Russian, or Swedish means, or through a combination of all three. The struggle aganst Napoleon demanded a Wgure of commanding magnitude, and for a time it seemed to her that Tsar Alexander might provide it. When she was presented to him at the St Petersburg court in August she began to conceive hope. Or was she really disappointed? Dix anne´es d’exil describes almost the same experience as Vige´e Le Brun details a few years earlier on meeting the imperial family: Alexander I a happy (if slightly ambiguous) mix of Minerva and Antinou¨s, making others forget his grandeur by his winning simplicity; his wife Elizabeth, the ‘guardian angel’ of Russia; and the morally perfect Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Tsar Paul’s widow.43 In other words, the ideal trinity condemned by Napoleon.44 But did anyone possess the naked desire, as well as the strength, that toppling him would require? The energy that Dix Anne´es d’exil shows Stae¨l to have invested in observing and reXecting on Russia did not desert her when she moved on. She left St Petersburg on 7 September 1812, the day after the battle of Borodino; a week later Moscow went up in Xames, in order, she remarked grimly, ‘for it to be said that any country which had become this man’s [Napoleon’s] ally would be ravaged by the hellWre at his disposal’.45 She travelled to 41 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 302. 42 Norman King, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et la chute de Napole´on’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe, 63–79, at 63–4. 43 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 289–90, 292, 307. 44 Diesbach, Stae¨l, 488. 45 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 271.

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Sweden via Finland. In a letter to Hochet of 19 October 1812, sent from Stockholm, she announces the intention to write about the north—that is, the lands north of Germany—as she has already written about the south. ‘I think it will be intriguing like Europe and Asia, but the land to be described trembles, and pictures disappear before they have been sketched.’46 Then she summed up the contrast between the beset exile’s life and the celebrity existence it seemed possible to lead almost at one and the same time: ‘all I needed, to feel that I was in the paradise of Odin, was for the tormenting to stop.’ Torment was the raw wound that, in all the upset of travel, could never heal properly, a hurt that wore away the heart. ‘What is Wxed within me are aVections,’47 she wrote, but a little later: Everything is a wound now, through absence or wrongs committed—but I Wnd more strength than previously in reverie, and what gives me pleasure is the ending of the state I was in—security and independence are new delights to me— . . . the sky is grey, the earth arid, but the soul is no longer oppressed, the arts fall silent but the conscience can speak, in short I would redo what I have done and I praise God for having guided us over 1,500 leagues, my daughter and myself, without a thousand perils striking us.48

The 1,500 leagues had been quite enough, given the travelling conditions on the mainland; to add to them the distance covered by sea was to multiply the suVering tenfold. She hated such voyages, particularly the sort in which storms blew up without warning and consigned women prone to be seasick to purgatory. In the end it was her terror of the sea that stopped her ever going to the United States, and the voyage from Turku to Stockholm seemed to conWrm the justice of her fears. Schlegel recalled the circumstances years later, at the time of Albertine’s death. ‘Little Albertine showed heroic courage in the most imminent danger. We were surprised in the Gulf of Bothnia by a dreadful storm, with waves inundating our frail vessel every second. In the midst of the general confusion she stayed serene, her brow unruZed, solely occupied as she was in calming her mother’s fears.’49 As well as Albertine, Stae¨l had decided to take her sons to Sweden to enlist in the army. Then there was her real purpose, conferring with Bernadotte. There can be no certainty that, as Rovigo claimed, she really acted as a go-between in the rapprochement of Alexander and Bernadotte at Turku, so helping to bring

46 Mistler, Lettres, 226.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid. 227.

49 Balaye´, Carnets, 332.

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Sweden into the coalition that resulted in Napoleon’s defeat, but it is likely. Even before she left Russia the Tsar had twice consulted her, realizing the inXuence she might be able to exert on the Crown Prince (whom he then envisaged as head of a liberal French monarchy). The party, which arrived in Stockholm on 24 September, stayed for eight months. Stae¨l immediately and predictably became a social success; as she told Hochet, she was received everywhere like a queen. To many it must have seemed that this had been her sole motive in coming. An unknown Swedish correspondent informed Anne Romilly in early November that she was by then playing one of the leading roles at court and in the town, and that no society was complete without her.50 The monde, equally, fought for invitations to the Stae¨l receptions. Brinkman observed that hers became the premier salon of the capital ‘for conversation’ and all the pleasures of the mind, where she did the honours as a veritable Corinne.51 Balls, concerts, readings, and theatrical performances were all arranged with perfect taste, seeming to belie the amount of organization that had gone into them. In February 1813 Hudson Lowe reported to Sir Henry Bunbury that a couple of days previously he had seen Stae¨l and Albertine acting, and commented that the mother’s ‘extraordinary abilities’ were ‘quite universal’: Madame de Stae¨l and her daughter, an extremely interesting girl in her sixteenth year, went through some of the Wnest scenes in Racine’s tragedies of Athalie and Iphige´nie. An old French oYcer who was present and who appeared to be a connoisseur told me she surpassed Mademoiselle Clairon. [Later Albertine danced the Cossack shawl dance.] I had no idea of anything so graceful with that name.52

Stae¨l’s elegant dinners and suppers brought together what Brinkman calls every order of society, from princes to artists—in other words, the cultured world she already knew elsewhere, untainted by the lower classes. (On the other hand, he mentions that she seemed equally at ease with the least learned and sometimes the least educated kind of people.) No foreigner, apparently, had ever exerted such a dazzling eVect before, which made one woman of wit observe that there must be nothing so agreeable in the world as to be able to trail everywhere, as Stae¨l did, preceded by one’s reputation and accompanied by one’s cook.53 Stae¨l would probably have taken issue 50 Sir Samuel Romilly, Romilly–Edgeworth Letters 1813–1818 (London: John Murray, 1936), 56. 51 Brinkman, ‘Lettre’, 170. 52 Quoted in Norman King, ‘Correspondances sue´doises de Germaine de Stae¨l’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 39 (1987), 11–137, at 71. 53 Brinkman, ‘Lettre’, 170.

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with the Wrst statement—she made the best of travelling, but would rather not have had it imposed upon her—and guests at her meals over the decades might have dissented from the second: she does not seem to have been very interested in haute cuisine, and did not waste money on a chef capable of providing it. Brinkman notes additionally that nothing in her house seemed showy, but everything betokened ease and tastefulness. In April Napoleon rearmed; in May Prussia abandoned him and formed a coalition with England and Russia, which Sweden soon joined. The net was beginning to tighten around the French Emperor, and Stae¨l might justiWably feel that her past and present inXuence had counted for something. Accordingly, in a letter to Brinkman of 3 May 1813 she advanced a signiWcant claim about how she, a woman, could shape political opinion and events through the act of writing: ‘at present I do not think that one can be a man without worshipping liberty, and thought in me is male. So far from not publishing what I am writing at the moment, if I hope for glory it is by developing and manifesting all the virtues which spring from liberty, and [exposing] all the vices which spring from despotism.’54 The she added a typically Stae¨lian coda: ‘After religion I know nothing that more certainly leads to the maintaining of everything religious in man than English liberty.’ A correspondent of Anne Romilly’s observed that Stae¨l’s Anglomania amused the Swedes, but that the strangest aspect of this singular, superior woman was her aVectation of depreciating French tragedies and praising German ones to the skies. The writer attributed this tic to her relationship with Schlegel, and still more to her being inaccessible to the charms of poetry. He or she would have been astounded to hear about the recent and violent defence of Racine in St Petersburg, or read the reports on her acting scenes from Athalie and Iphige´nie. Maria Edgeworth, who would be disappointed in her hopes of meeting Stae¨l in London on the Wnal stage of her European tour, had a particular as well as general interest in making her acquaintaince, but was obliged to leave for Ireland before the great woman arrived. The particular interest derived from the fact that she had just received a proposal of marriage—the only one in her life—from a Swedish suitor called Edelcrantz, a man in his late forties who worked for the Swedish Crown as administrator of the royal theatres. It is intriguing to imagine Stae¨l advising such a stern moralist on anything

54 Ibid. 181.

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relating to matrimony, and probably as well that she never did. On the other hand, she would later give some reasonably sensible and certainly well-meant advice to Byron after his wife had left him. The Sweden she met with in 1812 was very diVerent from the one Mary Wollstonecraft had visited in 1795, and about which Wollstonecraft published an account, A Short Residence in Sweden, the following year. Whereas Sweden had possessed over half the Baltic coast at the end of the eighteenth century, by 1809 it had been stricken, mutilated by the Russian conquest of Finland, and economically damaged. It needed an eVective ruler: not the senile Carl XIII who had been put on the throne that year, but someone with vision and resolve, a leader with the determination to unite with France, expelling Russia from the Baltic and so giving the country back its power there. Stae¨l, of course, had her favourite to assume this charge. Bernadotte,55 whom the Swedes mistakenly imagined to be Napoleon’s choice as king, was in fact his rival, and thus doubly attractive to her. His real interest at present, though, was in associating Sweden with Russia and England and Wghting the republican French. In 1799 he had brieXy been Minister of War, before Napoleon curbed his political ascent and tried to neutralize the threat he believed Bernadotte posed to his own authority. The oVer of the Swedish crown seemed to Bernadotte, whom Byron called ‘that rebellious bastard of Scandinavian adoption’,56 an obvious step towards personal and European liberation from the toils of the Napoleonic empire, making it possible for him to pursue his preferred course of forming prudent international alliances and smashing Bonaparte’s Continental System. These were also attractions for Stae¨l, who saw Bernadotte as the future William III of France. She wrote to Dumont that Bernadotte had launched himself into the European cause more energetically than anyone, and, usefully, that no one was more hated by the master who had thought Bernadotte to be his servant.57 (The deWnitive break between the two men had come as early as 1809.) After Wellington, she continued, Bernadotte was the man to whom Europe owed the most. Dix anne´es d’exil quotes his response (which in an earlier version she attributes to herself, saying that ‘a general she saw often’ stole it from her)

55 See Franklin D. Scott, Bernadotte and the Fall of Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935). 56 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.107. 57 King, ‘Correspondances sue´doises’, 32.

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to Napoleon’s self-congratulatory survey of his own achievements: two million men died to ensure it and to uphold the principle of liberty.58 Bernadotte, who had been a regular visitor at her and Juliette Re´camier’s salons in Paris, saw Stae¨l’s potential usefulness to the realization of his and Alexander’s project, and probably encouraged her to visit Sweden when she did. She did not witness the political manoeuvring involving the two men that culminated in Napoleon’s Wnal defeat, and about which Byron remarked in his journal on 9 April 1814: ‘Napoleon Buonaparte has abdicated the throne of the world . . . What! Wait till they were in his capital, and then talk of his readiness to give up what is already gone!!— . . . But, after all, a crown may not be worth dying for. Yet to outlive Lodi for that!!!’59 But she was satisWed that she had been instrumental in turning the tide against the despot. The work she intended doing in London, her next port of call, would involve hectoring politicians and statesmen who did not understand the extent of the power she could wield behind the throne; or so she often chose to believe. In fact they would sometimes be as embarrassed by their dealings with her as she was by her friendship with them, which few took as always best directed at getting the result they wanted. The story of her third stay in England was, as much as anything, one of helpless attraction (on both sides) to an intellect or intellects that seemed at war with one another, principally a war between liberal principles and royalist weaknesses that highlighted Stae¨l’s ambivalent attitude to class and social status. The unevenness of character this tension revealed caused considerable exasperation to many of her natural English supporters, but also seemed enormously appealing: if she was not consistent, at least she had the passion and brain to make such a stir that her self-contradictions were almost excused. She would continue to be what she had remained throughout her adult life, the woman who both enjoyed and deplored celebrity, and who professed her political innocence in the same breath as writing and behaving in a patently political way. So she pushed English tolerance, and the cult of liberty she had always revered in the nation, to the very limit—and, or so it sometimes seemed, beyond. 58 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 127–8.

59 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.256.

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his last trip of Stae¨l’s across the Channel was undertaken as a mission: as she announced to Dumont on 13 October 1812, ‘I have covered 1,500 leagues to come to England’.1 Given what she had just been doing in Sweden this does not ring entirely true, but it was clear enough that she had brought herself to London in a mixed spirit of purpose and curiosity: the purposes of literary publication and political consultation (though some dismissed the latter as her inveterate desire to meddle) and curiosity about the present state of a culture to which she had always been idealistically drawn. On 16 February 1813 she wrote to Lady Charlotte Campbell more speciWcally, announcing that she was coming to London to publish two works, De l’Allemagne ‘and another book I am writing at the moment, the story of my exile’,2 while to the Duchess of Devonshire she declared on 4 March: ‘I am busy writing the story of my exile from ten years ago, and this exile is linked with everything that has happened of general interest. I am merely the occasion, not the goal.’3 She also claimed, with some justice, that the dismal picture Corinne paints of provincial English life might have persuaded the natives that she would never be happy living among them, to which her reponse was always that she revered England’s traditions, ‘its liberty, its enlightenment, its morality, its religion’, and that simply breathing English air would restore and soothe her.4 Finally, on 13 July she told Graf von Lo¨wenhielm, ‘I am going to write my Dix anne´es d’exil which will make a big splash if there is still a splash to be made, that is if he [Napoleon] is not victor or vanquished’.5 1 King, ‘Correspondances sue´doises’, 31. 2 Stockholm, 16 Feb. 1813, Broglie Papers, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.280. 3 Quoted in Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 26. 4 Stockholm, 16 Feb. 1813, to Lady Charlotte Campbell, Broglie Papers, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, II.280. 5 Quoted in King, ‘Correspondances sue´doises’, 120.

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She had survived another hideous crossing by sea to reach the land of freedom. As she boarded ship at Gothenburg on 9 June en route for Harwich, she noted: ‘Terror of the sea. How fear abases. Question you ask yourself about the sacriWces you would think yourself capable of . . . Ambition: peaceful death . . . Beauty of life when you are afraid: music, nature, society, your own talents, your aVections. Remorse at being afraid. It’s not a religious enough impression.’6 Unsteady and uncertain she may have felt, but everybody wanted to see her.7 When, having reached London, she directed her carriage to Leicester Square, she found so many admirers gathered outside her hotel that she could only with diYculty advance towards the entrance.8 (She had chosen to stay at Brunet’s: many of the hotels in the square had French names, and Frenchspeaking visitors found their proximity to the not quite English life of Soho reassuring.) There she held levees over a period of several days, and seemed to be enormously enjoying her celebrity. It was the same when she attended a reception, at which ‘immense crowds gathered to see her [ . . . and] the eagerness of curiosity broke through all restraint,’ according to one witness; ‘the Wrst ladies of the kingdom stood on chairs and tables, to catch a glimpse of her dark and brilliant physiognomy’.9 Stae¨l herself wrote to the Queen of Sweden, obviously pleased despite her disclaimer: ‘You can have no idea what London life is like. I can tell you without exaggeration that I have had 300 visits in four days, twenty invitations, and at such tiring times that after spending twelve nights awake I was ill just from seeing society.’10 Thus 1813 became, to the English, the year of Madame de Stae¨l. Some also called it the year of Byron, who was to become well acquainted with the new arrival. The publication of the Wrst two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 may have made their author the toast of literary London, but he was as keen as everyone else to meet the visiting celebrity, enjoying what he described as ‘the honour of having been the Wrst among my countrymen presented at Lady Jersey’s house to Madame de Stae¨l on the very night of her arrival in London’, when he bowed ‘not the knee, but the head and heart in homage to an extraordinary and able woman driven from her own country by the most extraordinary of men’.11 The following day 6 Balaye´, Carnets, 352. 7 See Whitford, Madame de Stae¨l, 21. 8 Balaye´, Carnets, 364–5. 9 Whitford, Madame de Stae¨l, 21. 10 Balaye´, Carnets, 364–5. 11 Byron, ‘Some Recollections of My Acquaintance with Madame de Stae¨l’, Ravenna, 4 Aug. 1821, Murray’s Magazine, I (1881), 4.

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they saw each other again, at a dinner given by Sir Humphry Davy where Stae¨l also met Sheridan, the Irish statesman Henry Grattan, the Whig politician Samuel Whitbread, and the Marquess of Lansdowne.12 ‘The Wrst experimental philosopher of his own (and perhaps any other preceding time)’, Byron would write in 1821, ‘was there to receive the most celebrated of women, surrounded by the Xower of our wits, the foremost of our remaining orators and statesmen, and condescending even to invite the then youngest and, it may be, still least of our living poets.’13 If this last disclaimer seems modest, Byron’s admiration of the new arrival was also more qualiWed than his words suggest. In August 1813 he told Lady Melbourne that Stae¨l was a dramatist of her own emotions who ‘[could] not exist without a grievance—and someone to see, or read, how much grief becomes her’.14 All the same, to the English Stae¨l was a literary colossus, already celebrated as a novelist, historian of ideas, and cultural commentator (De la litte´rature had, after all, virtually created the science of comparative literature), and the London publication of De l’Allemagne would conWrm her position as a pre-eminent theorist and a leading thinker of the age. Byron, it might be felt, was by contrast simply on his way to securing an international reputation. Other factors, too, separated them, which were chiefly their apparently divergent political attitudes along with what Byron saw as Stae¨l’s self-indulgent ‘womanish’ excesses. She, equally, felt exasperated by his mocking and vaguely satanic social persona. Their further acquaintance in London removed some of these antagonisms, but exacerbated others; they would be resolved only through Byron’s own later exile, though in ways neither can have anticipated. At Wrst Stae¨l simply seemed overwhelming, bludgeoning polite society with her verbosity. ‘I saw the woman of whom I had heard marvels,’ Byron remarked: she justiWed what I had heard, but she was still a mortal and made long speeches! Nay, the very day of this philosophical feast in her honour, she made very long speeches to those who had been accustomed to hear such only in the two Houses. She interrupted Whitbread; she declaimed at Lord Lansdowne; she misunderstood Sheridan’s jokes for assent; she harangued, she lectured, she preached English politics to the Wrst of our Whig politicians, the day after her arrival in England; and (if I am not much misinformed) preached politics no less to our Tory politicians 12 See Blennerhassett, Stae¨l, III.394. On Byron and Stae¨l see also Joanna Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Stae¨l: Born to Opposition (Aldershot, etc.: Ashgate, 1999). 13 Byron, ‘Some Recollections’, 4. 14 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.94.

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the day after. The sovereign himself, if I am not in error, was not exempt from this Xow of eloquence. As Napoleon had been lectured on the destinies of France, the Prince Regent of England was asked ‘what he meant to do with America?’15

Samuel Rogers noted that Stae¨l complained of being unable to understand Byron, ‘but I believe he has not been very attentive to her. Strong feeling delights her most. The death of Clarissa, she says, comes to her constantly as one of the events of her life.’ Rogers told the poet Thomas Moore that she was ‘good-natured, very lively, and eloquent’ and that ‘She speaks English well, but not Xuently’.16 Notwithstanding that, her tongue, according to Byron, was ‘in perpetual motion’.17 ‘She declaimed at you instead of conversing with you, never pausing but to take breath; and if during that interval a rejoinder was put in, it was evident that she did not attend to it, as she resumed the thread of her discourse as if it had not been interrupted’. This observation was ‘amusing enough’, wrote Lady Blessington, ‘as we had all made nearly the same observation on him, with the exception that he listened to, and noticed, any answer made to his reXections’. ‘Madame de Stae¨l,’ Byron went on, was very eloquent when her imagination warmed (and a very little excited it); her powers of imagination were much stronger than her reasoning, perhaps owing to their being much more frequently exercised; her language was recondite, but redundant; and though always Xowery, and often brilliant, there was an obscurity that left the impression that she did not perfectly understand what she endeavoured to render intelligible to others. She was always losing herself in philosophical disquisition, and once she got entangled in the mazes of the labyrinth of metaphysics, she had no clue by which she could guide her path—the imagination that led her into her diYculties could not get her out of them; the want of a mathematical education, which might have served as a ballast to steady and help her into the port of reason, was always visible.18

Stae¨l was, of course, like most other women of her time in having been denied a mathematical education, however hard her mother had tried to make her learned, and in the 1814 preface to the Essai sur les Wctions she remarks sardonically on how well such omissions in female education suited the opposite sex: ‘People almost never deny that literary taste and literary studies are a great advantage for men, but do not agree on the inXuence 15 Byron, ‘Some Recollections’, 5. 16 See P. W. Claydon, Rogers and His Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Smith Elder, 1889), II.132, 134, 135. 17 Byron, Letter and Journals, III.160. 18 Blessington, Conversations, 22–3.

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these same studies may have on women’s destinies. If the intention is to impose domestic slavery on them, people should be wary of nourishing their intelligence, for fear that they may be tempted to revolt against such a fate.’19 The femme savante Mary Berry invited Stae¨l and ‘a few people’ to an evening reception to which she ‘came, talked, questioned, and went away again like a Xash of lightning, or rather like a torrent’.20 E´tienne Dumont, on the other hand, told Maria Edgeworth he was fearful of this plenty, having been reminded of Stae¨l’s overpowering talk and complete inattention to logic in the course of ‘two immense encyclopaedic conversations with her, where it was as though you were there, so realistically do you describe that kind of eloquence in which imagination is everything and reason such a puny thing. It’s like giving up bread and living oV champagne.’21 Berry, too, seemed comparatively unimpressed, though she would adore Stae¨l by the end of her English stay. When she visited the latter, she was ‘very much amused with her ideas of English society. She will very soon be disgusted with it: I have always prophesied that.’ A few days later Berry remarked to a friend who would shortly himself be lionized in London, Sir William Gell, ‘you have come just in time to save Madame de Stae¨l’s life, who certainly would have roared herself to death in another week’.22 In this restricted sense, however, the lionizing was reciprocal, since as Fanny Burney wrote to her brother Charles on 1 July 1813: ‘The whole talk of London is of Madame de Stae¨l, and her having lived wholly with the [Whig] opposition since her arrival—yet being invited [despite her liberal reputation] to the Prince Regent’s Grand Ball last night.’23 This may not have been particularly signiWcant, since invitations to Carlton House had been sent to almost a thousand people. Given that her loathing of Bonaparte aligned her with the Tories, it was natural enough for Stae¨l to be a focus of attention at such an establishment function; but the Whigs were a more obvious attraction despite their enthusiasm for Napoleon, so she was often to be found at the party’s strongholds of Holland House or Devonshire House. Lord Holland, Tierney, and Whitbread, its most inXuential members, were the men with whom she habitually discussed politics, and in the Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise she remarks rather inaccurately that 19 Stae¨l, Essai sur les Wctions, 38. 20 Berry, Journals, II.536. 21 See Norman King, ‘ ‘‘The Airy Form of Things Forgotten’’: Madame de Stae¨l, l’utilitarisme et l’impulsion libe´rale’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 11 (1970), 5–26, at 15. 22 Berry, Journals, II.538. 23 Burney, Journals and Letters, VII.149.

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although she knew not a soul when she arrived in England she came with conWdence because, as one persecuted by an enemy of liberty, she felt sure of a sympathetic welcome. Every English institution, she rather optimistically continued, was in harmony with her own political convictions.24 The fact that the company at Holland House was predominantly male, which Lady Holland sometimes complained about, predictably suited her too. It was, after all, apparently what gave talk there its unique quality. In a letter of 12 August 1813 about Stae¨l, Anne Romilly told Maria Edgeworth that ‘in general it is to men alone that she thinks it worthwhile to be agreeable, though I am not quite sure that agreeable is a word that properly applies to her talents’.25 Dumont reported how on one occasion she was snubbed because of this preference. She was generally at a loss, he wrote, for things to converse with women about. Finding herself one day faced with a very beautiful woman, and not knowing what to say, she began to talk to her about her diamonds, and had the indiscretion to ask her what they cost. Then suddenly— correcting herself, knowing she had blundered, ‘O pardon, Madame—it is a very indiscreet curiosity, but you know that that is a fault of our sex.’ ‘Ah Madame! curiosity! I always thought it was a fault of women!’26

Perhaps this was too crude or direct a hit. A Member of Parliament noted the same year: ‘This extraordinary woman is not so ugly as I expected from the accounts we have heard. Her eyes are extremely good, her mouth bad, but she is one of the people who improve with age. She appears extremely good-natured, careless of the society of ladies and openly showing her dislike of it, and thinking Sir James Mackintosh the most agreeable man in England.’27 Sir Henry Holland—unrelated to Lord Holland—mentioned in his diary at about this time that Stae¨l had Xattered him with attentions at a large gathering. ‘I was led to believe that she would willingly surrender something of her intellectual fame for a little more of personal beauty.’28 The unpleasant J. W. Croker, who in 1814 wrote so acidly of Burney’s The Wanderer as to suggest a deep-rooted misogyny, described his Wrst encounter with Stae¨l after she had got lost on her way to Lord Liverpool’s country seat, Coombe Wood, and arrived two hours late. His words seem Wrst to conWrm the charge of great personal plainness and then to refute it, before reasserting it via a backhanded compliment: 24 26 27 28

Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 523. 25 Romilly, Letters, 53–4. Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England 1813–1818, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford, 1971), 96. Notes and Queries, 5th ser., 1 (1874), 326. See London Quarterly Review, 132 (1872), art. VII: ‘Sir Henry Holland’s Recollections’.

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She was ugly, and not of an intellectual ugliness. Her features were coarse, and the ordinary expression rather vulgar, she had an ugly mouth and one or two irregularly prominent teeth, which perhaps gave her countenance an habitual gaiety. Her eye was full, dark and expressive; and when she declaimed, which was almost whenever she spoke, she looked eloquent, and one forgot that she was plain. On the whole, she was singularly unfeminine, and if in conversation one forgot that she was ugly, one also forgot that she was a woman. . . . During dinner she talked incessantly, but admirably, but several of her apparently spontaneous mots were borrowed or prepared.29

This was, of course, entirely familiar disparagement. The Austrian diplomat Wessenberg, who spent some time with Stae¨l when he was posted in London in 1813, observed: Nature blundered in making the author of Corinne a woman. Her frame was roughhewn, her whole build massive; her only handsome feature was her eyes, which radiated genius. Her dark hair added to the harshness of her aspect. Despite that, there was something attractive about her face; everything in her exuded goodnaturedness and benevolence . . . In conversation she never alluded to her works. Yet she longed for renown, for glory; her ardent soul gave her no rest; she wanted to be part of the world’s destiny; she was anxious to have her own page in the history of her century, but she wanted all that without damaging anyone’s selfrespect. This feeling of humanity penetrated every impulse of her ambition.30

He added that what spoiled her life was her love of celebrity; the fame her writings assured her was not enough. ‘She desperately wanted political fame.’ Her misfortune was perhaps to have been brought up in Paris and to have spent her youth in the salon of a father who also wanted his part of glory.31 And yet, he said, Stae¨l pined for love. ‘For Madame de Stae¨l aVection was a feeling so real, the need for an attachment so positive, that no woman was ever less coquettish.’32 For one of her greatest admirers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stae¨l’s lack of womanliness was a more positive strength. In her childhood Barrett despised nearly all the women in the world apart from her—‘she could not abide their littlenesses called delicacies, their pretty headaches, and soft mincing voices, their nerves and aVectations . . . One word she hated in her

29 The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Rt. Hon. John Wilson Croker, ed. Louis L. Jennings, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1884), I.300–2. 30 Quoted in Norman King, ‘Souvenirs sur Madame de Stae¨l par le baron de Wessenberg’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 22 (1977), 45–53, at 48. 31 Ibid. 49. 32 Ibid. 48.

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soul, and the word was ‘‘feminine’’ ’.33 It was precisely Stae¨l’s lack of femininity, however, that Byron could not abide. ‘I saw [Curran] presented to Madame de Stae¨l,’ he noted; ‘ . . . It was the great conXuence between the Rhone and the Saoˆne; and they were both so d . . . d ugly that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken respectively such residence.’34 Had Stae¨l been a man, he would no doubt have overlooked her appearance and, possibly, her behaviour in society and acknowledged her as his equal, but since she was a woman he expected her to behave and appear like one. It must have seemed to many observers as if Stae¨l’s third English trip was little more than a series of social appearances and performances, a set of opportunities for the latest curiosity to be displayed and wondered at, particularly as her political opinions—despite what she says in the Conside´rations—were often regarded as irrelevant or misguided. Mary Berry was anxious to please and impress even against the odds of Stae¨l’s well-known prejudices. ‘I really want to keep up the credit of our sex with her, which, between ourselves, en fait d’agre´ments d’esprit, I know is not very high in her opinion. She expected our women to be more superior, and our men less so.’35 Others were obviously jealous. Lady Holland grumpily observed to Lord Lansdowne: Madame de Stae¨l continues still the nine days wonder. She is certainly very clever, but also very tiresome. One of the wittiest dialogues, in which however she only supplied the topics, and was the cause of wit in others, occurred here at dinner between her and Lord Wellesley, whom she attacked for his speech on the Swedish Treaty. Congreve could not have written a better scene. He parried inimitably well all her political queries and Xowery harangues. She laughed very much on the wrong side of her mouth, as she has a mortal aversion to pleasantry in any shape.36

Emma Allen, the future sister-in-law of Simonde de Sismondi, reported that Sir James Mackintosh thought Stae¨l looked as if she suspected the smile that was passing over the face of the company and acknowledged her ignorance of that kind of warfare by turning to him and saying: ‘Ah! it is so easy to catch me out!’37 Her imperfect understanding of British politics was certainly 33 Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I.xxxvii. 34 Quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.140. 35 Berry, Journals, III.4. 36 Bowood Papers, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.96. 37 Emma Darwin, A Century of Family Letters, ed. Henrietta LitchWeld, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1915), I.35.

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mocked, particularly by the Whigs, and sometimes attributed to her wellknown elitism, including the liking for monarchies that sat rather ill with her professed but strictly qualiWed republicanism. On the other hand, much the same criticism could have been levelled at Byron, who perfectly manifested what has been described as an eighteenth-century notion of liberalism consisting in ‘a revolt against tyranny which might even go as far as republicanism, but which envisioned an artistic or gentlemanly leadership’, and involved ‘distrust of the mob and lack of sympathy for democratic or proletarian, or even middle-class, control or participation in government’.38 As for Stae¨l, Lady Holland reported that the Regent ‘paid her a visit of two hours, in which she was perfectly convinced of the purity of his motives in returning his present ministers, and was even touched to tears at the Wlial piety of his feelings . . . [Stae¨l suggested] that indiVerence to royal ministers had brought about the French Revolution, especially towards the Queen— a good line from her, who took such a personal line herself.’39 Meanwhile Lord Holland wrote to his sister: We have seen Madame de Stae¨l. To quote one of my poor uncle Dick’s phrases, she is un peu complimenteuse, il me semble. Sheridan and she sat Xummerying one another for an hour yesterday at supper at Lord Bessborough’s. Her topics were his moral principles, good heart, etc. etc., and his, I conclude, were her beauty and youth . . . With all that she is, I believe, a very good-hearted woman, and everybody knows she is a very clever one.40

It was not, perhaps, generally known that she had herself come to England with more reservations about her likely reception than those who were acquainted with her natural Anglophilia might have imagined. On 29 June 1813 she wrote to Rocca: ‘I have seen quantities of ladies and some Wgures of men, but whether because of my problems with the language or the uniformity of their manners, I recognize almost none of them, and what I feel more than anything is boredom . . . Everything here is less unnerving, but also less agreeable than I imagined . . . ’41 And although she told Schlegel on 2 July that she had been received like a princess, ‘there is such a crowd, such a quantity of women, such great monotony in society that it dulls me rather than entertains me . . . The fact is that I am sad and discouraged . . . What is surprising is that everyone will tell you that I am given the most delightful 38 See Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (London: Century Hutchinson, 1971), 321. 39 Bowood Papers, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.97. 40 Ibid. 97–8. 41 Quoted in Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 447.

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reception, yet all I seem to see is a sea of faces that all look the same.’ Auguste and Albertine were also bored, she informed Schlegel in another letter, and she herself was far from enjoying London life; ‘but I attribute this impression to your absence’, which was no doubt untrue.42 Some thought that she was paying the country a visit simply to conWrm the prejudices she already had, not to further some grand political scheme or gather more anti-Napoleonic ammunition. She had imbibed an uncritical devotion to the English political constitution from her father, and loudly proclaimed the value of that liberty she had seen Wrst the Convention, then Napoleon’s despotism, wrest away from the French. When at one of the dinners given by Sir Humphry and Lady Davy the talk took a political turn, as it characteristically did when Stae¨l was present, Sir Humphry alluded to the loss of liberty in England itself. She made the celebrated reply: ‘And you count for nothing the freedom to say that, even in front of the servants!’ (without, apparently, wondering whether servants ought to exist in a free country). Lady Davy had been right, however, in imagining that she would be a useful, if unbiddable, addition to her salon, a forum she had instituted as much out of ambition to rival others (such as that of Holland House) as from the disinterested desire to cultivate the polite arts in a civilized and European way. Byron, pursuing a risque´ relationship with his halfsister Augusta Leigh after four years’ separation, and beginning to take a provocative pleasure in being seen publicly with her, tried to tempt her into attending Lady Davy’s gatherings with the prospect of seeing Stae¨l there. Maria Fanshawe, present at a Davy ‘soire´e mondaine’ to which both Stae¨l and Byron had been invited, excitedly reported: I have just stayed in London long enough to get a sight of the last imported lion, Madame de Stae¨l; but it was a sight worth twenty peeps through ordinary show boxes, being the longest and most entertaining dinner at which I ever in my life was present. The party being very small, her conversation was for the beneWt of all who had ears to hear and even my imperfect organ lost little of the discourse: happy if memory had served me with as much Wdelity; for had the whole discourse been written without a syllable of correction, it would be diYcult to name a dialogue so full of eloquence and wit. Eloquence is a great word, but not too big for her. She speaks as she writes, and upon this occasion she was inspired by indignation, Wnding herself between two opposition spirits who gave full play to all her energies . . . 43

But of course this eloquence could appear quite overpowering: as another witness remarked on 2 November: ‘No Englishman’s ideas could move at 42 Ibid. 448, 460.

43 Byron, ‘Some Recollections’, 6.

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the rate of her tongue.’44 If Stae¨l judged so many of the English to be poor conversationalists, it was not merely that they could never aspire to an art which, as Burney had concluded at Mickleham, the French had raised to such dizzying heights, but also because she steamrollered anyone who dared to tussle with her—though Wellesley was an exception—or simply gave the impression of being uninterruptable. This oVended not only the native principle of fair play, but also the hallowed tradition of companionable silence described by Rousseau in La Nouvelle He´loı¨se45 and Ferri di San Costante in Londres et les Anglais’.46 No other nation, it was said, was so fearful of wasting words, or as ready to assume that taciturnity conveyed a kind of wisdom. The Napoleonic propagandist Fie´ve´e was so startled by the silence the British preserved as they went about their daily business that he constantly felt the need to oVer them his condolences on whatever disaster had robbed them of the power of speech, while even the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall, founded for cosmopolitans, greeted Talleyrand with a ‘taciturnite´ toute anglaise’.47 Stae¨l, however, liked nothing better than a good harangue. Jessie Allen, later Sismondi’s wife, remarked on an acquaintance’s experience of hearing her perform in this style, which was her favourite and best mode of showing herself. In common conversing, he told us, she appeared like any other clever woman, but in one of these harangues there is such a burst of feeling, such eloquent language, and such deep thought, and so much action, that it is the most extraordinary and interesting thing he has ever witnessed. Her subjects, he said, were invectives against Napoleon, praise of Bernadotte, the state of Europe, and above all the happiness of Englishmen.48

This range of topics conWrmed the unchanging set of political principles she had been touting about Europe since the start of her exile. Even after being worsted by Wellesley, according to Emma Allen, ‘she stood up and harangued for half an hour against peace in the style of the ‘‘Regicide Peace’’ ’. Lord Holland was, at least on this occasion, not amongst the admirers, and when Stae¨l had gone away he declared that ‘she was the most presumptuous woman he had ever met with’. She had committed the crime of breaching

44 45 46 47 48

Quoted in King, ‘Airy Nothings’, 16. The ‘matine´e a` l’anglaise’: see Rousseau, La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, in Œuvres, II.557–8. Ferri di San Costante, Londres, I.234. See Langford, Englishness, 178, 180. Darwin, Letters, I.32–3.

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the rigid code of etiquette that deemed ‘proper’ women to be unpolitical and rightly conWned within the domestic sphere. Others who refused to be dazzled by the Stae¨lian eloquence sometimes conWrmed Croker’s observation that her speechifying was prepared, though there was nothing particularly unusual or reprehensible about deploying some ready-made material in this way: favoured speakers rarely conversed completely impromptu, and guests such as Sydney Smith, Samuel Smiles, and Henry Luttrell knew that their function on these occasions was to perform. It may seem a little ironic that Stae¨l, herself a mistress of solo discourse, should have criticized Samuel Taylor Coleridge for his own habit in this respect when she met him: ‘He is very great in monologue, but he has no idea of dialogue.’ Her friend Gibbon, too, who had honed his skills in French-speaking salons, had a method of delivery that often discouraged the exchange of ideas or even any response at all. Most listeners still acknowledged that they were in the presence of a star. Stae¨l was a major catch for society hostesses, whose guests were often invited principally to give tone to an evening’s discourse, though her loquacity sometimes reduced listeners to desperation. When she visited Blenheim, then inhabited by the great-grandson of the most famous Duke of Marlborough, she encountered an eccentric old man who, in order to avoid having to address his wife, had maintained a total silence for years. Despite being warned that even if presented to him she would not be spoken to, Stae¨l decided to confront his wordlessness face-on. When they were introduced she complimented him on his palace and family and asked dozens of questions. After an hour listening to her monologue the duke rang for his servants, frantically crying: ‘Let me out!’49 For such admirers as Mary Berry, though, it was evidently diVerent. In early January 1814: ‘The streets were so full of snow, and it continued to fall so thick, that I would not take the servants and horses out. At about four o’clock Madame de Stae¨l arrived [at Curzon Street], saying it was beautiful weather to pay visits, put her feet upon the fender, and stayed talking with me for nearly an hour. Her conversation always excites me.’50 Her address during the winter months was 31 Argyll Street (as it was then numbered), oV Regent Street, on the site of what was until recently Dickens & Jones. The previous August she had decamped from her summer quarters in George Street, Hanover Square, to a rented house in Richmond, her 49 Balaye´, Carnets, 390.

50 Berry, Journals, III.2.

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departure possibly hastened by some terrible news. Byron mentioned it waspishly in a letter to Lady Melbourne: Madame de Stae¨l’s favourite son has had his head cleft by a vile Adjutant who knew the broadsword exercise better than piquet . . . Corinne is doubtless very much aVected—yet methinks—I should conjecture—she will want some spectators to testify how graceful her grief will be—and to relate what Wne things she can say on a subject where commonplace mourners will be silent.—Do I err in my judgement of the woman think you?51

It might have been predicted that Albert would come to no good. Always wild in comparison with Auguste, he had disobeyed orders to await Bernadotte (who had given him a commission in the Hussars) in Stralsund in late April, going instead to Hamburg and behaving, as Schlegel told Stae¨l, like Harry Hotspur, gambling and debauching himself with such ferocity that one observer predicted a premature end.52 Bernadotte punished him lightly, and in July Albert went on leave in the Baltic resort of Doberan, where his misdemeanours continued. They culminated in his being challenged to a duel by a Russian oYcer, who with no further ado virtually beheaded him. Outwardly his mother continued living more or less as normal. Mary Berry described her peripatetic existence in a letter to the indisposed Lady Hardwicke: ‘The said Stae¨l is still at Richmond until the end of the month [of September], when her torrent of words and ideas will no longer Xow into the Thames, but turn its course towards London, and then to Lord Lansdowne’s, and then it is StaVordshire, and then—‘‘to Nova Zembla and the Lord knows where’’; but still she sticks to being at Wimpole [Hall, in Cambridgeshire] the middle of November.’53 She was also proposing to visit the Lansdownes at Bowood that month, Berry continued, but ‘I stick to my intention of meeting her . . . I trust and hope long before that time to have better accounts of your voice; but if you must still be deprived of it, there cannot certainly be a more convenient visit to a dumb woman than Madame de Stae¨l’. The idea that the gothic peoples of the north were forced to engage in introverted brooding by the raw, gloomy climate and their consequent domestic conWnement, contrasted with the outgoing, freely sociable ways of the south, is not one that Stae¨l develops in De la litte´rature, though it 51 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.86–7. 52 See Herold, Mistress, 437–8. 53 Berry, Journals, II.541.

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would be implied in Corinne and De l’Allemagne; but it may explain something of the boredom she often experienced in England. A further cause, it was sometimes said, was the Puritanical attitude of the natives to such institutions as the Sabbath. Only in England, surely, could Vige´e Le Brun’s friend Lady Mary Bentinck have been threatened by the stones of the mob for giving Sunday evening concerts and suppers at her house in Piccadilly. (Nietzsche would later remark on the economic calculation that underlay this attitude, the intention so to hallow and begloom Sunday that Englishmen unconsciously hankered for their working week again.)54 Another institution engendering comparable frustration, according to Louis Simond’s diary of a stay in England in 1810, was the deadly rout. ‘People never sit down; there is no conversation, cards or music; people elbow each other, go from room to room, and after a quarter of an hour you escape to the entrance to wait for your coach. You spend more time at the front door with the servants than you do upstairs with their masters. From one rout you set oV for another where you . . . begin the same routine.’55 It would all have looked the height of perversity to someone used to the Paris monde, though Stae¨l’s professional interest in what made cultures diVerent from each other may have palliated the tedium of such social institutions. Baron de Baert’s Tableau de la Grande-Bretagne of 1800 simply calls these baZing gatherings ‘crowds’, and sees in their cramped, dead silence an image of the English nation itself, trapped inside its stiXing taciturnity.56 When an Englishman remarked to Vige´e Le Brun at about the same time: ‘How amusing these occasions are!’, she replied that what amused the English was torment to the French.57 Nonetheless, such functions enabled one to meet the best English society. The vogue for routs seems to have peaked at about the time Stae¨l was in England, but remained unfathomable to all outside observers. Among the most fashionable in London were those held by Lady Hertford at Manchester House (the present home of the Wallace Collection, and now known as Hertford House) in Manchester Square; others had been given by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the gloomy, opulent, now-demolished urban counterpart of Chatsworth. Designed by Kent and built around 1737 at a cost 54 Nietzsche, ‘The English on Sunday’, in Beyond Good and Evil, Works, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Helen Zimmern, 18 vols. (London and New York: Allen & Unwin, 1909–13 ), XII.109. 55 Balaye´, Carnets, 360. 56 Baron de Baert, Tableau de la Grande-Bretagne, 4 vols. (Paris: H. J. Jansen, 1800), IV.181. 57 Vige´e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, II.122.

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of over £20,000, it was the resort of London’s beaux esprits as well as the Whig Opposition. Stae¨l seems to have met the Duchess at some point, but not during this stay: she had died in 1806. The Duke then married his long-time mistress and Georgiana’s dear friend Lady Elizabeth (Bess) Foster. The type of sociability she encountered in England might have seemed less provoking to one whose intentions were apparently not simply to mingle with the well-born during her various spells abroad, but to garner impressions about diVerent cultural worlds, and where appropriate to use them as blueprints for mapping a more enlightened European future. But if Stae¨l’s energy had not made routs rebarbative to her, her sheer opinionatedness, which antagonized many English acquaintances, would certainly have done. Jessie Allen said that Talleyrand was not the only person to be ‘si fatigue´ d’esprit’ in her company: ‘There are a few already that venture to laugh, one or two that acknowledge she tires them, and some that prophesy that in the long run Madame de Stae¨l would be tiresome.’58 She oVended people further by her social awkwardness and tactlessness. She was, Lord Byron told Lady Blessington, too much occupied with self, and often said the most mal a` propos things, because she was thinking, not of the person she addressed, but of herself. She had a party to dine with her one day in London, when Sir James and Lady —— [Mackintosh] entered the drawing-room, the lady dressed in a green gown, with a shawl of the same verdant hue, and a bright red turban. Madame de Stae¨l marched up to her in her eager manner and exclaimed, ‘Ah, mon Dieu, miladi! comme vous ressemblez a` un perroquet!’ The poor lady looked confounded: the company tried, but in vain, to suppress the smiles the observation excited . . . 59

Yet this was the Stae¨l whose own poor dress sense was celebrated, and who in De l’Allemagne, published during this same London visit, develops in a discussion of conversation the idea of a necessary tact, the ability to perceive clearly on the countenance of the person addressed the impression of what one has just said, so avoiding giving oVence or wounding vanity. The Boigne memoirs draw attention to this anomaly in her character, a mind so attuned to sociability, yet her whole being completely lacking sensitivity. She never, Boigne observes, took account of the nature of her audience as she spoke, and without having the least intention to confuse or

58 Darwin, Letters, I.40.

59 Blessington, Conversations, 213.

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wound chose subjects for conversation, or ways of speaking, that were the most likely to oVend or discomWt her interlocutors. On one such occasion she publicly asked the Countess, whose marital diYculties were well known, whether she thought a woman could behave well when she lacked all sympathy for her husband. Another time she held forth to Madame de Caumont, who had a rather fast reputation, on the impossibility for a woman who was not pure and chaste to be a good mother—a matter on which she herself might surely have been embarrassed to pronounce. But, Boigne continues, rather than forgetting her own situation she regarded herself as a being apart, whose genius permitted deviations from the moral code that were unacceptable in ordinary people.60 It was an awkward position to defend when one was known to have been exiled in part because of one’s imprudence. More dispassionately, some saw her as a person who invited censure through her multiple breaches of etiquette. Maria Edgeworth reports on Stae¨l’s visit that year to Bowood, a place where the Whig Opposition could rally and where liberal measures such as Catholic emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade could be discussed. The poet Bowles sprained his shoulder in an accident as he was riding there to dine, but doughtily insisted on continuing his journey. When Stae¨l complimented him on the fact, he replied: ‘Oh Ma’am, say no more about it, for I would have done far more to see so great a curiosity.’ Lord Lansdowne said that it would have been impossible to describe the expression of shock on Stae¨l’s face—‘her breathless astonishment’—and the total change produced in her opinion of the man and her manner towards him. She said afterwards to her host: ‘I perceive that he is only a cure´ without common sense—although a great poet.’ She never forgot it.61 Two years later she spoke of the occasion to Lord Lansdowne in Geneva and wondered how it was possible that un tel homme could exist, which suggests the lack of self-knowledge that people would comment on throughout her life. On one occasion, again at Bowood, Lord Bathurst, Secretary for War and the Colonies, was awaiting news from Wellington. A red dispatch box was brought to him, and the whole company retreated—with the exception of Stae¨l. She followed him to the window seat on which he had taken refuge, eagerly asking: ‘What is it about, Milord?’ His Lordship, Maria Edgeworth reports, ‘was surprised and

60 Boigne, Me´moires, I.174.

61 Edgeworth, Letters From England, 96.

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shocked almost beyond the power of diplomatic answer and complained indignantly afterwards about this want of good breeding’.62 Unaware that she had blundered, Stae¨l thoroughly enjoyed her stay with the Lansdownes. ‘Bowood,’ she jotted in her notebooks: ‘The charming countryside in England. The perfection of an English chateau. The grounds are vast, and you sense the power of the great English lords.’63 Lady Romilly, who reported that Stae¨l was ‘frankness itself, and has an excellent heart’, also said that she spent a brilliant fortnight there. Dumont, who had been living in England since 1791, and who was then acting as tutor to the Marquess of Lansdowne’s children, simply commented that it had been a fortnight dominated for good and ill by her: Madame de Stae¨l was in her full lustre . . . Alone among us in her attacks on Locke, on utility, on Benthamist classiWcation and deWnitions, accusing us of killing the religious spirit, imagination, poetry, enthusiasm for the good and beautiful, of reducing men to vile arithmetical machines, and cheating them in the moral sphere by telling them that virtue was the same thing as happiness, she astounded us with the weakness of her reasoning and the vivacity of her eloquence. Tolerably good logicians were embarrassed to penetrate this confusion of ideas and Wnd a guiding thread to direct their answer. Well, sad utilitarianism will live longer than brilliant enthusiasm. When you see all the German jargon in her third volume [of De l’Allemagne], you will think you are in Bedlam where the wise have become mad. But philosophical madness is the most incurable kind.64

No doubt there was truth in this, but the summary betrays too many of the stereotypical judgements men passed (and pass) on ambitious women to stand as a fair overall comment. It pinpoints the qualities that made statesmen fear Stae¨l as well as mock her, and its verdict on De l’Allemagne ignores all the evidence the book presents of its author’s good sense and, in particular, her ability to comprehend and redeploy material in a way that was genuinely enlightening, far exceeding the operations of so-called ‘female’ reproduction. In other words, Dumont’s summary simply rehearses the commonplaces that have traditionally been used to deWne—negatively—one sex’s diVerence from the other. De l’Allemagne certainly waxes eloquent on the Romanticism of German imaginative writing and thought; but that is precisely its point, and has nothing to do with womanish weakness. Nowhere does Stae¨l sacriWce common sense to poetic enthusiasm; Ticknor’s account of her encounter with Fichte, indeed, reveals the opposite. Part of what 62 Edgeworth, Letters From England, 96. 64 Quoted in King, ‘Airy Nothings’, 17.

63 Balaye´, Carnets, 375.

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irritated those who were hostile towards her enterprise, moreover, was often enough the evidence of her sheer good sense. It was easy to make an intellectual magpie look disreputable, or at least try to humiliate her by maintaining that, like every magpie, and every woman, she took whatever had already been made or worked out (such as Fichte’s laboriously constructed theory of the self) and recycled it; but it is hard to see what would have been preferable in a synthetic account of German thought and writing such as De l’Allemagne. In any case, where Stae¨l comprehensively demolished a male intellectual position something more impressive was clearly at work—perhaps just a highly intelligent pedagogical instinct, but at other times naked creative intelligence. Dumont’s friend Maria Edgeworth was more tolerant of the overall Stae¨lian enterprise, at least in certain respects, but although she ‘never never regretted not seeing any person as much as [she] regretted missing an opportunity of being acquainted with that transcendent genius, that generous-hearted woman’,65 she felt the same reservations as Burney. (Samuel Rogers thought that Stae¨l had timed her arrival in London to coincide with Edgeworth’s departure, fearing odious comparisons. Auguste heard this remark while his mother was in the antechamber, and remonstrated with him.)66 To Dumont Edgeworth conWded: ‘My father seems to think that if I had heard her, I should have been fascinated by her genius, eloquence, sensibility. But, in this instance, I think he is mistaken in his judgement of me. Not all ‘‘the talents she possesses’’, nor yet her generosity and magnanimity, would ever make me forget ‘‘all the virtues she wants’’—I could never make a friendship without certain indispensable prerequisites’67—a standard ‘female’ version, then, of the ‘male’ reservations her correspondent voices. Old Edgeworth was said in 1813 to be enraged with the reception Stae¨l received, saying that it rendered valueless what the ‘pure Maria Edgeworth’ was accorded.68 If Madame de Stae¨l hears this, Jessie Allen conWded to her sister, ‘she will not, as she intended, go to Edgeworthtown in her tour through Ireland; and that she will hear it there is no doubt, as she has very ready ears’.69 But the projected trip to Ireland never took place, any more than a planned visit to Scotland. At least Stae¨l had spared the sensibilities of some of her hosts by packing Rocca oV to Bath as soon as he arrived, though that was partly so that he could be treated with the spa waters. 65 Ibid. 14. 66 Romilly, Letters, 91. 68 Darwin, Letters, I.46. 69 Ibid.

67 King, ‘Airy Nothings’, 15.

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If her general excessiveness and apparent lack of self-consciousness made it easy to mock, Stae¨l’s invariable good-nature discouraged it. Sometimes it seemed that people expected her brilliance even as they disapproved of her conduct, so unconsciously invoking the real nature of her dual exile as would-be opposition politician and aberrant female. It was inevitable that their evaluation of her behaviour would be tempered by an awareness of her dazzling gifts, the e´clat she knew she had to preserve in her banishment from France in order to function as a purposive being. On 7 December 1813 Mary Berry reported dining at Lord StaVord’s with Stae¨l, Albertine, and Auguste; Sir James and Lady Mackintosh were also present, and in the course of the evening other guests arrived, making an agreeable soire´e. But at dinner the conversation ‘rather Xagged. Madame de Stae¨l was not excited enough; it appeared to me that she only wanted that to be as brilliant as usual, though she had today received the news of the death of comte Louis de Narbonne’.70 (He had died in the retreat from Moscow at Torgau, having been appointed lieutenant-general in the Grande Arme´e.) If the Wnal clause seems like an afterthought, it is perhaps because many of those present did not know the secret that had so shocked the bien-pensant English in 1793, though Berry was not among them. ‘One must acknowledge that one could not lose an old lover more gaily, as it was said of Charles VIII and his kingdom.’ Not everyone, clearly, did think Stae¨l gay. How could she have been? She had lost Narbonne’s son Albert only months previously, and perhaps the father mattered still more to her. Burney wrote to Mrs Waddington, ‘I have no conception how she will endure such a blow’.71 Stae¨l endured as she did other losses, not hysterically as at her father’s death, not demonstratively (despite Byron’s unkind remark), but with a sense of the world’s shifting, its assuming patterns that hurt her. Mary Berry had Wrst met Stae¨l as a young woman in Lausanne, where the budding writer was, ‘to her utter surprise’, cold-shouldered by the resident English ‘for the boldness of her manners’. To add to this negativity, Berry’s reXections on Delphine in 1803 suggested mistrust, along with dislike.Yet in November 1813, referring to Stae¨l’s round of social engagements in town, she mentions her ‘very agreeable dinners and soire´es, with two or three women and half a dozen men—dont elle se charge toute seule’. She is always an entertaining presence, Berry concludes, ‘and I, who know her so much and 70 Berry, Journals, II.546. 71 Burney, Journals and Letters, VII.206.

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so well, will add always good-natured and never me´chante’.72 Some months later she tried to spend some time alone with Stae¨l away from the pull of society: I left her at the door, and not without emotion; but emotion is not what she excites, nor what she feels (except momentarily). She does not dwell long enough upon anything; life, characters, and even feelings pass before her eyes like a magic lantern. She spends herself upon paper, and runs through the world to see all, and to say all—to excite herself, and to give it all back to the world, and to the society from whence she has drawn it.73

Does this do justice to her intellectual creativeness or profundity? No mere popularizer could have written De l’inXuence des passions, De la litte´rature, or De l’Allemagne, however much second-hand material the last two contain: to assemble diVerent sorts of evidence, adapt them, and set them forth eVectively required a powerful and subtle mind. Her outstanding strength lay in her ability to change the course of cultural thought by seeing which philosophies, arts, and customs were particularly adapted to a new age, and then presenting them to the right audience. Interpreted in this light, Berry’s verdict on Stae¨l, who declared that ‘she loved [Berry] the best, and thought [her] by far the cleverest woman in England’,74 appears a profound and dispassionate evaluation. The admiration she felt for Berry’s intellect is the more surprising, perhaps, in light of the general absence of any real salon tradition in England comparable to that of France, even consular and imperial France. The rule of self-interest associated with the new order of parvenus and money-men by people nostalgic for the ancien re´gime had not prevented the French from consorting with each other socially in an elegant way: there were still drawing-rooms where concerts were held and where talk centred on literature and art rather than material concerns. What did early nineteenthcentury London have in comparison with this? True, there were the gatherings organized by Lady Davy, the Curzon Street society of the Misses Berry themselves (who often lit the lamp over their front door), and the regular soire´es and dinners at Holland House, along with the Devonshire House parties. But it seemed little to one who had known the douceur de vivre of pre-Revolutionary France.

72 Berry, Journals, II.545. 73 Ibid., III.12–13. 74 Ibid. 13.

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If Holland House gave the lie to Stae¨l’s celebrated assertion in the Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise that ‘in England women never involve themselves in discussion alone; men have not accustomed them to take part in general conversation [and] when they [women] have left the dining-room this conversation becomes all the more lively and animated’,75 it was probably because only bold ladies were in attendance, Lady Holland being a divorcee. As a young woman unhappily married to a much older man, Sir GeoVrey Webster, she had roved the continent on the lookout for adventure, accompanied by Byron’s ‘hack whore of the last century’ Lady Bessborough, Georgiana Devonshire’s sister and the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb. She had aVairs with other aristocratic men before Wnding and settling upon Lord Holland, who took her back as his prize to England. In 1831 Macaulay would call her ‘a bold-looking woman, with the remains of a Wne Wgure and the air of Queen Elizabeth. A great lady, fanciful, hysterical and hypochondriacal, ill-natured and good-natured, sceptical and superstitious, afraid of ghosts and not of God—would not for the world begin a journey on a Friday morning and thought nothing of running away from her [Wrst] husband.’76 Lady Holland’s stated belief that ‘all women of a certain age and in a situation to achieve it should take to politics’77 can only have struck a chord with Stae¨l, which did not make the women any fonder of each other. Talleyrand’s judgement on the Englishwoman was damning: ‘She places an assertion, and its proof is her secret. She Xings out observations, but does not develop them. She pretends to know everything, because that gives her importance, and when she does not know she invents.’78 It is the same allegation of approximation, illogicality, and speciousness as was regularly made in connection with Stae¨l’s approach to matters of the mind, and as crudely dismissive. She was a despot whom Lady William Russell called Lucrezia Holland; Sydney Smith, an habitue´ of Holland House, asserted that London apothecaries sold pills especially for people who had been frightened by its hostess; but the amiable Lord Holland soothed those whose feathers she had ruZed. It was said, however, that only he loved her. Her hero-worship of Napoleon of course made her politics unacceptable to Stae¨l: when he was captive on Elba she supplied him with newspapers, while on St Helena he 75 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 556. 76 Quoted in Leslie Mitchell, Holland House (London: Duckworth, 1980), 18. 77 Ibid. 21. 78 Ibid. 22.

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received delicacies from her through the Colonial OYce. (The ‘pruneaux de Madame Holland’ were almost the last such treat he asked for.)79 She ordered foodstuVs for her own purposes by similar means, levying contributions of Wsh and game from the owners of salmon rivers and grouse moors. A half-sheep was once left at the Brussels Foreign OYce marked ‘very urgent’: the clerks, mistaking it for a bundle of dispatches, forwarded it by special messenger to London, care of Holland House.80 She could be brutal to the dinner guests who sat at her invariably crowded table, peremptorily ordering Luttrell on one occasion, ‘make room’. ‘It will have to be made,’ he replied, ‘for it does not exist.’81 On another evening she dismissed the poet Rogers from the table with: ‘Go away, there is something on your handkerchief I do not quite like.’82 When rail travel arrived she made Brunel restrict the speed of the train from Chippenham, which she caught after a visit to Bowood, to less than 20 miles per hour, to the great indignation of her fellow-travellers. Accustomed to dominate and get her own way, she might have felt that she had met her match with the egotistical Stae¨l; but Stae¨l’s good-nature marked a diVerence between them, and Lady Holland’s admittedly fading looks another. It was natural, in these circumstances, that the claims of distinguished women should be discussed by the habitue´s of Holland House. Only three women writers were accorded the accolade of excellence there: Sappho, Madame de Se´vigne´, and Stae¨l herself. Lady Holland, however, disagreed about the last, which meant that another topic for conversation had quickly to be found.83 The hostess had an ally in Sheridan, of whom Byron remarked that he had seen him quiz Stae¨l (or, elsewhere, iron her), along with cutting up Whitbread and annihilating Colman. This Sheridan was a broken man when Byron knew him, though still capable of putting down Monk Lewis; in later years ‘he got drunk very thoroughly and very soon’.84 Those who found Lady Holland diYcult were unable to resist her husband, for ‘nothing can be more perfectly natural, good-natured, moderate or cheerful’,85 according to Lord Minto (Sir Gilbert Elliot). In 1805 he described Lady Holland as ‘grown very fat, but otherwise just as she was, that is, domineering and pitiless’. (Byron, however, held her in high esteem, adding that ‘Holland’s society is very good, you always see someone or 79 80 82 84

Lloyd Sanders, The Holland House Circle, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1908), 41–2. Ibid. 67. 81 Ibid. 66. Mitchell, Holland House, 32. 83 Sanders, Holland House, 94. Ibid. 117–18. 85 Ibid. 125.

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other in it worth knowing’.)86 Sir Humphry Davy, a frequent guest, was thought to have had his head rather turned by professional success, which brought a knighthood with it; he became fashionable enough to be invited to many other grand houses besides Holland House, often going from laboratory to dinner-party in such a hurry that he had no time to change, simply putting fresh linen on top of what he already had on (and sometimes appearing with Wve layers of shirts as a consequence). The vivacity of his wife won Stae¨l’s approval, perhaps because, like Lady Holland, she seemed untypical of her sex. But company like hers was common enough at Holland House, where between 1799 and 1840 almost anyone who was anything in politics, science, or literature was a guest.87 The focus on British foreign policy at discussions there must have seemed laudable in principle to Stae¨l, even if its Whiggish interpretation sometimes displeased her. When Byron remarked, ‘I don’t like her politics—at least, her having changed them’,88 he was referring to her apparent abandonment of the kind of liberalism the Whigs represented, as well as her disaVection with Napoleon. Not for nothing, after all, was Lord Holland the nephew of the great Whig politician Charles James Fox. But at least the Hollands were Francophiles who celebrated the pursuit of liberty against tyranny. Apart from the fact that it was royal tyranny they deplored—they detested the absolute monarchy of France—this philosophy matched that of Stae¨l, whose own royalism was qualiWed: she mocked Louis XVIII without being quite as dismayed as Holland House at his restoration in 1814, and was certainly made as uneasy as they were by the waging of a war against the entire French people in the name of toppling a single individual, Napoleon. Nor were the members of the Holland House set hostile towards her elitist republicanism, given their assumption, which resembled hers, that government was best left in the hands of experienced and ancient families because the masses lacked the ability to reach mature and informed opinions and were unworthy of being entrusted with the complex and diYcult task of running the country. Yet the fact that she was a victim of Napoleonic persecution meant that Stae¨l was also looked on with favour by the Regent and the Tory ministry. Undoubtedly this created diYculties between her and those (liberal) English to whom she was instinctively most drawn. 86 Quoted in Sanders, Holland House, 213. 87 Princess Marie Liechtenstein, Holland House, 3rd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1875), 97. 88 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.227.

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Whatever their private opinions about Stae¨l’s merit as a writer, the artistic tastes of the Holland House set were largely conservative, Wrmly grounded in the Augustan age of the eighteenth century and inclined to reject most of what came after. Despite the fact that they cultivated a generation of authors who were themselves modernists—Scott, Dickens, Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton—they disliked most of the new age’s productions, loathing Jane Austen and seemingly never reading the Bronte¨s. They made an exception, however, for Byron, possibly in part because his fame was tainted or enhanced, depending on point of view, by the same hint of scandal as made decent ladies avoid Holland House. Byron himself regularly managed to enrage Stae¨l by casting some doubt on the extent of her persecution by Napoleon. ‘I cannot believe that Napoleon was acquainted with all the petty persecution she used to be so garrulous about, or that he deemed her of suYcient importance to be dangerous. But, like me, he had perhaps too great a contempt for women; he treated them as puppets, and thought he could make them dance at any time by pulling the wires.’89 The fact is that Napoleon did think her suYciently threatening to need rigorous control, and Stae¨l, exiled, spied upon, and harried as she was, invented neither the continuous nature of his persecution nor the degree of its severity. If misogyny undoubtedly played its part in this persecution, the persecutor was never moved simply by mistrust of a woman; the danger Stae¨l posed was for him general as well as gender-speciWc. Stae¨l’s diVerences with Byron in this respect were a perennial source of friction between them, though the passage of time saw their views of Napoleon drawing closer. Both of them had a love–hate relationship with the Emperor. Stae¨l never quite overcame the admiration that had struck her dumb the Wrst time she met him, and during the occupation of Paris after Waterloo would Wnd herself resenting both the Allied commander Wellington and the restored Bourbon monarchy that replaced Bonaparte; while Byron at diVerent times celebrated him as a liberator, damned him as a tyrant, or criticized him on an aesthetic level (comparing his fall from power with classical models, for instance, and Wnding him wanting).90 This ambivalence, naturally enough, reXects the ambiguous glory of the man described in the Wrst canto of Childe 89 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 182. 90 See Eric Strand, ‘Don Juan as Global Allegory’, Studies in Romanticism, 43 (2004), 503–36.

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Harold as ‘Gaul’s Vulture’,91 his ‘wholesome reign’ that of a ‘bloated Chief’ (stanza 53), while in Don Juan his energy would be remembered in defeat and contrasted positively with the deal-doing and peace-mongering of Wellington and the despised Castlereagh. Later, in Switzerland, Byron’s image of Bonaparte vanquished would match that of Harold and the bythen exiled poet himself, a ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (canto 3, stanza 3).92 The author of Dix anne´es d’exil, however, had good reason to Wnd her own experience of banishment far more bitter than Byron’s selfimposed exile, to which Napoleon’s conWnement on St Helena was as imperfect an analogue as her enforced ten-year removal. It followed that her attitude to the man who caused it should be sharply diVerent from Byron’s. She suVered in London from the mockery of other men (rather than women) who found her too earnest or self-important to be taken seriously. Thus, while cordially loathing the leader of the dandies, Beau Brummell, she seemed to let his group do what they wanted with her, which was to make her look ridiculous. This was sometimes their loss, according to Byron. ‘I have seen her entranced by them, listening with undisguised delight to exaggerated compliments, uttered only to hoax her, but persons incapable of appreciating her genius.’93 Byron himself, of course, often appeared to belong to that clan, and it was her apparent lack of selfconsciousness and good breeding that laid her open to their mockery. Byron once described a moment of social embarrassment that would have Wnished another woman, but which ‘poor dear Madame de Stae¨l’ shrugged uncaringly oV. On this celebrated occasion the busk of her corset had somehow risen above her de´colletage during a society dinner. Stae¨l tried, crimsonfaced with the eVort, to push it back down, but eventually had to ask a valet’s assistance in removing it, which he managed only by passing his hand over her shoulder and across her bosom, and tugging desperately. ‘Had you seen the faces of some of the English ladies of the party, you would have been, like me, almost convulsed; while Madame remained perfectly unconscious that she had committed any solecism on la de´cence anglaise.’94 The sadistic pleasure Byron took in teasing her is obvious, 91 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, st. 52. 92 See Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of InXection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 257 and 264, on all Byron’s works being made in his own image, and id., Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 95. 93 Blessington, Conversations, 212. 94 Ibid. 23.

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and the more incendiary the topic under discussion, the better pleased he appeared. He told Lady Melbourne: ‘As to Madame de Stae¨l—I never go near her. Her books are very delightful—but in society I see nothing but a very plain woman forcing one to listen and look at her, with her pen behind her ear and her mouth full of ink.’95 Yet some of this distaste was surely manufactured, which explains how Stae¨l could scold him at the same time as revering his poetic gifts. ‘Treat those who admire you a little more kindly,’ she instructed him, ‘and be grateful to me for forgiving your genius everything that displeases me in you.’96 Yet by August 1814, some months after her departure, she had apparently become for him ‘our friend of indiVerent memory’,97 even though he had previously told his publisher John Murray that, while he did not love her, ‘depend upon it—she beats all your natives hollow as an authoress—in my opinion—and would not say this if I could help it’.98 (Note the restriction to ‘authoress’, however: male writers might still, by implication, be judged superior to her.) In November Byron received ‘a very pretty billet from Madame la baronne de Stae¨l Holstein . . . Her works are my delight, and so is she herself, for—half an hour . . . She is a woman by herself, and has done more than all the rest of them together intellectually—she ought to have been a man.’99 This is a more generous estimate of her mental powers than she received from many men. Like everyone else, Byron thought her ‘a very goodnatured creature’ as well as a strikingly intelligent one. ‘No woman had so much bonne foi as Madame de Stae¨l,’ he later said; ‘hers was a real kindness of heart.’100 But like many others too, he felt oppressed by her. ‘[R]eally her society is overwhelming—an avalanche that buries one in glittering nonsense—all snow and sophistry.’101 Or again: ‘She was always aiming to be brilliant—to produce a sensation, no matter how, when or where. She wanted to make all her ideas, like Wgures in the modern French school of painting, prominent and showy—standing out of the canvas, each in a light of its own.’102 He oVended her at a dinner they both attended for having committed ‘the heinous crime of sitting . . . with my eyes shut, or half-shut

95 96 97 99 101

Byron, Letters and Journals, IV.19. Quoted in Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 473 (London, end Jan.–early Feb. 1814). Byron, Letters and Journals, IV.158. 98 Ibid. 25. Ibid. III.226–7. 100 Medwin, Conversations, 184. Byron, Letters and Journals, III.244. 102 Ibid. 185.

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[but] what this last can mean I don’t know unless she is opposite—if I then do she is very much obliged to me—and if at the same time I should continue to shut my ears—she would be still more so . . . I have more faults to Wnd with her than ‘‘shutting her eyes’’—one of which is opening her mouth too frequently.’103 A milder acquaintance was Sir James Mackintosh, whose honeyed review of Corinne in the Edinburgh Review had so delighted Stae¨l. This man of liberal outlook had in 1791 published the Vindiciae Gallicanae, a pro-Revolutionary reply to Burke’s ReXections on the Revolution in France and a polemic Wlled with Whig opinions. Some regretted that he had sacriWced potential political fame and inXuence for conversation; he was said to lack humour, but— at least according to Sir Henry Holland—had ‘the power of putting an argument into its most pithy form’. Stae¨l had been in touch with him since 1802, when he, a trained advocate, agreed to defend a man, Gabriel Peltier, charged by the French government with disseminating anti-Napoleonic propaganda. He then went to India as Recorder at the Bombay tribunal, ‘deWcient in the ways of self-advancement’ and wrongly reasoning that a settled income and pension would give him leisure for literary pursuits. (When he returned it was said to be with all the diseases and none of the wealth of the East.) Although a brilliant conversationalist, he failed to gain the ear of the House of Commons when an MP, since he gave the appearance of neither feeling nor thinking what he was saying. Rocca was needlessly jealous of him. When Stae¨l allowed her lover to appear in society, he impressed discerning judges much more than he had done some of her French critics: Byron reports the opinion on one occasion of a guest at Holland House, where Byron had also been invited, that he was ‘the only proof he had seen of her good taste’.104 She may have Xirted mildly with Sir James, but no more. He seemed not to object to being bossed, even slightly insulted, by her, saying that she was ‘the most celebrated woman of this or, perhaps, any age . . . I am generally ordered with her to dinner, as one orders beans and bacon; I have, in consequence, dined with her at the houses of nearly all of the Cabinet Ministers.’ He concluded that she was one of the few people who surpassed expectations. She had every sort of gift, ‘and would be universally popular if, in society, she were to conWne herself to her inferior talents—pleasantry, anecdote and literature—which

103 Byron, Letters and Journals, IV.33.

104 Ibid., III.231.

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are so much more suited to conversation than her eloquence and genius’.105 This may be a lesser form of disparagement than many men resorted to in Stae¨l’s case, but still it is an attack on her ability to think seriously. Some, in similar spirit, thought that her fame in England owed almost as much to her championing by Sir James as to her own brilliance. Mackintosh joined Byron in particularly revering De l’Allemagne, which neither man regarded as simply a work of haute vulgarisation. Byron ‘like[d] it prodigiously, but unless I can twist my admiration into some fantastical explanation, she won’t believe me, [yet] I won’t give up my opinion—why should I? I read her again and again, and there is no aVectation in this. I cannot be mistaken (except in taste) in a book I read and lay down and take up again.’106 Still, though, the notion that it was a work of genius had to be qualiWed. Byron’s friend Hobhouse laughed at all De l’Allemagne—in which, however, I think he goes a little too far [ . . . for] there are Wne passages;—and, after all, what is a work—any—or every work—but a desert with fountains and, perhaps, a grove or two, every day’s journey? To be sure, in Madame, what we often mistake, and ‘pant for’ as the ‘cooling stream’, turns out to be the ‘mirage’ (critical verbiage): but we do, at last, get to something like the temple of Jove, and then the waste we have passed is only remembered to gladden the contrast.107

The fact is that the War of Liberation had created a market for ideas about matters German which Stae¨l had deftly exploited, and which ran directly counter to Napoleon’s imperial intentions. None of his attempts to purge De l’Allemagne of its (to him) outrageous Gallophobia could damage its triumphant celebration of national identity per se, a celebration that would shape other celebrations of other national identities in the future. What Bonaparte saw as so subversive that it had to be suppressed, and its author banished, was for other readers revelatory precisely in its recognition of cultural variety, of the discrete individualisms De la litte´rature had drawn to public attention. Yet although what most strikes the present-day reader of the work may be the Europeanism she pinpoints in a celebrated line from Dix anne´es d’exil, at the very time De l’Allemagne was published in London—indeed, partly because it was being published in London—she was also reWning her view of England as the most admirable among civilized lands. It was, of course, 105 Mackintosh, Memoirs, II.264. 106 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.231–2.

107 Ibid. 211.

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a view she had long held, at least with respect to its practical virtues: England’s ongoing war against slavery, its religious tolerance, its bicameral system of political checks and balances, and so on. Now England would prove its superiority by protecting and releasing her latest exile narrative. She set about arranging publication, hunting down booksellers, haggling over contracts, apparently and rightly sure that De l’Allemagne would be a publishing sensation. Dumont urged her to have the book translated to increase its general sales appeal and market, but to proceed cautiously in this respect: Corinne and Delphine were massacred by their translators, each one of your works, Madame, is a prey for them, but because speed is all that counts three or four workmen are let loose on each volume, and the translation appears at almost the same time as the original. Don’t be in a hurry. I shall take further soundings. I’ll Wnd you a translator who will work con amore, who will not disWgure you to the extent of making you unrecognizable . . . 108

The Gentleman’s Magazine of July 1813 had a paragraph on the forthcoming book amongst its ‘Literary Intelligences’: ‘Speedily will be published Madame la baronne de Stae¨l’s interesting work, whose suppression has so long excited the curiosity of Europe.’109 As ever, she needed few lessons in attracting press and public attention. John Murray mentions her among the literary Wgures who frequented his drawing-room (which was his oYce during the day and library in the afternoon), where he led, as he put it to a friend, the most delightful life seeing ‘celebrated men and women of letters, Southey, Scott, Stae¨l and Byron among them’, ‘with means of prosecuting my business in the highest honour and emolument’.110 Crabb Robinson’s diary noted on 11 July that Murray had oVered Stae¨l 1,500 guineas for the book. The following day William GiVord wrote to Murray apropos of publishing the English translation that ‘the hope of keeping her from the press is quite vain. The family of Œdipus were not more haunted and goaded by the Furies than the Neckers, father, mother and daughter, have always been by the demon of publication. Madame de Stae¨l will therefore write and print without intermission.’111 The translation was indeed published in December 1813, a month after Murray’s original French version, 108 Quoted in King, ‘Correspondance’, 40. 109 Quoted in Whitford, Madame de Stae¨l, 27. 110 Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1891), I.266. 111 Ibid. 314.

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four months after the translation of De l’inXuence des passions and Zulma, and eleven after that of the Re´Xexions sur le suicide. The English version sold 2,250 copies, a huge quantity for a three-volume work, while the French edition of 1,500 sold out in three days. Pointedly, a reprint would be issued as Napoleon fell. Stae¨l made celebrated the enemy’s accusation, ‘your last work is not French’, by publishing it in the preface to the London edition. To most if not all of her English readership this probably increased its appeal: De l’Allemagne had caused a sensation. Fanny Burney was a fervent admirer of the book. She wrote to Mrs Waddington on 24 December after reading about a third of the Wrst volume: I perpetually longed to write to her—but imperious obstacles are in the way— and . . . tell you the pleasure, the transport rather, with which I read nearly every phrase. Such acuteness of thought, such vivacity of ideas and such brilliancy of expression I know not where I have met before. I often lay the book down to enjoy, for a considerable time, a single sentence . . . I have rarely, ever in the course of my life, read anything with so glowing a fullness of applause.112

(In February 1816 her friend would send a copy of the book to Alexandre d’Arblay as he recovered from illness.) Mrs Waddington herself made Stae¨l’s acquaintance through Mackintosh when the star was being entertained in London, and seems to be referring to De l’Allemagne when she describes how both her mother and she ‘felt to so great a degree the irresistible enchantment of her last work that we both addressed her; but we had not courage to send her the eVusions of our hearts’—almost as though a novel rather than a work of cultural theory and intellectual history had been in question. Never, she said, had she been ‘so highly gratiWed by conversation’ as when she met her.113 And it would have been hard for any of Stae¨l’s English supporters to gainsay the gratiWcation of reading her renewed praise of their country in the preface to the 1813 edition, where she asks in connection with Napoleon’s closing of the Channel ports to her in 1810 whether it was to be concluded from her undying attachment to France ‘that I should be forbidden to admire England? We have seen it, like a knight armed for the defence of social order, preserve Europe for ten years from anarchy, and for ten more from despotism. Its glorious constitution was, at the beginning of the Revolution, the goal of the hopes and eVorts of the French; my soul has remained where theirs was then.’ So a celebration of Germany led indirectly to another of England. 112 Burney, Journals and Letters, VII.206.

113 Ibid. IX.451.

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Burney, meanwhile, kept her distance out of circumspection, as she halfexplained to Mrs Waddington: ‘That I do not write to Madame de Stae¨l is not prudery, as you suspect, but prudence, and more than prudence, far more.’114 The precise reason for her caution was that d’Arblay had remained in France when his wife returned to England in 1812, so provoking the by now familiar worries about endangering his pension by letting news of his wife’s association with such a persona non grata leak out. None of this prevented her, however, from selecting Stae¨l as one of the privileged early readers of The Wanderer to whom advance copies of the Wrst volume were to be sent by the publisher; and nothing reveals her continuing regard for Stae¨l more clearly than her anguish on realizing that an uncorrected copy had been dispatched to her in error. She wrote in dismay to the publishers Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown: the critics, and very able judges, into whose hands she is informed that the Wrst volume is fallen, are the last who ought to see it in an unWnished state. Their approbation is the most diYcult to obtain; and their censure stamps disgrace: she is peculiarly, therefore, vexed that the reading should have begun under such disadvantages by Sir James Mackintosh, Madame de Stae¨l and Lord Holland.115

(Byron had tried to get hold of another copy for an invalid friend, saying: ‘I would almost fall sick myself to get at Madame d’Arblay’s writings’, though on another occasion he remarked to Murray: ‘[Scott’s] Waverley is the best and most interesting novel I have read since—I don’t know when—I like it as much as I hate [Edgeworth’s] Patronage and [Burney’s] Wanderer . . . and all the feminine trash of the last four months.’)116 Despite the mishap, Burney later declared to her brother James, who had cut short his friendship with Hazlitt after the latter’s damning review of The Wanderer, that the Wrst volume ‘was received by the reigning critical judges with almost unbounded applause; Sir James Mackintosh; Lord Holland; Madame de Stae¨l; Sir Samuel Romilly, Lord Byron, Mr Godwin—others whose names I do not recollect sang its panegyric . . . ’.117 Yet they might have felt some disappointment too, for reasons quite separate from the uncorrected state of the copies they received. Many readers regretted that Burney had held back, as Stae¨l herself had done some years earlier, from writing the Revolutionary novel she might have produced; and perhaps her 114 Burney, Journals and Letters, VII.257–8. 115 Ibid. 237. 116 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.203 (to Murray, 27 Dec. 1813); IV.146 (to id., 24 July 1814). 117 Burney, Journals and Letters, VIII.317 (to James Burney, Brussels, 10–12 July 1815).

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reasons had been similar. The public, she told James Burney, had thought that The Wanderer would be set in France, not in provincial England, and reXect the ‘political bustle’ of recent times; but instead she had given them the story of a penniless young woman, seemingly a French e´migre´e, who experiences painful rejection as she seeks honest employment over the Channel. It seems likely enough that Burney’s familiar caution was behind this indirectness, since the circumstance of her marriage continued to dictate prudence. England and France were still at war. But had she been, if not pusillanimous, then simply unimaginative in the eyes of those readers who had relished Evelina, Cecilia, and even Camilla? ‘The second volume’, she wrote, ‘undeceived [readers]: and thence began a disappointment which, like hope, carried with it a propensity to be displeased through the rest of the work.’118 The Wanderer begins, it is true, with the turmoil caused by the Terror, and the retrospective narrative of two characters, Juliette the wanderer and her friend Gabrielle, evokes earlier stages of the Revolution, while the intemperate idealist Elinor Joddrel speaks of bastilles and the rights of women. Yet the real subject is the xenophobia, bigotry, and isolationism of the English faced with a refugee whom they cannot ‘place’ and whom they consequently both disparage and exploit. In turn, they oVer opinions about the French from which Burney would dissociate herself (notwithstanding the acknowledged reality of the Terror), representing them as agents of slaughter, torture, conspiracy, and death, and their country as one where highways are deluged with human blood, massacres take place in every town, and gallows blacken the streets. Some of Burney’s published critics incorrectly implied that her views diVered from Stae¨l’s in at least one respect. The Quarterly Review attacked what it saw as her support for Bonaparte, sarcastically describing the novel as having been written ‘in Paris where she enjoyed . . . under the mild and beneWcent government of Napoleon ten unbroken years—neither startled by any species of investigation, nor distressed through any diYculty of conduct, by a precious Wreside, or in select society, a stranger to all personal disturbance’.119 If, as we must assume, Stae¨l did read either the English or the French version of the novel (which was translated in 1815), she is unlikely to have concluded that the conservative and timid Burney was as 118 Ibid. 318. 119 Burney, The Wanderer, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64.

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keen a supporter of Bonaparte as the Whigs she knew. Although she was no revolutionary idealist, as Elinor Joddrel is, like Stae¨l she remained conscious of some of the iniquities of the ancien re´gime. Besides, the central Revolutionary character referred to in The Wanderer is Robespierre, who had authorized both the execution of the Queen whom Stae¨l had defended and the arrest of aliens not living in France before the fall of the Bastille. Juliette is escaping from a forced marriage to a hated Frenchman, contracted to ensure the safety of a bishop, one of those ‘refractory priests’ on whose account Burney had written the ReXections on the Emigrant French Clergy. In order to preserve her incognito during the Xight from France she has blackened her face, which makes her seem to the other passengers on the boat like a ‘tawny Hottentot’. The year is 1793, and her English fellowtravellers are escaping because France has just declared war on Britain, making foreigners who remain there liable to imprisonment. Mary Wollstonecraft, who was then in France, remained safe because her lover Gordon Imlay had registered her at the American embassy as his wife; in October passports to leave France were refused, but the pregnant Wollstonecraft decided to go anyway. The following April all foreigners were ordered out of Paris within ten days on pain of being guillotined. Juliette’s travelling companions assume that she is from one of the French ‘settlements’ in the West Indies such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, or St Domingue, whose black population had recently revolted against the tyranny of white settlers.120 It is possible that Burney’s depiction of her owes something to her friendship with the abolitionist Wilberforce, whom she came to admire as greatly as Stae¨l did during her stay in London. Although the Convention Nationale had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794, Napoleon re-established both in 1802, so provoking the uprising in St Domingue led by Toussaint L’Ouverture which a poem of Wordsworth’s records. In a letter to her father towards the end of 1813 Burney described meeting Wilberforce in Sandgate after she had returned from France the previous year: Let me steal a moment to relate a singular gratiWcation . . . four hours of the best conversation I have, nearly, ever enjoyed! He was anxious for a full and true account of Paris, and particularly of religion and inWdelity, and of Bonaparte and the wars, and of all and everything that had occurred during my ten years’ seclusion 120 See David Geggus, ‘Slave Resistance Studies and the St Domingue Slave Revolt’, Latin American and Caribbean Center Occasional Papers Series, 4 (winter 1983), 2.

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in France; and I had so much to communicate, and his drawing out and comments and episodes were all so judicious, so spirited, so full of information, yet so unassuming, that my shyness all Xew away and I felt to be his conWdential friend, opening to him upon every occurrence and every sentiment, with the frankness that is usually won by years of intercourse. I was really and truly delighted and entertained by him; I desired nothing more than to renew the acquaintance, and cultivate it to intimacy. But alas! he was going away next morning.121

Stae¨l’s similar concern with the lot of blacks was both literary and practical, long pre-dating her acquaintance with Wilberforce. The plot of Pauline had unfolded in the ‘burning climates’ where men care only about business and ‘barbarous gain’, while Mirza showed a deserving family of Negroes trying to escape the yoke of slavery.122 Suzanne Necker had been one of the earliest members of the Socie´te´ des Amis des Noirs, founded by the journalist and future Girondin Brissot in 1788 after a visit to England,123 and Stae¨l herself had supported Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rebellion. One is bound to ask how the ‘libertarian’ England she repeatedly celebrated squared its conscience with the fact that over the previous 300 years it had shipped almost 3 million Africans across the Atlantic for a life of servitude;124 yet the astonishing and mitigating fact remained that early in the nineteenth century, at the height of its commercial and maritime prosperity, Britain had voluntarily and against its own economic interests125 renounced the terrible trade, a circumstance for which Wilberforce received most of the credit. In reality the work of other abolitionists such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson had also been crucial. Byron enjoyed ‘setting [Stae¨l] by the ears’ with Monk Lewis about the keeping of slaves, particularly as both participants in the argument were ‘obstinate, clever, odd, garrulous and shrill’.126 (On another occasion, however, he decribed Lewis as ‘a bore—a damned bore’.)127 Lewis advocated the institution of slavery simply because most of his property was in Negroes and 121 After 23 Sept. 1813: Burney, Journals and Letters, VII.181–2. 122 See comtesse Jean de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et les ne`gres’, La Revue de France, 19 (1934), 425–42, at 429. 123 See e.g. Siman Schama, Rough Crossings (London: BBC Books, 2005), 304–7, and Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 74. 124 See James Walvin, Britain’s Slave Empire (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), 134. 125 See Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1977), and id., The Mighty Experiment (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Although Wilberforce and others argued that this great humanitarian eVort would do no damage to the British economy, it manifestly did. 126 Byron, Letters and Journals, III.240–1. 127 Ibid. IX.18; also quoted in D. I. Macdonald, Monk Lewis (Toronto, BuValo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 24.

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plantations, and ‘[n]ot being satisWed with three thousand a year, he wanted to make it Wve’, according to the not necessarily reliable Byron.128 He was, however, said to be an enlightened master, and in a journal entry for 1816 he unequivocally condemned traYcking in human beings.129 The great achievement of abolitionists such as Wilberforce, who had been involved in public life since 1780, came in 1807 with the passing of Britain’s Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Yet seven years later, as Stae¨l was well aware, the restored Louis XVIII would come under pressure from ejected French planters and domestic shipbuilders to reconquer St Domingue, and from ordinary French citizens to bring back an institution that had beneWted the national economy,130 even though at the same time anti-slavery pressure across the Channel resulted in 800 petitions being signed by three-quarters of a million Britons urging their government to persuade the French monarchy to end such traYcking.131 In February 1814, at a meeting in the African Institute—a body formed after the abolition of the slave trade to promote civilization and improvement in Africa—Sir Samuel Romilly told Wilberforce of Stae¨l’s desire to meet him ‘more than any other person’.132 Being the person she was, she asked the patron of the Institute, the Duke of Gloucester, to arrange an evening rendezvous. While disliking social dissipation, the famously abstemious Wilberforce felt unable to refuse when he was invited for dinner in her company. He had strong misgivings, all the same. ‘This is mere vanity and perhaps curiosity, and I felt my vanity a little rising too on the occasion. O! how full are we of this degrading passion . . . She told the Duke of Gloucester that I did not think how really religious she was. I must read her Allemagne, in order not to excite her prejudices.’133 128 Medwin, Conversations, 193. 129 See Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Press, 1961), 151. 130 See Serge Daget, ‘A Model of the French Abolitionist Movement and its Variations’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds.), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform (Folkestone and Hamden, CT: Dawson, 1980), 64–79, at 68–9. 131 See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 354–5. Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition 1787–1832’, in Bolt and Drescher, Anti-Slavery, 153, puts the number of signatories at a million and a half, and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 189, at 1 million. 132 William Wilberforce, Correspondence, ed. R. I. and S. Wilberforce, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1840), II.160. 133 R. I. and S. Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London: John Murray, 1838), IV.159.

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The dinner occurred. Wilberforce’s diary entry for 19 February 1814 records the occasion: Madame de Stae¨l quite like her book, though less hopeful, complimenting me highly on abolition—‘All Europe etc. . . . ’ But I must not spend time in writing this. She asked me and I could not well refuse to meet Lord Harrowby and Mackenzie and poet Rogers on Tuesday sennight. This would lead to an endless round of dinners but it neither suits my mind nor body . . . Oh! how sad, that after trying to lead a Christian life for twenty-eight years I should be at all staggered by worldly company, Madame de Stae¨l etc. I will not, however, please God, enter and be drawn into that magic circle into which they would tempt me.134

This was a recurrent anxiety of his. Once his worldly fame had begun: ‘You can scarcely conceive the prodigious amount of inconvenience which I sustain from not thinking it right to allow my servants to say, when I am within, that I am not at home.’ Eventually he bought a small house near his home which he antiphrastically called The Nuisance, and Xed there when social disturbance became unbearable.135 Although he continued on the defensive, Wilberforce felt safe in sending Stae¨l his books, ‘for which she had almost asked’.136 He turned down a subsequent invitation to see her, refusing a dinner, then agreeing to an evening party, ‘but on reXection no good to be done, and it would lead to precedents’;137 so he declined. By March he had thawed a little. On the fourth: much unpleasant doubting what I ought to do about Madame de Stae¨l. Lady S. tells me that there has been much discussion whether I should go, and wagers laid; but Madame de Stae¨l said she was sure I should come, because I had said I would. What care this shows we should take, because we shall be more closely watched, strictly judged! I must do away the mere eVect of this in her mind, that she may not think I conceive I may speak conversational falsehoods, the very doctrine and crime of the world, which so resents what it calls lies and the imputation of them.138

On the Wfth he wrote to Stae¨l personally: let me assure you that I was quite sincere in alleging so homely a cause as that of my stomach for my having been compelled to lay down for myself the rule of not dining out of the house . . . Public men can only meet their friends at dinner with 134 135 136 137

Ibid. R. Coupland, Wilberforce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 347. Wilberforce, diary, quoted by V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.180. Ibid. 181 (25 Feb. 1814). 138 Ibid. 182 (4 Mar. 1814).

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convenience. [But] I have persuaded myself that Madame de Stae¨l’s table, for reasons less proper to be told herself than to any other person, may be an exception to my general rule, and I shall therefore be happy to wait on you . . . 139

So, after agonies of deliberation that match, if they do not exceed, the inner torments Burney suVered on Stae¨l’s account, he accepted on 10 March. ‘Let me try to speak plainly though tenderly to her.’140 On 18 March 1814 he duly dined in the company of Albertine, Auguste, two other foreigners, Lord Harrowby, Lord and Lady Lansdowne, and Sir James Mackintosh. ‘A cheerful, pleasant dinner—she talking of the Wnal cause of creation—not utility but beauty [which would not have surprised Dumont and her fellow guests at Bowood] . . . A brilliant assembly of rank and talent.’141 On the next day: The whole scene was intoxicating even to me. The fever arising from it is not yet gone oV (half past eight a.m.), though opposed by the most serious motives and considerations both last night and this morning. How dangerous then must such scenes (literally of dissipation, dissipating the spirits, the mind, and for a time almost the judgement) be to young people in the heyday of youth, and life, and spirit! . . . O Lord, enable me to view last night’s scene in its true colours, and shapes and essences . . . O Lord, guide me; let me not do anything contrary to the liberal and social spirit of thy religion . . . I am clear it is nothing for me to withdraw from the gay and irreligious, though brilliant, society of Madame de Stae¨l and others.142

Stae¨l’s picture of him was quite diVerent. She told Mackintosh, ‘Mr Wilberforce is the best converser I have met with in this country. I have always heard that he was the most religious, but I now Wnd that he is the wittiest man in England.’143 Had she known of his later description of the by then deposed Bonaparte as ‘a sort of Birmingham emperor’144—that is, a tinplate potentate—she would no doubt have enthused even more. Gradually Wilberforce revised his opinion of her. He came to perceive the seriousness that underlay the surface brilliance and devotion to sociability, and saw that she might help enlist others in the great enterprise of universal abolitionism. Her London clan fell in with this eVort, which involved the translation of pamphlets, press manipulation, and social stirring-up. When 139 Wilberforce, diary, quoted by V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, II.444–5; Broglie Papers (Kensington Green, 5 Mar. 1814). 140 Ibid. I.182 (10 Mar. 1814). 141 Ibid.; also Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, IV.167. 142 V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.182. 143 Ibid. 183. 144 Coupland, Wilberforce, 396.

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she was back in France, in May 1814, Stae¨l wrote excitedly to Mary Berry to tell her that Alexander of Russia was in favour of abolishing slavery. (She paid the Tsar the highest compliment of likening him to English statesmen, ‘whose strength resides in themselves, not in the barriers surrounding them’.) Restoration France would remain recalcitrant in the face of the abolitionist cause, however, for abolition itself had become fatally associated (via the St Domingue rebellion) with the outbreak of the French Revolution. Yet Wilberforce found an unexpected ally in Louis XVIII and a more immediate one in Wellington, brieXy English ambassador to Paris after Napoleon’s Wrst abdication. Wellington, whom Stae¨l continued to admire, proposed the translation of Wilberforce’s Letters to his Yorkshire Constituents on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which had greatly inXuenced public opinion in 1807; Albertine promised to undertake the work, and Stae¨l to write a stirring preface. (Incidentally, this preface states unequivocally that abolition went against Britain’s mercantile interests, although Stae¨l’s Appel aux souverains re´unis a` Paris pour en obtenir l’abolition de la traite des ne`gres of 1814, which according to Sismondi was widely read in Paris,145 denies it.) Had her ‘ducomania’ anything to do with this eVort? Surely not, though Stendhal, who invented the word,146 applied it to her, and after reading her Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise described the work as on its knees before the greatest evil of present-day society, the nobility.147 Louis XVIII, on the other hand, regarded it as positively republican in tenor. Stae¨l, more usefully for the present purpose, had written in the Appel aux souverains re´unis that the most eVective way for Europe to repay the England to which it was indebted for its liberation was to unite in the common cause of ending slavery. In November 1814 a decree ordered French subjects to desist from engaging in the trade north of Cape Formosa, and Stae¨l, by then back in France, wrote to Wilberforce: ‘it is you and Lord Wellington who have won this great battle for humanity.’148 Yet the sad truth is that the abolition to which the French King was made to agree at the 1815 Congress of Vienna was never enforced.149 Wilberforce was left to lament the fact in a letter of 14 August 1821, where he called France ‘the last power we should 145 See letter to Wilberforce from the Hon. I. Villiers, 15 Feb. 1815 (Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, IV.215). 146 Stendhal, Correspondance, ed. H. Martineau and V. del Litto, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962–8), I.915–16. 147 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 39. 148 V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.188. 149 See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2005), 318.

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have hoped that would have been tempted to take up a commerce with human beings, which Great Britain had indignantly abandoned as being deWled by wickedness and cruelty’.150 Stae¨l, Napoleon’s pariah as political dissident and as woman, knew as much about the pain of displacement as the slaves shipped from Africa, even if she possessed means of palliating and Wnally ending exile that were unavailable to them. Yet although her oeuvre celebrates the triumph of her personal survival, it also mourns the defeat of all the disenfranchised, particularly disenfranchised women, the ones who cannot survive—Mirza, Pauline, Delphine, Corinne, and many more. They suVer less brutally, but no less absolutely, than the victims of the hateful human tyranny Britain helped to destroy, and which Stae¨l’s daughter, son, and son-in-law would continue to Wght against after her death; they die because, like slaves, they are denied the basic human right to self-possession or autonomy. For those forbidden full identity, says Stae¨l, exclusion never ends; to them, the travel and other kinds of resettlement which she herself was able to turn to positive account merely entrenched diVerence,151 and only another revolution—for women as for slaves—could bring the freedoms that really mattered. After Waterloo Stae¨l’s reverence for Wellington would increase, though she was unsettled by some of the consequences of the Allied victory. Even before she left England, indeed, she was made uneasy by the turn of political events against the country of her birth. It seems to have taken Napoleon’s catastrophic defeat at Leipzig in October 1813 to persuade her, reluctant though she was to acknowledge it, that for him to be permanently removed France itself must also be overcome. (In this connection Albertine wrote that with the loss at Leipzig, when the Prussians took Germany back from France, her mother, foreseeing the Allied invasion of her own country, was in a state of constant suVering.) As the Allies crossed the Rhine on 21 December this became clearer than ever, but she felt suddenly shocked by the realization that in London she was being feˆted by her national enemies. And with the advance on Paris she lost all hope that Bernadotte, in whose interest she had continued to campaign vigorously when she arrived in England, might succeed Bonaparte: as the Allies took the capital the Crown Prince, realizing that he had missed his chance, stopped at Nancy and 150 W. Wilberforce, Correspondence, II.454 (to Prince Czartoryski). 151 On this general question see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).

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returned to Sweden. Mary Berry wrote to the Countess of Hardwicke on 17 January 1814: Madame de Stae¨l is in despair about France. She cannot bear what she calls the humiliation of the Allies marching to Paris. She wants the annihilation of Bonaparte (which she don’t think will take place), and she don’t want the return of the Bourbons . . . She wishes for a liberty, a real constitutional liberty, for which, I believe, France is no more Wt than Turkey; but this she won’t bear to hear.152

And to the same correspondent on 28 January: If [the French] don’t want [the Bourbons], let them continue to bow the neck under the iron yoke of Bonaparte, or let them again try their hand at their ridiculous and impossible republic, which, however it began, would surely end in a second edition of military despotism under some of Bonaparte’s apprentices. But to attempt putting them upon the throne, or even to advance one step further in France merely on their account, is a madness of which I really believe neither ourselves nor our Allies are going to be guilty.153

To Constant, however, Stae¨l wrote that she would support the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy faute de mieux. Her considerable reluctance was clear, all the same. ‘If the French recalled the Bourbons under certain conditions it would be all well and good, but don’t you see that they’ll make a long crime out of twenty-Wve years, and an article of faith out of the legitimacy of monarchs?’154 On 25 February 1814, in a mood of great depression, she informed Albertine Necker de Saussure: ‘Things have been badly arranged since the decision to march on Paris. I myself wanted more than anything for the Allies not to get that far. Such is the heart of a Frenchwoman.’155 Who could have predicted a few months earlier that with the end of her exile she would not rush back to Paris? Now she hung about in London, unable to decide on returning under such conditions, noting morosely to Auguste: ‘It is a cruel blow, all London is drunk with joy, and I am the only person in this great city to feel pain.’156 Schlegel pointed out the paradox in a letter to the Countess of Albany: ‘As soon as the Germans had crossed the Rhine all she wanted was peace with Bonaparte, and she felt France’s humiliation and dependence with the deepest grief.’ On 16 April he told 152 154 155 156

Berry, Journals, III.2. 153 Ibid. 3. Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 475 (London, 22 Mar. 1814). Quoted in comtesse de Pange, Schlegel, 496. Ibid.

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Auguste that a letter he had just received from Stae¨l was ‘full of worries about events. She too had thought Bonaparte would be unstoppable or unknock-down-able.’157 She wrote of how her friends were calling her home: ‘I shall go, but who would have guessed I should speak in such a way about leaving for Paris? Who could have told me that what I have been wanting for Wfteen years would happen to me in such a way?’158 Yet her aversion to what Bonaparte represented was absolute. In March 1814 she wrote to Prince Tatichev, then attached to the Russian embassy in London: ‘If I wanted to pride myself on anything, I’d tell you that I cannot see Paris again (though I have been dreaming of it for ten years) unless Bonaparte is toppled. Don’t you know that while all the European powers have given way to him, only I, in all my weakness, have resisted him . . . ’159 The irony was overwhelming: she was caught in a double bind, wanting the defeat of Napoleon but not that of her country. As she wrote to Constant the same month, ‘I hate the man, but I blame the events that force me to want his success’. It was, she said, diVerent for the foreigner Constant. ‘You aren’t French, Benjamin, all your childhood memories aren’t in these places; that’s the diVerence between you and me. But can you really want to see Cossacks in the rue Racine?’160 By April her views had evidently hardened, both because of and despite the news on the ninth of Napoleon’s abdication. On 16 April Berry reported: ‘She talked with much warmth and much sentiment on the subject of France, but at this moment her feelings obscure her judgement. Because France has not delivered herself from her tyrant she will not hope anything really good for her, and will only believe in the reestablishment in totality of all the old prejudices, which is not possible.’161 And at the end of the month Stae¨l further described the ambivalence and complexity of her emotional state to Madame Necker de Saussure: I don’t need to tell you what I’ve felt, this mixture of pleasure and pain, amazement and depression, revulsion at the presence of foreigners, joy at being freed of Bonaparte . . . You know I’m feeling everything. Yes, dear friend, I am going to Paris . . . though I feel very coldly towards the Russians (between ourselves). My friends are calling me to Paris; I am going. Who would have said I’d talk like that about Paris? Who could have told me that what I’ve wanted for Wfteen years would happen in this form? . . . In Paris I think people regard the present constitution as the 157 Quoted in comtesse de Pange, Schlegel, 499. 158 Ibid. 159 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 474 (London, 15 Mar. 1814). 160 Ibid. 475 (London, 22 Mar. 1814). 161 Berry, Journals, III.10–11.

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triumph of my father’s opinions. But what a constitution! What men to make it work! Poor France, you can only pity it . . . 162

It was, she thought, a particularly painful position to be in for a woman of strong political opinions such as her own, and the result was to make her almost obsessive in her periodic approaches and reproaches to Wellington. Yet however great Stae¨l’s distress at the occasional triumphalism of the English in the face of France’s discomWture (which some of the English regarded as fair return for the defeat France had helped to inXict on them in the War of American Independence), it would be quite wrong to see her as lastingly and seriously disaVected with her hosts. There had always been reservations on both sides, though it seems unlikely that she had been, as Byron claimed, perpetually ‘sighing for her coterie at Paris’163 while she was in London. The emphatic preference for France above all other countries held as Wrm as was natural. She wrote to Brinkman: ‘However beautiful England appears to me, my desires are always for the continent. I cannot withhold a feeling of sadness.’164 It was of a piece with the regrets she expressed in the Conside´rations when she described the non-enforced emigration of the French nobility in 1791 (contrasted with their necessary emigration a year later to escape the Terror): When [emigrants] found themselves in the midst of foreign uniforms, when they heard Germanic languages, no sound of which recalled memories of their past lives, could they still believe themselves blameless? Did they not feel an unbearable grief, recognizing their national airs, hearing the accents of their own provinces, in the camp they had to call an enemy one? . . . Ah, you cannot transport your household gods to foreign hearths.165

At the end of October 1813, after Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig, she had told the Queen of Sweden, ‘I am going to Paris; I have been exiled from it for so long’; 166 yet she had also declared her intention to marry Albertine to an Englishman, and when laughingly told that it might not be so easy, and that ‘if you could do it, it might not be for the happiness of either party’,167 had seemed genuinely astonished. Her mystiWed ‘What do you say?’ was 162 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 477 (London, 19 Apr. 1814). 163 Medwin, Conversations, 182. 164 Balaye´, Carnets, 360. 165 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 256. 166 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 461 (end Oct. 1813). 167 Lady Charlotte Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV, 2 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1838), I.69.

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answered by the self-evident commonplaces that would have suggested themselves to anyone but her: the diVerences in education, habits, national character, and so on. She, however, could see nothing but the marriageability of her charming daughter, eVortlessly triumphing over the very homesickness her mother had never conquered. Yet Albertine’s own experience of living in England should perhaps have made her cautious, however ruthlessly she had intended to force the girl to make a ‘mariage d’inclination’.168 Albertine had apparently charmed Sweden, where Brinkman said that she looked and behaved like ‘an angel of wit’,169 though one who occasionally appeared ‘an indolent Grace’; and she mostly pleased the English too. In August 1813, however, Anne Romilly thought her manners cold ‘to an unpleasant degree’, and considered that ‘a residence of nearly two years in the northern coasts had a little injured the simplicity of her Swiss education’.170 Another acquaintance was astonished at the change that had taken place in the girl’s manners, and was perpetually on the point of saying, ‘do you remember me, Albertine?’ In November that year, however, Romilly revised her earlier view, declaring that although her mannerisms were unpleasant at Wrst, thereafter ‘she is as natural and unaVected, as full of youthful gaiety and simplicity, as you could imagine’.171 Even so, by the following April she had returned to her negative opinion. Albertine was ‘by no means successful in society, and I do not think her mother will succeed in one great object of her wishes, which certainly was to have married her to an English nobleman’. ‘A French marriage will suit her much better, and that now may be eVected for she will have a very large fortune.’172 All the same, she concluded that Albertine was ‘really a very pretty amiable girl’, a view shared by many—for this oVspring of a coarse-looking, fat-lipped woman and a carrot-haired and (to others as well as to Stae¨l herself, at least initially) physically repulsive man was, despite her freckles, ‘one of the most ravishing people’173 the comtesse de Boigne had ever seen. If she was thought ‘plain’ as well as sensible by Jessie Allen,174 Dugald Stewart’s daughter said she became beautiful after one had spent an hour in her company.175 Brummell, for no good reason, called her Libertine, though Byron remarked that ‘the poor girl was and is as correct as maid or wife can be, and very amiable withal’.176 Indeed, as she grew 168 170 172 174

Boigne, Me´moires, I.270. 169 Brinkman, ‘Lettre’, 177. Romilly, Letters, 55. 171 Ibid. 64. Ibid. 72. 173 Boigne, Me´moires, I.270. Darwin, Letters, I.33. 175 Balaye´, Carnets, 3. 176 Medwin, Conversations, 182.

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older she came more and more to resemble her prudish grandmother Suzanne Necker. In the end she would marry a rather stiV young man, Victor de Broglie, whom her mother described in a letter to Lady Davy of 22 September 1815177 as ‘the only Englishmen in France’, and Albertine herself eventually recognized the sterling qualities of the truly English: ‘an Englishman is such a noble, true creature!’ Nonetheless: ‘The love of France is the malady of my whole life,’ her mother wrote in 1803, ‘and when you have made a bad marriage at the age of 18 in order to stay there, instead of marrying the Wrst Lord or Prime Minister of England, there is something bitter about still Wnding yourself deprived of what has cost you so much.’178 Albertine, too, could say only that she hoped to see the ‘noble and true’ English on the continent, where they would be ‘very agreeable [sic]’.179 On 26 April Anne Romilly reported to Maria Edgeworth that Stae¨l had been graciously received by Louis XVIII (in England), ‘and proposes soon taking her wing to Paris’. ‘Her mortiWcation at not being asked to meet the Bourbons at Carlton House was extreme. She has been a little imprudent in her conversation, and it is the fashion there to take notice of such things.’180 Stae¨l’s famously interfering disposition had been found oVensive in other quarters too: the Russian Count Orlov, for instance, claimed that she always had ‘a little constitution ready to present to every government whether it may be in want of one or not’. There was, Romilly concluded, ‘a great deal of the French love of intrigue mixed with great good nature and openness of character in her disposition, and the one does not suit the other, so that she is constantly getting into scrapes, but people cannot be oVended with her for long’.181 So the vigorous, voluble, often embarrassing, but always good-natured visitor came to the end of her third and last stay in England, having infuriated and dazzled the natives in roughly equal measure, and leaving a gap in London social life that could be Wlled—and then incompletely—only by the surge of relief that accompanied her departure. She had to return to Paris, because ‘Paris has always seemed to me the most agreeable of all places to live in . . . French conversation exists only in Paris, and since my childhood conversation has been my greatest pleasure’.182

177 178 179 181

Muse´e Lullin, Geneva. Stae¨l, Correspondance ge´ne´rale, IV.613 (to Pictet-Diodati, 12 Apr. 1803). Balaye´, Carnets, 406. 180 Romilly, Letters, 72. Ibid. 182 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 135.

9 Eternal Recurrence

I

f Stae¨l returned to France, it was not to do someone else’s bidding. As she wrote to Mary Berry from the rue de Grenelle on 14 June 1814, she was existing in a state of rather insipid tranquillity, glad to be Napoleon’s victim no longer, reserving her Xattery for more decent beings than him, but feeling no more digniWed as a result. Additionally, she was far from happily at home. ‘As for society, it is still nothing. Some relics of it gather at my house, but there’s no unity, and I’d already have left for Switzerland if I wasn’t still trying to get my father’s loan paid back, but I get more empty promises than action.’1 She was like other women of the monde in Wnding the lost paradise of Paris converted into something new and rather repellent. A decade previously, just as Stae¨l’s ‘ten years of exile’ were beginning, Vige´e Le Brun had similarly returned to the capital to Wnd a new order, new values, and a new politics prevailing. She too had started her salon again, but without enthusiasm, tut-tutted at the establishing of the Consulate and the rule of materialists, parvenus, and money-men, and decided to head for England, both because it was still a monarchy and because it represented a thriving art market for a portraitist. Paris had become nearly as odious then as it would seem to Stae¨l in 1814. Stae¨l herself felt that she could do little but bide her time, which for her meant resuming some of the activities she associated with the delicious life of Paris, but at a distance from Paris. The Times of 14 October 1814 reported on it: ‘Madame de Stae¨l . . . has lately returned and resides within a mile or two from Paris, where her salon has become, as heretofore, the central point of the literary, political and fashionable world.’2 If that suggests a return to all the sweetness of past existence—Talleyrand’s douceur de vivre—it was no 1 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 484. 2 Quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.197.

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more than partial. The sense of dissatisfaction, even humiliation, at the way the country she had been forced to leave behind had been treated during her absence resurfaced with its invasion in the present. In the Conside´rations she describes wanting to visit the Ope´ra soon after her return from England, since she had longed for it throughout her exile. But the grand staircase was lined with Russian guards, and in the auditorium she could see only foreign faces, though a sprinkling of old Parisian bourgeois were to be found in the stalls simply because they had refused to break old habits. The performance retained all its former grace, yet she felt humiliated at seeing it ‘squandered on these sabres and moustaches’. At the The´aˆtre-Franc¸ais it was the same story: Racine and Voltaire were performed ‘before foreigners more jealous of our glory than anxious to acknowledge it’, and she blushed at Corneille’s noble sentiments still being proclaimed when France had been brought to its knees by the Allied troops and army of occupation. For that reason, she claimed, no French oYcer came to watch; he would have been Wlled with national shame.3 The consequence was as the notice in The Times implies: to further qualify her feelings about the land from which she had recently returned, but in a way that seemed distinctly ungracious to her former hosts: ‘It would appear that she has taken under her protection the United States as well as the House of Bourbon, for lately, on hearing of the capture of Washington, she pronounced an oration in favour of that government which, as it happened to be in the presence of our Ambassador, seemed to be a challenge to His Grace to prove that the sword is not his only weapon.’ The ambassador at that time being Wellington, he did, the report concludes, what no one else but Bonaparte could do—‘he silenced her’. Her old mistrust of Napoleon was soon compounded by a new moral alarm: old friends, even a prospective son-in-law, had switched camps. In April Constant had returned to Restoration Paris in Bernadotte’s suite, which seemed respectable enough, but to Wnd him apparently rallying to the Bourbon cause was in Stae¨l’s view much less so. She herself was clearly disaVected with the monarchy, having seen and described with contempt the mountainous and valetudinarian Louis XVIII during their joint exile in England as he toured Bath in his Bath chair: ‘In his wheelchair he was the very image of the old monarchy, pulled from the front, pushed from the back . . . How can you ascend the throne when you need so many helping hands to get you into an armchair?’4 Then, confusingly and even 3 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 461.

4 Balaye´, Carnets, 376.

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shockingly, there was the matter of Constant’s new allegiance to Napoleon. Despite saying that Bonaparte ‘meditated tyranny: what liberty can he promise? . . . his triumph would be the beginning of a Wght to the death with the civilized world’,5 his principles were wavering. Was this, she wondered, just a reversion to gender type? Were the only moral heroes in such a climate women, who had nothing to hope in practical terms from compromise? In other words, were men inclined to commit the crime of political opportunism simply because they might secure power (something unavailable to woman) by so doing? Did a political end justify any means? What kind of political end could one hope for by allying oneself with despotism on the one hand or reactionariness on the other, joining either the dictator or the superannuated monarch? Stae¨l, furious, believed that Constant had dragged Sismondi and her future son-in-law Victor de Broglie into a world of power-mongering by falsely oVering them the prospect of a return to liberal ideals. Yet Constant himself had seemed clear-sighted that spring of 1814, after the Allies took Paris and the Senate, forcing Napoleon to abdicate and restoring the Bourbon monarchy. How immense were the corruptions of power! Was any other explanation possible for the fact that the same Constant who would proclaim in March 1815, with Bonaparte’s triumphant return to France from Elba and Louis XVIII’s ignominious escape to Belgium, ‘I shall not drag myself from one power to another like a wretched turncoat, cover up infamy with sophism and stammer profane words in order to redeem a shameful life’,6 could, a month later, accept a position as a Counsellor of State, putting his talents at the execrable service of a reinstated emperor? True, Louis XVIII had disaVected many by the ignominious nature of his retreat to Ghent when the Hundred Days began, even if others still saw him as their benevolent protector (‘Rendez-nous notre pe`re de Gand [paire de gants]’—‘Give us back our father from Ghent [pair of gloves]’). The monarchy’s reliance on foreign assistance during the Wrst Restoration would have seemed humiliating even if Napoleon had not retained considerable popular support, and nothing seemed likelier now than that his return from Elba would swell it. Wellington misjudged his resilience and assumed far too easily that royalty would prevail (‘the king 5 See Victor de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et la situation politique en France pendant les CentJours’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 21 (1976), 15–37, at 16. 6 Ibid. 17.

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will destroy him without diYculty and in a short time’). Schlegel had a more accurate perception of where the balance of power and probability lay: De l’Iˆle d’Elbe aborde L’impe´rial brigand. Tout se joint a` la horde Et le roi Wle a` Gand.

It was small comfort to Stae¨l that Napoleon had by this time decided that De l’Allemagne was a work beyond censure, and one which he inaccurately claimed he had been forced to suppress by his advisers against his better judgement. The new age, he declared, must be one in which no literary work was prohibited—an easy claim to make in the heady atmosphere of the triumphalist present, but destined never to be put to the test. It was hard for Stae¨l, relegated as a woman to the sidelines, to draw any other conclusion than that of opportunism about Constant’s shift of allegiance. Her former lover’s self-abasement seemed to her complete when on the eve of Waterloo he declared the need to stand Wrm with Napoleon against alien powers—‘The Foreigner is looking at us, he knows that at our head there marches the premier general of the age: if he sees us rallying around him, he will think he is beaten in advance; but if we stand divided we perish’7— given that the same Constant had complained about the military nature of life under Napoleon as early as 1808: ‘everything is regimented . . . there are no individuals any longer, just batallions wearing uniforms . . . ’8 It was Stae¨l, not he, who left Paris when the Hundred Days began. Napoleon had been aware that Albertine’s marriage with Victor de Broglie, whose family had been greatly impoverished by the Revolution, would be contingent on the repayment of the 2,400,000 francs Jacques Necker had lent the exchequer in 1777. Stae¨l badly wanted this marriage to come about, perhaps particularly in light of the fact that Albertine’s only other suitor at the time was the homosexual Astolphe de Custine, the son of her old friend Delphine. As early as 24 March 1815 Bonaparte carefully let it be known that he took a close interest in the ‘delicate position of Madame de Stae¨l’, and in early May she was, probably unwisely, able to Xatter herself with the progress her claim had made, particularly the fact that Napoleon had declared himself well satisWed with her silence since her return to Paris.9 7 Ibid. 8 Quoted in Franc¸ois Rosset, E´crire a` Coppet (Geneva: Slatkine, 2002), 56. 9 Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 494 (Coppet, 17 Apr. 1815).

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(The letter to Constant in which she says this contains the assertion that she regards his fortune—his Wnal situation—as lost if he stays on in Paris.) Constant, it is true, assumed some of the credit for persuading Napoleon that the loan should be repaid, as he remarked in a letter to Juliette Re´camier of 2 January 1815: ‘I discovered that her business was running smoothly and that she would certainly be repaid. I had the pleasure of seeing that I had done her a not inconsiderable service by preventing her from writing a very violent letter, which would have done her a great deal of harm, as she had already damaged her case by sounding too violent.’10 He himself, of course, also owed Stae¨l money, as she would remind him in due course, which makes his self-congratulatory tone here rather unpleasant. Bonaparte’s interest was far less pure than he wanted it to appear, and it did not take his oVering Victor de Broglie a peerage and inviting Stae¨l herself to return to Paris to make her smell a rat. The previously unthinkable duly occurred: she turned down the invitation on the grounds that it would be seen as degrading support for a corrupt ruler, and removed to Coppet. What a bitter paradox, that the family chateau she had loathed during her exile should become a welcome retreat when she went there of her own free will, the irony all the more pointed for the fact that, despite her disaVection, she remained as addicted to Paris as any of the worldly French she describes in Dix anne´es d’exil, terriWed like her by the threat of boredom: ‘Staying forty leagues from the capital, in contrast with all the advantages assembled in the most agreeable city in the world, gradually weakens the majority of exiles, accustomed from childhood to the charm of society.’11 Her nobility in declining to gratify Napoleon was in turn noted, at least by her friends: the Duchess of Devonshire, for example, wrote to her son Augustus from Milan that Stae¨l had shown enormous force of character in resisting his blackmail.12 She appeared a diVerent woman from the one who had worriedly written to Hochet from Geneva, a decade earlier, that ‘people will get used to my exile’, and ‘I lose everything by being forgotten, for my defence is my e´clat’.13 Nor, however, would she compromise her position by fraternizing with those who had followed Louis XVIII to Ghent during the Hundred Days, even though Mathieu de Montmorency was 10 Constant, Lettres a` Madame Re´camier (1807–1830), ed. Epraı¨m Harpaz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976), 84. 11 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 86. 12 V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et la situation politique’, 18. 13 Mistler, Lettres, 46 (3 Mar. 1803).

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among them. His Wdelity to the Bourbons may have won him the Ministry of Foreign AVairs under the Restoration, but the ultra-royalism he gradually embraced distanced him from her irrevocably. When Stae¨l had Wrst heard the news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, where British forces and the Prussian reserves destroyed over half the French army, her reverence and enthusiasm seemed to know no bounds, though she felt it her duty to act on his conscience and plead with him to be merciful as well as reasonable. All political life in France, after all, was dominated by the presence of the Allied armies, whose inXuence, as she knew, Wellington was uniquely able to temper. Her description to Constant and Tatichev of the Russian troops entering Paris after Napoleon’s Wnal defeat is a bitter moral cry against the despoiling of any country by intruding victors: ‘It is not fair of the Russians to think it bad if I do not want their success against the French, when I so much wanted the French not to have it against Russia.’ And again: ‘One should not speak ill of the French when the Russians are at Langres. May God banish me from France rather than have me return there thanks to foreigners! . . . Does France not have two arms, one to throw out the enemy and the other to overthrow tyranny?’14 This reXects a fairly general view, expressed in the disabused perception that Louis XVIII, the brother of the executed king, had come back from Ghent ‘in the foreigners’ baggage’. Stae¨l was, of course, in danger of confusing the two issues of pro-Napoleonism and pro-Frenchness, caught in the same web of conXicting loyalties as Delphine’s Le´once, who remains only half-conscious of the crime it would be to Wght his fellowcountrymen while Wghting against republicanism in the name of the royalist cause. Given her qualiWed support for republicanism, Stae¨l is more keenly aware than Le´once of the moral agony caused by civil strife, and her resentment of the Cossacks walking the Paris streets expresses an acute disquiet. Both situations are political contingencies caused by exceptional national and international circumstances that explain, if they do not legitimize, a degree of moral inconsistency, though nothing like the kind Consant had displayed. She was aware that appealing to Wellington’s faith in the French monarchy was the most eVective way of moving him. So she wrote to him on 15 July 1815:

14 Quoted in ibid. 157.

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There has been a measure of glory in the world, but glory without reproach, unmixed, felt and acknowledged universally—I do not know if there is another example of it—you told me this winter that you were happy at present—do you not at present have a foretaste of the life beyond, and does your heart not beat when you wake up in the morning with the joy of being you—I have given up novels for history . . . One cannot humiliate twenty-four million people if one wants to restore peace to the world, besides our King is truly a martyr in the present state of aVairs, and whatever wit, goodness, wisdom he shows, if he cannot relieve the French of foreigners what will become of him—your achievement must not be undone, and to preserve it you must be gentle with the French and continue promoting peace . . . 15

Though she was rarely subtle, this letter is tactful enough. Another she drafted at this time but seems not to have sent to Wellington harps on the same theme, that the victor should show both magnamity and compassion towards those who have been defeated and ‘liberated’: Will you forgive me for confessing, my lord, that I suVer as I admire you, the more unblemished your glory the more I feel the humiliation of my unfortunate country. The French in their misfortune can still look proudly at all the nations of continental Europe, they once defeated them, they have seen them bow the knee before them, but the English led by you are superhuman beings, and before you we blush with shame . . . Admire us for not being able to praise you without pain, all noble feelings sympathize with us, and when you see old wounded soldiers whose trophies you have snatched away weeping with rage at the sight of your glory, tell yourself that this nation is worthy of respect, and become its protector against those who would like to overcome it.16

Wellington was furious at her politicking, however qualiWed and cautiously (for her) expressed, yet it is probably correct to see her inXuence as crucial in his Wnally agreeing to reduce the number of troops occupying Paris. The hero of Waterloo, in any case, would be one of her most faithful visitors during her Wnal illness in 1817. Louis XVIII eventually agreed to what preceding heads of state had declined, repaying the Necker millions. This cleared the way for Albertine’s marriage to Victor de Broglie. According to the couple’s daughter, this stiV young man never made his wife happy, and Constant showed a justiWable paternal concern at the prospect of their union. On the other hand, there is no real indication of worry about Albertine’s married future in 15 V. de Pange, Stae¨l et Wellington, 45.

16 Ibid. 47.

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the letter he sent on 14 March 1816 to Juliette Re´camier, with whom he had been deliriously in love since 1814: ‘I want her to be happy. Her husband is an excellent man, and I do not believe that she, as she has been educated, has a really pressing need for an expansive sort of sensitivity. Madame de Stae¨l has instilled a perfect reason in her children through the excesses and failures of her own enthusiasm. Deep down I feel a sort of anger towards her, along with aVection . . . ’17 Nonetheless, Stae¨l’s earlier statement about forcing her daughter to make a love match lingers rather unsettlingly in the mind. The couple were duly married in Italy, and returned ahead of Stae¨l to Coppet. De Broglie’s Anglophilia presumably found further relief there, for Geneva was teeming with English visitors that summer of 1816, among them Lord Breadalbane, Lord Glenbervie, and Stae¨l’s friend Lord Lansdowne. Another lord too, whose relations with Stae¨l in what would prove to be the last months of her life were as important as any he experienced during his own years of exile, was hovering in the vicinity. While she now chose to live at a distance from the city and land she had always regarded as her true home, he had been driven from his country by the implacable force of social disapproval. His exile would be artistically fertile, just as Stae¨l’s had been, but like hers also marked by loss and suVering. The problems that culminated in Byron’s Xight from England in 1816 had begun years before. In 1813 Stae¨l herself had heard the rumours of ‘irregularities’ in his relations with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, whether or not they were Xaunted at the soire´e of Lady Davy’s at which he had promised to introduce Augusta to the reigning literary lion. Whatever the case, Byron cursed Stae¨l for the eagle eyes Jessie Allen had commented on, as he wrote to Lady Melbourne on 13 January 1814: ‘I do heartily wish Madame de Stae¨l at the Devil—with her observations—I am certain I did not see her—and she might as well have had something else to do with her eyes than to observe people at so respectful a distance.’18 He certainly knew that he was playing with Wre in his liaison. Incest, of which many supposed him to be guilty, was not a criminal oVence in early nineteenth-century Britain, but it was widely regarded as immoral and against nature—if not to the same degree as another oVence he was suspected of having committed and continuing to commit, and which was perhaps the true reason for his swift exit from England. 17 Constant, Lettres a` Madame Re´camier, 246–7.

18 Byron, Letters and Journals, IV.28.

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As a result of the on-dits that continued to plague him and his half-sister, Byron told Lady Melbourne several months later, Augusta ‘wished me much to marry—because it was the only chance of redemption for two persons—and was sure if I did not that I should only step from one scrape into another—particularly if I went abroad . . . ’19 He did follow her advice, but marriage, far from saving him, made his situation inWnitely worse, so much worse, indeed, that it helped to bring about his exile in 1816. It was during this time that he once more entered Stae¨l’s magic circle. Byron had Wrst met Annabella Milbanke in 1812, at the time when he was being feˆted by society for Childe Harold. It took only one or two conversations with him for her to become convinced that she must ‘save’ him. The marriage took place on 2 January 1815; the couple’s daughter Ada (destined to have the ‘mathematical education’ her father had described Stae¨l as lacking) was born on 10 December. Five weeks later, on 15 January 1816, Annabella left with the child for her parents’ house and never returned. A fortnight after that her father asked Byron to agree to a separation, which Byron refused to do until he knew that it was truly his wife’s desire. It was, though she did not reveal the reason why. When, on 16 February 1816, he received an oYcial letter concerning a legal separation, he imagined that the grounds alleged might be drunkenness, cruelty, even inWdelity; he does not seem to have expected the gathering rumours of something far more dangerous. In fact he stood accused of sodomy (both marital and homosexual)20 along with incest. On 25 March 1816, accordingly, he wrote to his wife in fear and loathing: my name has been as completely blasted as if it were branded on my forehead—this may appear to you exaggeration—it is not so—there are reports which once circulated not even falsehood—or their most admitted or acknowledged falsehood—can neutralize—which no contradiction can obliterate—nor conduct cancel—such have since your separation been busy with my name—you are understood to say ‘that you are not responsible for these’—that they existed previous to my marriage—and at most were only revived by our diVerences . . . —is it with perfect apathy you quietly look upon this resurrection of infamy?21

But others had been busy working on Annabella’s behalf, or at least against Byron’s interests. His former lover Lady Caroline Lamb told her what she had earlier learnt about Byron’s unnaturally close relationship with his 19 Byron, Letters and Journals, IV.191. 21 Byron, Letters and Journals, V.54.

20 See MacCarthy, Byron, 205.

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half-sister, the homosexual dalliances of his youth, and his guilty pleasures later in southern Europe. It was enough for Annabella’s lawyer to pronounce her well escaped ‘from all proximity to or intercourse with such contamination’. The sensational novel Glenarvon which Lady Caroline published in the midst of this furore fuelled the scandal, and seems to have been conceived and written in the spirit of revenge. The hero, Glenarvon, is the incarnation of the worst character-traits the author had perceived in Byron, who on 17 November 1816 wrote morosely from Venice to Thomas Moore: ‘I suppose you have seen ‘‘Glenarvon’’. Madame de Stae¨l lent me it to read from Coppet last autumn. It seems to me that if the authoress had written the truth, and nothing but the truth—the whole truth—the romance would not only have been more romantic, but more entertaining. As for the likeness, the picture can’t be good—I did not sit long enough.’22 The average reader certainly read the book for the ‘entertainment’ of scandal and titillation it provided. According to Fanny Randall, who wrote to Sismondi about the aVair on 17 June 1816, Glenarvon related ‘the entire history’ of the relationship between Byron and its author, and in so doing depicted so many members of high society that Lady Caroline too ended up exiled from it.23 Stae¨l would later ask Byron if his character was well drawn in it. ‘She was only singular’, he remarked, ‘in putting the question in the dry way she did.’24 There was far more than idle curiosity to the enquiry, as we shall see. For Byron no alternative presented itself to going abroad in the hope of escaping the malevolence of society and its ‘excommunicating voice’, though this was the very society that had lionized him a mere four years earlier. He was defeated by the same forces as would be unleashed at the end of the century against Oscar Wilde, but would not entirely escape them by Xeeing the country. He left on 23 April 1816 and never returned. Stae¨l, with all the human warmth of one whose own experience of exile remained vivid, did what she could to alleviate his situation, particularly after he took up residence near Coppet in the Villa Diodati and became a regular visitor. Yet Byron himself had been far from generous towards her in the interim. A letter he wrote Lady Melbourne on 15 August 1814, some 22 Ibid. 131. 23 Georges SolovieV, ‘Sce`nes de la vie de Coppet (re´cits d’hoˆtes europe´ens)’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 45 (1993–4), 46–66, at 64. 24 Medwin, Conversations, 273.

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months after Stae¨l had left England, described her as ‘our friend of indiVerent memory’, and remarked that she had also been ‘bowed out of Paris’ for ‘some of those bright remarks which doubtless will appear in her next preface’.25 It was supercilious and meant to be wounding: ‘indiVerent’ hardly describes the memory which England retained of her brilliant but often infuriating presence, and no one was ever unmoved by meeting her. In any case, if Byron thought he had done with her, she was—most fortunately, as it happened—far from Wnished with him. His circumstances had in certain respects come to resemble her own. The celebration and mourning of solitude in the third canto of Childe Harold matched much of what she herself had experienced during her life of exile, and if she had been ‘bowed out’ of Paris (though Byron’s report here is suspect), he had similarly been driven from England. At the same time, there were crucial diVerences between them. Although Stae¨l had often Xirted with sexual scandal, it was the perceived irregularity of her political views that had driven her from Paris and then France, whereas Byron was escaping social disgrace and, quite possibly, legal retribution. Despite his professed indiVerence towards her, Stae¨l would become one of his most determined champions during the earliest days of his exile. While she saw in him a victim in need of support, he Wnally looked beyond the periodic excesses of egotism and absurdities of conduct to discover in her a sincere and resourceful friend. On 10 July 1816 the Duchess of Devonshire wrote to her: ‘Tell me what you have done in connection with Lord Byron. Have you received him? What do you say of Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel? Has she sent you it?’26 It was clear enough what made her remark in a letter from Milan, written after Byron had visited Coppet, ‘I think you could have done nothing other than see Lord Byron. Whatever his conduct with his wife may have been, it is no concern for foreigners.’27 (Even so, on 22 September 1816 Stae¨l was asking Lady Davy what the true facts underlying his disgrace were. ‘I think it is to do with violence. Should one believe in something worse?’)28 One general diYculty Byron faced, it became evident, arose from people’s knowledge of Glenarvon, in connection with which he reported to Murray on 22 July: ‘Madame de Stae¨l told me (ten days ago at Coppet) marvellous and grievous things.’29 It was clear in light of this why he should 25 26 27 28

Byron, Letters and Journals, IV.158. Coppet Papers, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.152. Ibid. II.370. Comtesse de Pange, Schlegel, 526. 29 Byron, Letters and Journals, V.85.

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have wanted to avoid meeting English travellers in Switzerland wherever possible. Lord Lansdowne and his wife may have been impeccably liberal, but others who gathered in Geneva and elsewhere were more likely to reXect the moralistic conservatism of the Swiss themselves. To judge by the tone of a note he sent Murray the following year from Venice, Byron’s instincts had been correct: ‘if I met any of the race in the beautiful parts of Switzerland—the most distant glimpse or aspect of them poisoned the whole scene.’30 According to Fanny Randall, writing to Sismondi on 17 June 1816: ‘The English in general are very harsh towards him: they are thrilled to have an excuse to treat with an air of superiority a man who so clearly towers above them all.’31 Even Victor de Broglie was cool, or cooler than one might have expected such a natural Anglophile to be, observing dismissively in his memoirs: As he [Byron] prided himself on being a swimmer and sailor, he constantly crossed the lake in all directions, and came quite frequently to Coppet. His outward appearance was pleasant without seeming particularly distinguished. His face was handsome, but devoid of expression and originality. His Wgure was plump and short, he did not manoeuvre his lame legs as elegantly and nonchalantly as Monsieur de Talleyrand. His conversation was heavy, tiring with all its paradoxes, seasoned with ungodly jokes, very well worn, in the style of Voltaire, and full of commonplaces of a vulgar liberalism.32

Rocca conWrmed Fanny Randall’s observations. ‘Lord Byron’, he wrote to Wellington’s niece Lady Bughersh, has been very coldly received here, both by the natives and by the English. No one visits him, though there is much curiosity about him. He has been twice to Coppet, where we have received the great poet very cordially. The Wrst time he met here Mrs Hervey [William Beckford’s half-sister, whose sentimental novels he satirized], a friend of his wife’s mother, a little old lady of sixty-eight full of cleverness. She nearly fainted at the sight of Lord Byron, which seemed to distress him very much, and he was very agitated.33

But Albertine responded robustly to this event: ‘This is too much—at sixtyWve years of age’ (the near-faint, or the fact of Byron’s presence?). Fanny Randall reports on another similar incident, or perhaps the same one seen 30 Ibid. 191. 31 Quoted in Carlo Pellegrini, Madame de Stae¨l e il Gruppo di Coppet (Bologna: Patro´n, 1974), 140. 32 V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.361. 33 Ibid. 153, n. 4.

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from a diVerent angle. When Byron arrived one Saturday to dine at Coppet, ‘as he entered the drawing-room his emotion was so palpable that Monsieur de B[roglie] rushed up to him with a promptness that gratiWed me’.34 Byron felt as though he had become a spectacle to be stared at, ‘as at some outlandish beast in a raree-show. One of the ladies fainted, and the rest looked as if his Satanic Majesty had been among them.’35 In light of Bonstetten remarked that all the Genevese spied on him and viliWed him—‘There is a principle of inhospitableness in society at present which is frightening to behold.’36 Byron was naturally horriWed by all of this, Wnding the rigid bourgeois morality of the bien-pensant Genevese both stupid and depressing. Rocca, whom he described as both ‘remarkably handsome’37 and ‘a gentle and clever man; no one said better things, or with a better grace’, asked him: ‘But, my lord, what tempted you to venture into this lion’s den?’38 The true answer would probably have been a complex one (though Byron no doubt gave Rocca a throwaway response), but could not have omitted reference to Stae¨l’s extreme goodness. She had, he wrote to Augusta on 8 September 1816, ‘been particularly kind and friendly towards me—and (I hear) fought battles without number in my indiVerent cause’.39 Stae¨l, at least, did not perform her duties as hostess towards Byron out of a sense of obligation or horrid fascination, and would scarcely have sympathized with any who came, as Fanny Randall described them coming, to gawp and shudder. One thinks of Catherine Fanshawe’s half-frightened, half-reverential account of the man she had met at the Davys’ house, ‘a mixture of gloom and sarcasm, chastened, however, by good breeding, and with a vein of original genius that makes some atonement for the unheroic and ungenial cut of his whole mind. It is a mind that never conveys the idea of sunshine. It is a dark note upon which the lightning Xashes.’40 And Stae¨l’s humanity could also lighten it, for no one, Byron noted, had as much bonne foi as she did. ‘She took the greatest possible interest in my quarrel with Lady Byron, or rather Lady Byron’s with me . . . I believe Madame de Stae¨l did her utmost to bring about a reconciliation between us. She was the best creature in the world.’41 34 35 36 37 38 40

Pellegrini, Madame de Stae¨l, 140, quoting letter from Fanny Randall, 17 June 1816. Medwin, Conversations, 12. Letter from Bonstetten, 20 June 1816, quoted in Pellegrini, Madame de Stae¨l, 140. Byron, Letters and Journals, III.232. SolovieV, ‘Sce`nes’, 65. 39 Byron, Letters and Journals, V.92. Byron, Some Recollections, 6. 41 Medwin, Conversations, 184.

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Unlike the staider type of Swiss, Stae¨l did not believe in taboos. She had faced too much social disapproval herself to think it served any useful purpose, and knew that its function was often merely to make unpleasantly explicit what might better have remained private. She saw nothing wrong in insisting that Byron unburden himself to her, because, as he had had occasion to notice in London, she was virtually immune to embarrassment; but her motives were neither prurient nor vulgar. The idea of a large middle-aged lady subjecting England’s most glamorous poet to a talkingcure by a Swiss lake seems strange only if we accept uncritically the personal myth he constructed, and which witnesses such as Fanshawe helped to propagate. If we see him instead as lonely, angry, and grateful for unprejudiced attention, it becomes easy to understand how, and why, he should have laid his soul bare to a listener he had often mocked. Even so, he probably thought her plan for saving him and his marriage both credulous and naive. The success of this project depended on the truth of Byron’s statement that he loved his wife and would like her to return to him, which was actually far from the case. No doubt there was a more purely social point in his show of sadness, his pose of wronged husband, than it suited him to admit, or than most of those who knew him guessed. Rocca, as though to conWrm Byron’s view of his sagacity, seems to have seen behind the fac¸ade that Byron had erected for the purposes of living. As he wrote to Lady Bughersh: ‘He aVects in his manner, his look and his way of speaking a sort of sweetness and sadness, melancholy and depression. He greatly praises his wife whenever she is mentioned to him . . . If he was all that he tries to seem now, he would really be very fascinating.’42 Stae¨l may not have seen all these complexities, though there was a great deal more to her reception of him than superWcially appeared. She adopted the unlikely role of grande dame welcoming an alien to her (detested) native land, and determined to do the honours of an admiring country. ‘Lake Geneva owes you its gratitude’, she said, referring to the recent publication of his Prisoner of Chillon, at which Byron thanked her and dashed to the far end of the room. This poem was written after Byron visited the chaˆteau de Chillon with Shelley, who was staying near him with the future Mary Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont at the Maison Chapuis; it has always been among his most read works, perhaps because its passages of frenzy and 42 V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.155.

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helplessness seem so Romantically confessional and quintessentially Byronic. Although an implied analogy is drawn in it between Bonivard, an imprisoned Swiss democrat and priest, and the defeated Napoleon, by then conWned to St Helena, the irony contained in the ending is in one respect also reminiscent of Stae¨l’s recent experience: My very chains and I grew friends, So much a long communion tends To make us what we are:—even I Regained my freedom with a sigh. (ll. 389–92)

Yet however celebrated Stae¨l had become for having refused to return to Paris in 1814 when Napoleon Wnally invited her to do so, it was less because her exile had become so internalized as to be a paradoxical form of security, changeless and therefore reassuring, than because she could not endure giving the despot any form of free consent after so many years of revolt. The prisoner of Chillon’s psychological need for seclusion remained alien to this most convivial of women, in whose imaginative writing—particularly Delphine and Corinne, along with the early Wction—withdrawal from the world and from all society rarely brings lasting satisfaction. Byron’s hounded and melancholy self is a closer reXection of the Romantic condition of isolation, brooding yet self-aYrming. He and Shelley undertook other expeditions on Lake Geneva in honour of Rousseau, a series of pilgrimages by boat to places made celebrated by La Nouvelle He´loı¨se. The locality inspired the Rousseau sections of Childe Harold’s third canto, which Byron wrote during this part of his exile, and it became a paysage moralise´ that was bound to appeal to the Rousseauworshipper Stae¨l. In common with the titanic Wgures he celebrates, Byron felt traduced and misunderstood by the world, like Rousseau perceiving its pettiness and prejudice but unable to withstand its force. The canto is thus a travelogue of visionary suVering invoking the stricken, brooding presence of mournful genius—Rousseau’s and Napoleon’s, of course, but also that of Byron himself. As Rousseau was banished for his social vision and fearless declaration of individualism, and Napoleon toppled in the nemesis of overweening ambition, so Byron emerges as the tragic victim of selfrighteous narrow-mindedness in an experimental transWguration of exile that enlarges and digniWes the condition of tormented absence. This section of the poem naturally spoke loudly to Stae¨l. After all, she had never denied

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Bonaparte’s inherent grandeur, simply taken strong exception to its megalomaniac perversion in the cause of individual and international persecution rather than legitimate national defence; she admired Byron; and she had been celebrating Rousseau’s brilliance since the time of her Wrst published work, the Lettres sur Rousseau of 1788. Bonaparte’s campaign had become a pursuit of personal glory, a glory that Stae¨l elsewhere describes as fatal to any woman’s happiness, but here seen as destructive of the male as well. Byron’s hubris, equally, had earned its fairly predictable reward. That did not preclude her active and practical sympathy for him.43 Whatever he had implied at the time Stae¨l congratulated him on The Prisoner of Chillon, in reality he found her far from overwhelming, and knew that she was genuinely eager to help him in his misfortunes. Her view was that he should accept society’s opinion graciously, to which he naturally responded by quoting at her the epigraph Suzanne Necker had unwittingly supplied for Delphine, that a man can aVord to brave opinion while a woman must submit to the opinions of the world. To this her refreshing but infuriating response was that in real life duty and the necessity of yielding apply also to men (not a new idea to Byron, as his letters to Lady Melbourne reveal). It was perfectly apparent to Stae¨l’s more discriminating acquaintances, of whom Byron was one, that literature appealed to her as a medium of expression because it makes possible the adopting of speculative positions that are hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the requirements of life. But if she could play with ideas and attitudes, so could he. The image of bewildered innocence he presented at Coppet may not have deceived Rocca, but it seems have taken the chaˆtelaine in. This was despite the detailed interrogation she subjected him to, and which he described in these terms: ‘She was often troublesome, some thought rude in her questions, but she never oVended me, because I knew that her inquisitiveness did not proceed from idle curiosity, but from a wish to sound people’s characters. She was a continual interrogatory to me, in order to fathom mine, which required a long plumb line.’44 Stae¨l hardly made reconciliation likelier, it is true, by the intermediaries she chose: Lady Romilly, wife of the lawyer Sir Samuel Romilly who had advised Annabella, and whom Byron detested, and Lord Brougham, who had written a withering review of Byron’s Wrst collection 43 For some details on Stae¨l’s relationship with Byron see Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Demon and the Thunderstorm: Byron and Mme de Stae¨l’, Revue de Litte´rature Compare´e, 43 (1969), 834–43, and Wilkes, Lord Byron and Madame de Stae¨l. 44 Medwin, Conversations, 273.

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of poetry, Hours of Idleness, in the Edinburgh Review of 1808. After receiving the letter, Annabella sent a response to Stae¨l via Lady Romilly containing her acknowledgements of the interest you take in her feelings and for your wish to oVer what may be consolatory to them. She adds that Lady Byron is well aware that her determination ought not to be changed. That she feels indebted to your candour in suspending a censure which circumstances and false professions are indirectly calculated to bring upon her, and which she had forborn to avert for herself by more decided accusation.45

Lady Romilly then told Stae¨l that having had no dealings with Lady Byron since the separation, and seen her only once since her marriage, she was unable to help. Lord Brougham quoted Lady Byron’s answer to his letter, which seemed decisive: I regret my overtures of reconciliation as the causes which compelled me to separate were of too decided a nature to admit of my listening to such advances. Having found . . . that . . . every sacriWce I could make to his welfare . . . was not only cruelly repelled, but that there was scarcely any self-destructive act of guilt he was not determined to commit with the express desire of forcing me to leave him and believing it would break my heart, I may hope that I have saved him additional remorse by the step I took . . . I am not weak enough to be shaken in that resolution. It was as much inXuenced by consideration for him as for myself— therefore I can never repent of it, and I fear it can never be my only duty to revoke it or to accept with that view the friendly services you oVer and which I beg you to believe are fully appreciated.46

Byron probably had Stae¨l’s reports on these responses by early November. On the second he wrote to Augusta from Milan: ‘I wrote to you the other day—and now I do so to send a few lines—and to request you to take particular care that Lady B receives a letter sent in another enclosure. I feel so miserable that I must write to her—however useless.’47 But useless the letter, which has been lost, evidently was. Nonetheless, Byron remained touched by Stae¨l’s goodwill, the more so as he had become accustomed to his aVairs ‘setting people by the ears’, as he wrote to Augusta, without provoking them to particular acts of charity. ‘She was very kind to me at Coppet’, he would recall later on, in a letter to

45 Quoted in Robert Escarpit, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et le me´nage Byron’, Les Langues Modernes, 45: 4 (1951), 23–6, at 25. 46 Ibid. 47 Byron, Letters and Journals, V.122.

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Murray of April 1817.48 There had been even more need of her kindness after the departure of Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont, when he began to spend time regularly at the chateau. Albertine remembered to her husband his feline grace—‘in all his movements there was the grace of a cat (I hope you Wnd small cats graceful)’49—while Byron noted that despite her recent marriage Albertine’s Wgure had not begun to thicken, though it seemed somehow taller. Perhaps mere mischievousness led him to declare some years after Stae¨l’s death that the latter’s professions of liking for him had been entirely insincere: ‘when asked why she had changed her [formerly negative] opinion [she] replied with laudable sincerity that I had named her in a sonnet with Voltaire, Rousseau etc., and that she could not help it through decency.’50 The poem in question is the ‘Sonnet to Lake Leman’, written in July 1816, just a year before Stae¨l’s death: Rousseau—Voltaire—our Gibbon and de Stae¨l Leman! these names are worthy of thy shore.

Perhaps Stae¨l had, for once, been speaking ironically rather than behaving with conventional good-manneredness, but it seems more likely that she genuinely admired the lyrical qualities of the poem. Byron’s declaration to Moore: ‘As to Madame de Stae¨l, I am by no means bound to be her beadsman—she was always more civil to me in person than during my absence,’51 may support the notion that her favour was not disinterested. But he never forgot that, as he told Lady Blessington, Stae¨l ‘ventured to protect me when all London was crying out against me on the separation, and behaved courageously and kindly; indeed, Madame de S[tae¨l] defended me when few dared to do so, and I have always remembered it’.52 Obviously she had been as struck during her time in London as during her previous stay in England in 1794 by the importance of moral support for the uprooted and outcast. Along with admiration and approval, which she came to expect from the natives, this form of sustenance would be essential to her morale, her feeling of validity in exile. Byron, whether or not visited by a similar fellow-feeling, told Samuel Rogers on 4 April 1817 how greatly 48 Ibid. 205. 49 Broglie Papers, 4 Oct. 1816, quoted in V. de Pange, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.165. 50 Byron to Moore, 2 Jan. 1821, in Byron, Works: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898–1901), V.213. 51 Ibid. 52 Blessington, Conversations, 44.

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he was indebted to ‘our Lady of Coppet—and I now love her—as much as I always did her works—of which I was and am a great admirer’.53 She had, after all, made Coppet ‘as agreeable a place as society and talent can make any place on earth’.54 The often caustic Stendhal conWrmed her gift for creating intellectual society there: ‘it was the Estates General of European opinion . . . Voltaire never saw anything like it. Six hundred of the most distinguished people would gather on the shores of the lake [Geneva]: wit, wealth, the most exalted ranks came there seeking pleasure in the salon of the celebrated lady.’55 The great question of desertion—man by woman, woman by man—was destined to be on people’s minds for other reasons than simply the fact of Byron’s presence by Lake Geneva. It was brought to general attention by Constant’s Adolphe, published the same year, an event that set people thinking in ways Stae¨l often found disadvantageous to herself. According to Byron, who read it at the same time as Glenarvon (at that time frequently thought to be its counterpart), it was a story that left ‘an unpleasant impression—but very consistent with the consequence of not being in love—which is perhaps as disagreeable as anything—except being so’.56 That same year he was visited at the Villa Diodati by Hobhouse, to whom he gave Corinne along with Adolphe to read as essential preliminaries to meeting and knowing Stae¨l. Hobhouse’s impressions were clear but not altogether Xattering. ‘Read a volume of Madame de Stae¨l’s Corinne, very good but prosy, I think. Also Constant’s Adolphe, which, though short, is tiresome, as perhaps it is meant to be, as it paints the annoyance of an attached woman who will not be deserted.’57 Hardly a reXection of the Byron me´nage, then, though a typically male-centred judgement for its time, and at least in keeping with some of the emotions that had driven Constant to compose it in the Wrst place. But the irony of the feckless Adolphe’s desolation at the emptiness of life after the death of Elle´nore—the Elle´nore whose neediness and social irregularity he has hitherto seen as the main reasons for his failure to progress in life—is ignored. We know Byron’s 53 Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V.206–7. 54 Ibid. 109 (30 Sept. 1816). 55 Quoted in Stae¨l, Choix de lettres, 15–16. 56 Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V.86–7. 57 Lord Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, ed. Lady Dorchester, 6 vols. (London: John Murray, 1909–11), II.12.

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opinion about Stae¨l’s habitual avalanche-like attempt to smother and so discredit any adverse criticism of her work (in this case his belief that Constant’s story was a useful antidote for young women who had read Corinne), yet it is perhaps a shame that Stae¨l’s eloquence ‘overwhelmed but never convinced [him]’.58 A clearer mind might have seen what Byron missed: that Corinne resembles rather than stands opposed to Adolphe in showing the fatal eVects on woman of male irresolution—Adolphe’s repeated prevarications, or Oswald’s tortured and imperfect dutifulness towards his father rather than towards Corinne. But perhaps more clarity might have encouraged Stae¨l herself to qualify her sympathy for the deserted Byron, a reaction he can hardly have wanted to encourage. He moved on to Italy, where Stendhal would be transported by him: ‘I was presented at the theatre [in Venice] with the sight of Lord Byron. His face is heavenly; it is impossible to have Wner eyes. Oh what a pretty genius! He is barely twenty-eight, and is the Wrst poet in England and probably the world. When he is listening to music, his countenance is worthy of the Greek ideal.’59 Byron did not see Stae¨l again. But when, the following year, he heard that she had died, he remembered a wise and kind tolerance that had supported him at a time of diYculty, provoking feelings very diVerent from the ones he had often reported at the time of their Wrst acquaintance in London: We have her picture embellished or distorted, as friendship or detraction has held the pencil: the impartial portrait was hardly to be expected from a contemporary . . . The gallantry, the love of wonder, and the hope of associated fame, which blunted the edge of censure, must cease to exist.—The dead have no sex; they can surprise by no new miracles; they confer no privilege: Corinna has ceased to be a woman—she is only an author . . . 60

Stae¨l would have regarded this as the greatest accolade, while ruefully reXecting on the usefulness the last two statements might have been to her in life (even in connection with Napoleon’s antipathy towards her, though what infuriated him in her was both the sexually ambiguous and irregular woman and the author). Posterity, which is gradually regaining a taste for her two novels, would probably agree with Byron’s following remark that 58 Blessington, Conversations, 92. 59 Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence, in Voyages en Italie, ed. Victor del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 124. 60 Byron, Childe Harold, canto IV, n. 5, in Complete Poetical Works, II.235.

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‘the longer the vista through which [her various works] are seen, the more accurately minute will be the object, the more certain the justice, of the decision’. Conversely, the same Stendhal who accorded her some praise when he heard of her death would write disparagingly a mere fourteen months later: ‘In France, when you write well, that is, when you give the vanity of your readers part of the pleasure of a choice eVect and the opportunity to praise, to judge, to show wit, you can say anything, the fundamental thoughts no longer mean anything. Look at the works of Madame de Stae¨l and Monsieur de Chateaubriand. These famous writers do not think.’61 And the judgement continued as severe. ‘Madame la baronne de Stae¨l repeats with much wit and style, but higgledy-piggledy, what she has heard her numerous friends say about politics. But one always recognizes the daughter of a parvenu from the blind respect she feels for this nobility which her family can never aspire to . . . ’ He dismisses her as ‘a little foreigner, full of wit, but fuller still of petty vanity’, who continued the absurd panegyric of her absurd father, a man with ‘a small talent and an immense pride’.62 And, he claims elsewhere, this feˆted woman only ever wrote one work, L’Esprit des lois de la socie´te´, simply reproducing the best mots she heard others deliver in her salon.63 How generous Byron’s words appear against this relentless belittling, and in contrast with the often fractious nature of their relationship in London. She would, he thought, ‘enter into that existence in which the great writers of all ages and nations are, as it were, associated in a world of their own’,64 and his tribute provides the Wnal corrective to all the petty fear and disapproval with which the small-minded had met her glory during her lifetime: ‘Corinna is no more; and with her should expire the fear, the Xattery, and the envy, which threw too dazzling or too dark a cloud round the march of genius, and forbade the steady gaze of disinterested criticism.’65 But is he right to say this: ‘the individual will gradually disappear as the author is more distinctly seen’?66 It would be hard to imagine a more individual, more personal, more embodied writer than she appeared to the world in Surrey, London, Coppet, Vienna, Weimar, Moscow, and all over Europe. As Byron immediately concedes, too, she cries out for biographical attention: ‘Some one should be found to portray the unaVected graces with which she adorned those dearest [domestic] relationships . . . Some one 61 Stendhal, Voyages en Italie, 233. 62 Ibid. 234–5. 63 Ibid. 326. 64 Byron, Childe Harold, II.236. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.

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should be found, not to celebrate, but to describe, the amiable mistress of an open mansion, the centre of a society, ever varied and always pleased, the creator of which, divested of the ambition and the arts of public rivalry, shone forth only to give fresh animation to those around her.’67 This is indeed how she seemed to most people throughout her banishment and emigration from France, as well as to many of her compatriots. Byron added his particular tribute to the testimonies of her enduring merit. ‘To the sorrows of very many friends and more dependants may be oVered the disinterested regret of a stranger, who amidst the sublimer scenes of the Leman lake received his chief satisfaction from contemplating the engaging qualities of the incomparable Corinna.’68 His earlier disparagement had been a diVerent sort of cloud, but one to which Stae¨l was generally oblivious; his own darkness, equally, was lightened by her generous, open spirit, a clearer manifestation of the libertarian instinct she associated with the British than Byron ever found in the depressing provinciality of native society. Certainly, the regime that dogged her was diVerently motivated from the forces that persecuted him, even though it shared Byron’s antifeminism; it punished woman’s brilliance (as convention nulliWes the gifts Corinne possesses) as well as her nonconformity, so imposing a double fetter on her body and spirit. Yet this dual penalty failed to break Stae¨l, any more than eventual concession on Napoleon’s part released her. If both writers had ‘earned’ their exile, both used enforced absence to open up the world and battle for its greater freedom. Stae¨l explored Germany, then Italy, and made them the emblems of an unshackled Romanticism and Classicism respectively, of a humane nationalism, and of art, while the self-banished Byron extended the domains of otherness he experienced even before he left England to the point of dying in the cause of foreign (Greek) liberty. Yet both felt reduced to a state of impotence by prevailing social forces: Stae¨l’s political existence as a woman could never be more than virtual, and Byron watched helplessly as Napoleonic energy was dissipated and neutralized, leaving no substantial legacy behind. Childe Harold’s third canto traces this decline. Would Byron’s visionary career in exile have shown the energy it nonetheless displays without Stae¨l’s example? To say that her ‘ceas[ing] to be a woman’69 (the lack of feminity for which he had earlier mocked her) 67 Ibid. 69 See n. 60.

68 Ibid.

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made him see the life of the spirit as more lasting than that of the body is no doubt a trivial observation, but it helps contextualize his achievement from 1816 onward. Like Rousseau’s, Stae¨l’s life apart had an exemplary richness in showing how expulsion—in this case woman’s exclusion from the public sphere or from the world of artistic creation—might become a form of inclusiveness, enabling its object to understand diVerent sorts of human experience. Throughout her life Stae¨l wanted her sex to be acknowledged in these terms, despite her continued and countervailing nostalgia for a traditional pattern of male–female relationship. This is why Napoleon’s persecution nearly confounded her. Since she could not prevent such an impulse except by behaving in ways she thought unacceptably impoverishing, she adjusted to it, and De la litte´rature, the ambiguously conformist Delphine, the part-visionary, part-resigned Corinne, the epoch-making De l’Allemagne, and the deWant Dix anne´es d’exil were the result. Whether or not he openly acknowledged it (at least before her death), Byron saw in all of this a model of artistic and human resistance. As for the biographical attention she deserves, in the aftermath to the Byron episode—which displays all her humanity, capacity and taste for being meddlesome (the quality that had so irked Napoleon), worldly wisdom, literary and artistic conviction, grande dame airs, and invariable passionate engagement with whatever issue currently seemed to her of the greatest moment—there was relatively little left to tell. She married Rocca after bearing him their ‘Little Us’, described by Maria Edgeworth as a ‘pleasing gentle looking ivory-pale boy with dark blue eyes like Madame de Broglie—intelligent enough but not any appearance of genius or of a bold enthusiastic character . . . as prudent as an old man and as careful of his property’.70 He would marry in 1834 and die in 1842 without leaving any mark behind. His mother never quite recovered her health after the birth, and her friends continued to worry about her cavalier habit of expending energy on matters that, in their view, did not merit it. She left Coppet the week following the marriage ceremony, summer having shaded into autumn, and proceeded to spend a winter of indisposition in Paris, living in the rue Royale. Not, admittedly, such a degree of indisposition that she could be persuaded to restrict her social pleasures, for she no doubt felt that she had a 70 Edgeworth, Letters from England, 219.

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great deal of lost Parisian time to make up. Yet in the midst of the balls, soire´es, receptions, and dinners, by the side of a husband whose own health was also by that time giving cause for serious alarm, she surely sensed that time was running out. On 21 February 1817, going downstairs after a reception given by Louis XVIII’s chief minister Decazes, she suVered a devastating stroke, though it was not generally realized that that is what it was: on 3 April Schlegel told Mackintosh that her collapse had been caused by a swelling of the liver which made her dropsical, her feet so swollen that walking was almost impossible.71 A Dr Young from London, who had regularly attended her, gave an unspeciWc but discouraging prognosis, and for over a week she seemed ‘absent’. But on 26 May Mary Berry received a dictated letter from Stae¨l describing her ‘truly dreadful accident’ in alarming but combative terms, mentioning that she was virtually unable to use her feet and hands and so had been forced to lie on her back ‘like a tortoise’ for ninety days, ‘but with much more agitation through the imagination than that animal’.72 It was, she wrote, an infernal punishment for ‘the most active person in the world’ to be in a state of near-petrifaction, though she still anticipated being transported in her carriage ‘like a package’ to Coppet in mid-July and to Rome in early October. Indeed, she and her carers, Fanny Randall and Albertine, were planning to visit a Geneva doctor, ‘very skilled’, who knew her and her constitution exceedingly well. But her state worsened and the trip was never made. Many remarked on the indomitable spirit with which she met and endured this Wnal misfortune. George Ticknor reported that she was under no illusions about her health. ‘I shall never recover from this illness,’ she told him. ‘I am sure of it.’73 He had found her in bed, ‘pale, feeble, and evidently depressed in spirits; and the mere stretching out of her hand to me, or rather making a slight movement, as if she desired to do it, cost her an eVort it was painful to witness’.74 Challenging the assertions of her other doctors that she would rise again from bed, with eyes brightening ‘in the consciousness that she was about to utter one of those brilliant things with which she had so often electriWed a drawing-room’, she responded, ‘yes, I know, but they always take such an authorial vanity in what they say that I don’t trust them at all’.75 71 Norman King, ‘Lettres de Madame de Stae¨l a` Sir James Mackintosh’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 10 (1970), 7–54, at 45. 72 Berry, Journals, III.126–7. 73 Ticknor, Life, 133. 74 Ibid. 132. 75 Ibid. 133.

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Madame de Boigne had referred feelingly to Stae¨l’s appearance in Paris even before illness forced her to keep to her bed: ‘She was pitiful to see at the beginning of the evening. She arrived exhausted by suVering, but after a while mind completely took over from instinct, and she was as brilliant as ever, as though she wanted to display to the last this matchless superiority which made her unequalled.’76 Towards the end, as the indignities of neardissolution took over, she was still brave enough to plan for the future she would never know. Boigne described her last visit: For some days she had been conWned to the sofa; livid blotches covering her face, arms, hands only too clearly announced the decomposition of the blood. I had the painful impression of a Wnal goodbye, yet her conversation was concerned only with future plans. Was she trying to deceive herself ? I do not know; but the contrast between this appearance full of death and these words full of life was devastating.77

As death approached her fear was that she would not see herself die but, rather, drift into a sleep from which she would not awaken. On 13 July Fanny Randall dozed oV, holding the hand of the sleeping patient, to whom she had given a stronger dose of opium than usual. At about Wve in the morning Victor de Broglie awoke with a jump: Fanny Randall herself had been roused from sleep to Wnd the hand icy cold.78 Stae¨l’s worst fears had been realized. As Maria Edgeworth reported in a letter of 4 June 1820, she had been ‘excessively afraid that no one would receive her last breath’.79 On 4 August 1817 Burney wrote to Alexandre d’Arblay from Ilfracombe: ‘You conWrm then, mon ami, the death of Madame de Stae¨l? . . . I had hoped the report was premature. I am sorry I had not once more seen her: circumstances here forebade it: but I am sorry, for she desired it repeatedly—and now she is dropped oV for ever!’80 And on 2 September she was still (in common with much of English society) preoccupied with Stae¨l’s passing. ‘You tell me nothing of Madame de Stae¨l, and here in England she is a constant theme still of enquiry and report.’81 Byron wrote to Murray on 7 August 1817: ‘I have been very sorry to hear of the death of Madame de Stae¨l—not only because she had been very kind to me at Coppet—but because now I can never requite her.—In a general 76 78 79 80

Boigne, Me´moires, I.479. 77 Ibid. 479–80. V. de Broglie, ‘Madame de Stae¨l’, I.381. Edgeworth, Letters from England, 140. Burney, Journals and Letters, X.583. 81 Ibid. 659.

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point of view she will leave a very great gap in society and literature.—With regard to death—I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.’82 In the Me´moires d’outre-tombe Chateaubriand describes paying a visit with Juliette Re´camier to the mausoleum in which Stae¨l’s body had been laid to rest, the coYn placed at the foot of the bath containing her mother and father and the door sealed up for ever. While his companion explored the surrounding wood he stayed behind by the tomb, sitting on a bench with his back to France and his eyes Wxed on Lake Geneva and the summit of Mont Blanc. Golden clouds covered the horizon behind the sombre lines of the Jura mountains, like an aureole above a long coYn. Others too who had belonged there, he reXected, were absent—Rousseau, Voltaire, though both had been exiled like Stae¨l herself, ‘so many famous names now dead, all on the same shore. If I have ever felt the vanity and truth of glory and life at one and the same time, it was at the entrance to the silent wood, dark, unknown, where sleeps the woman who had known such fame and renown.’83 ‘I shall’, Mary Berry wrote to Lady Hardwicke, ‘think the world less interesting without her.’84 82 Byron, Letters and Journals, V.255–6. 83 Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Molinier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), II.606. 84 Berry, Journals, III.139.

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xile led Stae¨l to freedom, though it was meant to make her captive. She declares in Dix anne´es d’exil that it was her need for liberty—the third of her life’s great loves, along with God and her father1—that made the tyrant Napoleon hate her. He drove her from Paris and tried to stop her publishing, but none of his measures could suppress her. She carried on goading him, thwarting him by speaking, humiliating him by writing. With the loss of one freedom, another was always being born. She learned that exile could be a political weapon for its victim, male or female, as well as its perpetrator. For Stae¨l herself it meant two things simultaneously, absence and writing about absence (as Constant called Corinne both travelogue and novel), or being abroad and giving a practical as well as theoretical account of the states that being abroad created. Every political regime in France bar the monarchy—that of the Terror, the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire—exiled Stae¨l, banished (for the wrong reasons) for holding the right principles. She was a liberal attached to constitutional theory, a passionate enemy of absolutism and dictatorship, and a defender of abstract values such as progress, tolerance, and faith in humanity, values that growing up in Enlightenment France had taught her. It is on account of all these things that she speaks so loudly to us today. In her time she showed how the writer, even (and under Napoleon perhaps especially) the woman writer, could be spurred by exile into expressing the kind of dissent and making the kind of revelation that must be feared by any tyrant. Hence her remarking in Dix anne´es d’exil, ‘I shall not be without usefulness to the world if I advertise everything that can persuade people never to give sovereigns the arbitrary power of exile’.2 Exile enabled her to be an active dissident in exactly the ways it was meant to punish her for being and to prevent her from being any longer. In

1 See Necker de Saussure, ‘Notice’, p. cxcii (to Chateaubriand). 2 Stae¨l, Dix anne´es d’exil, 152.

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forcing her to seek refuge in the non-Napoleonic world of Coppet, Italy, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and England, it also made her develop an additional retreat inside herself where she could exercise her powers of thought and give them literary expression. ‘I can conceive of no better resort against [injustice] than meditation on philosophy and the emotion of eloquence’,3 she wrote, underlining the reciprocal movements, inward and outward, that characterized her life of writing and sociability. As the nineteenth century invented the concept of the celebrity, so she used exile to make herself more famous than almost anyone in Europe, with the exception of Napoleon.4 Her sex was both a hindrance and a help in this respect, testing her endurance as she explored the continent, testing friendships (such as her relationship with the comparatively timid Fanny Burney) in the name of decorum, testing her own conception of the nature and implications of femininity, but giving her star status wherever she went. She could open, or dazzle in, salons all over the civilized world, trading on her cachet as Necker’s daughter, her wealth, her literary fame, and the innumerable connections she forged in a life of ceaseless sociability. Her network of acquaintances was sustaining both personally and politically, widening her power base and spawning interest groups which could oVer her the political life at second hand that was a proscribed but committed woman’s lifeblood. The Republic of Letters helped to extend this network of useful alliances by embracing her at every point of her travels and adding its voice to the publicity she always attracted. It seemed to onlookers, as a result, that any attempt to gag her must fail, a fact intensely annoying to Napoleon. Not only was he unable to restrict or curtail the life of her mind, but the life of her body was always provokingly vigorous (as she told Mary Berry at the time of her stroke, she had been ‘the most active person in the world’). No matter what he tried, she thwarted every attempt to suppress her. Bonaparte had been foolish, or unrealistic, enough to imagine that he could so circumscribe her world as to make it resemble the Trappist convent she once visited from Coppet, a sea of silence, isolation, desolation, and suVering. She, however, refused to resign the joyfulness of life, lacking all vocation for abnegation and self-denial. Company, by contrast, made her alive, since it fostered the vivifying exchange of ideas and feelings. Exile, which tried to make her lack, simply forced her to seek and Wnd replenishment away from home. 3 Quoted in Rosset, E´crire, 149. 4 See Simone Balaye´, ‘Ame et unite´ du Groupe de Coppet’, in Lucien Jaume (ed.), Coppet, creuset de l’esprit libe´ral (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2000), 13–23, at 15–17.

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Just as she found a space for literature in all her exiles, so her exile itself became literature, the written declaration of what her mind conceptualized, and a means to eVective protest that overrode local, national, and even international constraints. She triumphed over her enemies’ attempts to suppress her voice through censorship and her person through banishment, remaining hopeful about the extent to which she would be able to ‘get through’ to the people who really mattered: so she told Schlegel that foreigners were for her like a contemporary posterity, an audience that stood at a useful distance from her work. As they and their homelands in turn helped generate her writings, ‘in truth I have much to be grateful for in this posterity’. Being expelled from France, above all, exposed her to the diVerent forms of evaluation that matured her as a writer, though inevitably her favourite topics were loosely anti-Bonapartist—woman’s tragic subjection to the will of man (Delphine, Corinne), one nation’s Wght for autonomy (Italy), another’s search for self-expression (Germany), a third’s awakening to the concept of national pride (Russia), a fourth’s triumphant embodiment of political freedom and moral harmony (England). So it was that deprivation-with-fulWlment became her constant literary theme. An outlaw herself, she denounced the tyrannies that robbed an entire sex or country of self-determination, placing it outside the sphere where useful battles could be fought and crucial liberating actions taken. She could not keep away from politics, because she thought all the questions that were interesting to states interesting and relevant to individuals too. It followed from this that she could not help attacking orders and proscriptions that she saw as illiberal and unfair. Where she thought it rational for there to be underdogs, on the other hand (in certain acceptable models of republican government, for example), she was happy with inequality. Yet in her own life as a woman she generally took subordination as an insult, perhaps because she lacked what she called the consolation and fulWlment of marriage to a man whose superiority she could wholeheartedly celebrate. She thought moral freedom as vital as political or intellectual liberty, even though she did not necessarily believe in personal autonomy. She knew that suVering comes from an abandoning of the self to another that is no less inevitable and in some cases desirable for failing to guarantee individual happiness. Before she wrote either Delphine or Corinne she had argued both the powerlessness of the will to ensure fulWlment and the necessity of seeking the good of others. The thesis of De l’inXuence des passions may have seemed rather bleak in this respect, particularly for a natural egotist such as Stae¨l, but

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its message about human interaction was unambiguous: ‘[goodness] neither wishes nor expects anything from others, and places its felicity exclusively in what it feels. It does not give itself over to a single personal impulse, not even the need to inspire a reciprocal sentiment, Wnding its pleasure only in what it gives.’5 The implications of this doctrine for personal compensation, the safeguarding of one’s own contentment, are realistic, and deliberately so. Stable happiness eludes Delphine and Corinne as it did Stae¨l herself for much of her life, and perhaps this is at the root of what many who knew her (despite also knowing her as an egotist) called her abiding quality of goodness, a quality that ought to pay oV in someone’s happiness, but does not necessarily bring it to the doer. She knew that personal forsaking—of liberty, of homeland, or of any other representative means for expressing the self— commanded no automatic reward, but she was enough the Swiss Protestant to be convinced that the pain of renunciation might still be worth enduring. Or did she, even so, see the self-mortifying acceptance of loss as the product of her sex rather than of her religious upbringing? If she did, it must still be granted that she no more idealized the helplessness of women, the source of the double exile she suVered, than Wollstonecraft and others did, except occasionally in Delphine. There is, then, a disabused clarity about her diVerent accounts of women’s place in the world, situated as they are outside the realm of political activity and within the often stultifying conWnes of domesticity. In her work Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Re´volution (1798) she remarks: ‘We must always respect the (private) circle of everyone,’6 so acknowledging that even public acts derive from private existences. All the same, she was understandably negative about the scope for meaningful female activity outside the home. Despite the dimensions of her own achievements, she remarks in the same work that, as nature created her for conversation, ‘I have never in my life directed a public aVair’. The explanation that follows is unexpected: ‘to inXuence, one needs skill,’ which she professedly did not possess.7 It was not, in other words, that women such as herself lacked opportunity, but that they lacked ability. However hard it is to imagine that she truly subscribed to this damning opinion, it still returns us, rather disappointingly, to the old image of Stae¨l as a young woman exalting the 5 Stae¨l, De l’inXuence des passions, 225. 6 Stae¨l, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Re´volution et des principes qui doivent fonder la Re´publique en France, ed. Lucia Omacini (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1979), 111. 7 Ibid. 120.

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power of husbands and deifying the pater omnipotens et aeternus Jacques Necker, as well as to the essentially dismissive account of women’s creative limitations contained in De la litte´rature. Still, she thought, some women’s writing might help correct this situation, especially, perhaps, her kind of writing, intelligently focused on gain as well as loss. The ‘misfortune of being a woman’ which Edgeworth sardonically described as the essential theme of Delphine is less of a misfortune if one knows how to make social or political capital out of it. Not that the licence of Wction should be used to idealize the situation or confer on the female sex a degree of agency it lacks: Stae¨l is too much the realist to want to show social institutions being adjusted to suit the needs of women rather than men, and perhaps too little the feminist even to want to argue that they should be. Instead, she uses the rigour of exile as a pattern for describing other forms of denial imposed on female lives, showing that they are more severely determined by national, social, political, and cultural values than men’s. As a realist, too, she makes clear the impossibility of changing the pattern that has woman included (to a degree) at the price of self-denial, but excluded if she is errant, as Delphine’s Madame de R. or The´re`se d’Ervins is deemed to be. The realist does not expect social institutions such as marriage to be adjusted to suit female requirements, but, when she thinks they ought to be, makes plain the injustice of the status quo. Although Stae¨l allows herself to be the exception to many general rules, she still apparently thought woman’s place to be mostly in the private sphere. This does not mean that she justiWes an order which essentially relegates woman to the home; she merely declines to show women of the post-Revolutionary era as activists successfully using the principles of economic and social liberalism in their own interests, both because she does not show any post-Revolutionary woman even in works written, as both Delphine and Corinne were written, after the Revolution, and also because the reality is worse. The truth is that women are painfully trapped by the anti-female ordinances and assumptions of the post-Revolutionary Napoleonic era and carry on being trapped thereafter. Moreover, Stae¨l’s presentation of the argument for such exclusion reveals its circularity. The Re´Xexions sur le proce`s de la Reine declares in Rousseau-like spirit that woman cannot be contented if she leaves the estate for which man intended her, because man will be made unhappy by her desire to do so; the proclamation of De l’inXuence des passions on the necessity of altruism comes unbidden to support this claim by making it seem both

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self-evidently true and suYcient. What it eVectively aYrms is that women have no individual right to be happy. Set against this, however, are the facts of Stae¨l’s own life. Napoleon had to exile her, he insisted, because she refused to live like other women, or to do so consistently. Does this make her simply an egotist, the non-altruist by deWnition? Did she despise other women, and underline that contempt by deliberately antisocial conduct that betrayed no concern with improving the lot of her sex? Her conduct in society might seem to suggest as much, but the fact that she also carried on behaving in ways that guaranteed her exclusion from her favourite society, which included the society of men, argues against it. Rebellion resulted in her comprehensive disadvantage until she managed to partially retrieve the situation through a set of tactical manoeuvres that intensiWed the force of her attack on political authoritarianism and intermittently increased her own wellbeing. Her exile, then, if not a time of particular happiness, was far from the real-life equivalent of woman’s Wctional death. Going to Coppet or to the end of the civilized world was very diVerent for her from swallowing poison for Delphine, since she turned it to a far more practical purpose. She had objections to suicide in fact that she did not maintain in Wction, or maintained only under pressure from conservative milieus. If she found it degrading, both of life and of the exceptional woman, to regard exile as a terminal fate, it was because of the essential distinction between these truths of life and Wction. In the novelist’s world, after all, death may be a metaphor, whereas in human experience it is always a reality. It makes better sense for the exiled subject, then, at least if she continues to associate living with hoping, to make her expulsion a source of new life, of change and hoped-for betterment. Napoleon, who could not help admiring Stae¨l the writer, would probably have had no objection in principle to that; the problem, as he saw it, was that she kept turning this double creativity to political ends, whereas Stae¨l kept denying that they were political, or at least political in ways that damaged his authority. The truth was probably somewhere between these points of view. In her story ‘At the Chaˆteau of Corinne’ (1880), Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may be identiWed with the younger aunt in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, describes the conXict in a latter-day Stae¨l, Katharine Winthrop, between prevailing concepts of womanliness and the urge to write. The heroine upholds the example of Stae¨l, ‘a woman of genius’, against the depreciation and hostility of her companion John Ford, in whose

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eyes the phrase ‘woman of genius’ is both an oxymoron and a stigma. This is because: ‘No woman is so proclaimed by the great brazen tongues of the Public unless she has thrown away her birthright of womanly seclusion for the miserable mess of pottage called ‘‘fame’’ . . . ’8 (This echoes the view Stae¨l herself proposed, that glory is for woman a ‘dazzling mourning for personal happiness’.) Ford tells Winthrop that he himself asks ‘only the simple and retiring womanly graces’ of any female, and ‘pities literary women’. Replying that she is just such a woman, she presents him with a volume of her poetry, which he reads. At her insistence he oVers a critique of her work, and it is merciless. While he could, he says, tolerate its badness—‘we do not expect great poems from women any more than we expect great pictures’—he cannot forgive its daring, ‘its essential unpardonable sin’.9 A woman should not dare: ‘Her mental realm is not the same as that of a man.’ When she angrily protests that all men do not think as he does, citing a poet called Percival who is a visitor at her chaˆteau on Lake Geneva, he simply and dismissively responds that Percival is eVeminate10— that is, he represents the type of mal du sie`cle hero found in Adolphe, Corinne, and other works of their sort, one who is made profoundly uncomfortable by the coarsely virile and materialistic assertiveness of contemporary society. They part in anger. A year passes, in the course of which Winthrop loses the fortune that paid for her chateau and the elegancies of her life and allowed her to be a writer. Ford returns, Wnds her ill, proposes marriage, and reveals that he came back because he knew that her present poverty made her dependent, thus Wtting her to be the kind of wife he wants. After extracting from her a promise to abandon writing, he leaves in the apparent certainty that she will consent and that he will have proved his point. In his odious male prejudice Ford represents a type whose exemplar, for Stae¨l, was the conquering and misogynistic Napoleon, just as Winthrop resembles Stae¨l in her conviction both that domesticity and retirement are proper ends for woman and that woman should not be prevented from writing if she has something important to say. One wonders whether Corinne’s English-speaking women readers approved of Stae¨l’s novel solely, or even principally, because it trumpeted female genius and the rights of 8 Constance Fenimore Woolson, ‘At the Chaˆteau of Corinne’, in Joan Myers Weimer (ed.), Women Artists, Women Writers: ‘Miss Grief’ and Other Stories (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 211–47, at 229–30. 9 Ibid. 233. 10 Ibid. 234.

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superior females over inferior males. George Eliot puts the book in Maggie Tulliver’s hands in The Mill on the Floss, Elizabeth Barrett had read it three times by the early 1830s, Mary Godwin picked it up immediately after being delivered of her Wrst child by Shelley,11 but Jane Austen ironically recommended it, in all its undoubted grandiloquence, to a stone-deaf acquaintance. What all these readers seem to have found in the novel, despite appearances, was a rather qualiWed depiction of the rights of the woman of genius. One might have expected Stae¨l’s non-Wctional work either to investigate the reasons for woman’s exclusion from what man takes as his natural right (is woman’s nature truly Wxed, as the stereotypes of femininity suggest?) or make some attempt to Wnd a remedy for the situation. That neither thing is done may simply conWrm that the cause of women in general was of less concern to Stae¨l than her cause in particular, which could be quite eVectively advanced by means of the tools of wealth, brilliance, fearlessness, and verbal Xuency she had at her disposal. It seems unquestionable, however, that she did acknowledge diVerent determining factors in the lives of men and women respectively. National and cultural values of the kind she investigates in De l’inXuence des passions, De la litte´rature, Corinne, De l’Allemagne, Dix anne´es d’exil, and Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise are shown as forces that can rarely be withstood by either sex: Corinne and Oswald’s aVair could only end in tragedy, and Oswald’s father was right to conclude that Corinne was not a suitable wife for him.Yet Stae¨l still betrays a sexist bias that may dismay modern readers. In the Conside´rations, for example, she simply assumes that the free state of English society—which she regularly extols—‘naturally’ entails men recovering their ‘natural’ dignity (that is, their dominance) and women being subordinate to them.12 In an arbitrary monarchy such as that in France, on the other hand, the ‘conquests of grace’ were apparently limitless, and women ‘naturally’ dominated there. Although she dare not admit it, in other words, the entirely natural consequence of her political preference for freedom, resulting as it apparently must in male hegemony, is an equally ‘natural’ repression of the female. The paradox that political freedom is achieved only at the cost of someone’s constraint, which Rousseau had admitted in Du contrat social, ought, one feels, to have seemed particularly unacceptable to her when the disadvantaged party was so comprehensively disadvantaged, and also 11 See Moers, Literary Women, 52 and passim.

12 Stae¨l, Conside´rations, 356.

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represented her own side; yet seemingly it did not. Stae¨l’s indignation at woman’s marginal status could sound as genuine as her connivance at female repression, but neither tells the whole story. No one, of course, could prevent Stae¨l from writing (though her father tried); they could stop her publishing, or exile her for writing in anti-Napoleonic ways, yet it was as impossible to expunge the mark made by her writings as to stop her constantly writing more. Thus exile did not and never could constitute an absolute absence, either physical or metaphorical. It is commonly believed that Constance Fenimore Woolson, who died before her time, took her own life, possibly because she was disappointed in James’s feelings for her. Her death, whatever its precise cause, posed anew the question Stae¨l’s life and work had always asked: why do literary or artistic women break down? The simple answer is one that partially, but only partially, applies to Stae¨l herself, that an anxiety of authorship aZicts them to such a degree that they become unhinged. Stae¨l, of course, was far from unhinged—she was too robust and conWdent for that, except, perhaps, when she was embroiled in one of her tortured love aVairs—but she was acutely conscious of the sometimes paralyzing conXict between woman’s assigned place in society, with all the sacriWces it may entail, and her right to something more. Self-sacriWce, eVectively or actually suicide, features as prominently as it does in her Wction (Mirza, Zulma, Pauline, and Sappho as well as Delphine and Corinne) because she knew the extreme and deadly pressures that male orthodoxy and authority imposed upon women. Exile was one of its real-life translations. If woman’s ‘purpose’ is as John Ford assumes it to be, self-denial prompted or compelled by the absolute demands of patriarchy, Stae¨l was unashamed about evading it. Such evasion was, she knew, the positive version of enforced departure, such as the exile’s departure from home, and its equivalent was woman’s departure from restrictive convention. Stae¨l needed love, but not salvation through love, and she needed activity as she needed air to breathe. She also, to a degree, had the means for activism, the material resources, the courage (as the numbers she saved from prison and massacre testify), and the mental resolve; and she refused, as Corinne did, to see genius in woman as a disWgurement or delusion. Bonaparte acknowledged her genius and said that it made her works of lasting value, but his urge for power also made him denigrate them as well as her. Hence her exile and his banning of her work. The men she was most drawn to in life—Talleyrand, Narbonne, Constant—all compromised belief for the sake of political advantage. The kinds

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of gain they sought were not available to Stae¨l herself, but even if they had been it is unlikely that she would have sacriWced her integrity on their account: she had been in opposition far too long for breaking faith to seem a valid option. So she continued to wield her pen against Napoleon’s sword in the interests of a purer ambition, prepared to pay the price of dissidence. After all, she knew that caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt— people change their sky but not their minds when they cross the sea (or as De l’Allemagne put it, ‘l’on change de monde, sans avoir change´ de cœur’).13 But she also knew its opposite: exile changes your perspective. It never changed hers so radically that she abandoned her abiding principles, but it enlarged her vision and so gave her victory. It is true that to outside observers her courage sometimes looked like blindness. Her imperviousness to personal criticism and mockery (especially that of the English dandies) when she travelled abroad was of a piece with her comparative lack of social grace, which often made her appear more egotistical than she really was. She was easy to bait; but easy bait is rarely satisfying, and teases like Byron learned to respect her. Her guilelessness, by contrast, wins her our respect, because the punishment it earned—ostracism in Paris salons, subtler disapproval in London drawing-rooms—was so crudely disproportionate to whatever breach of convention it was meant to mark. If she irritated those whose national characteristics included reserve, self-deprecation (which she did not really comprehend), and understatement, she could still disarm them with a mixture of brilliance and goodwill. She was kindly and courageous, the cleverest woman Byron had met, and in the eyes of Sir James Mackintosh one of the three greatest geniuses of the modern world. Her sheer energy, along with her talent, made many people feel uncomfortable and inadequate, particularly those who disapproved of female accomplishment. Trying to get rid of her, however, was futile, since her voice—her written and spoken words—could inWltrate the very areas from which she had apparently been driven. To erase her was impossible, defeating even those who had De l’Allemagne pulped: removed from one place, she simply reappeared with her work in another. And she refused to temper her public dissent, because freedom of expression was one of the forms of liberty she most worshipped.

13 Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, I.192.

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For her, writing was a way of expressing opinion rather than merely a means of depicting the world or describing human relationships, though both of these could serve that higher purpose. So she was bound to follow ideas where they took her, fearlessly declaring beliefs—whatever she claims about Delphine—or having characters declare them in their own right, not tailoring them to conform with other people’s wishes. It is strange, therefore, that she should have told Brinkman she possessed only qualities, not virtues.14 The fact is that she made forsaking and renouncing into active virtues, however much she insisted that she was not suYciently capable of sacriWce. If her deWnition of virtue resembled that of Rousseau (who called it doing what you did not want to do), she was obviously not a woman of virtue for ‘doing’ what was a matter of compulsion. Yet in sacriWcing Paris and then the rest of France, she made a virtue of seeing the world. To have written at least four major works as a result of an extended European tour is to have turned sacriWce to very positive account. Her energy as a traveller, the way she noted, listened, discoursed, and compiled, also calls into question an assertion of hers to Brinkman that seems more self-critical than it actually is: that she was accustomed to rely on her talent, not on dogged eVort. The hateful voyages on stormy seas, the journeys along potholed roads and unbeaten tracks, the nights in smoky inns, the hideous weather, the dreadful food, the sheer discomfort of always being on the go—these were things she endured because she was a dissenter and an author (the two things went together) and, more particularly, someone who did not give up. Yes, she could always have stayed put at Coppet, but boredom and wanderlust drove her away. Her strength as well as her defence was her e´clat, as she told Hochet, and Coppet dulled it. In order to be remembered, she had to be on the move. Correspondingly, her life was regularly rocked by a refusal to submit that was a form of nobility. She was particularly tormented by her Wnal illness, she told Mary Berry, because it turned her into a tortoise, slow and seemingly past all ambition. Moral defeat was as unendurable to her as physical, as she tried to explain to Wellington; although moral integrity entailed suVering (not in itself a ‘good’, whatever Christian apologists might contend), it represented an active kind of endurance. She was convinced that people in general, not just rulers and politicians, care about meriting public esteem, and need to be seen as actively virtuous, however rarely they 14 Brinkman, ‘Lettre’, 181.

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succeed. Her virtue lay in being prepared to undergo severe deprivation, as she had seen Jacques Necker do, for the sake of principle. She was sometimes naive about the likely political consequences of her convictions, and often apparently caught unawares by the savage nature of the reprisals they invited, but she preferred punishment to defeat because she Wrmly believed, pace Suzanne Necker, that woman should not always submit. She had, after all, thrown down the gauntlet in the preface to Delphine, which declares that writers who express what they think good and true have chosen their public; they speak to the France of silence and enlightenment, to the future rather than the past. This was the territory she cared about, and in her life she made travel to foreign countries its equivalent. The need to speak to France, too, legitimized her habit of openly and impenitently carrying her Frenchness with her wherever she travelled, making her country the gold standard and its language the sine qua non of communication. Neither thing was inconsistent with her European outlook. When she told the crazed girl she met in London that the joys of home were more solid than the pleasures of travel, she meant the ideal home, the place of one’s heart. Absence rarely provoked any lasting elegy in her, however, no matter how central the fact of life in Paris was and remained. Instead, it characteristically awakened a Wghting spirit that could eVectively be translated into literature, and is most powerfully expressed in Dix anne´es d’exil. Yet however strong her urge to combat, she always felt the burden of constraint. Travel broadened her mind and made her European, but also caused her pain. Leaving for Germany in 1803, she noted as she passed through Lorraine how every turn of the wheel hurt her, the speed of the horses almost a reproach to her for abandoning a beloved land, a sense of persecution making experiences that otherwise would have excited her or whetted her appetite seem fearsome and threatening. When she went to Italy in 1805 to research Corinne, she felt as though the roads she travelled on were a via dolorosa, barely helping her atone for the guilt of having deserted her dying father. The later journey through Poland and the Russian steppes, Xeeing the Napoleonic army as she edged towards Sweden, was a Xight into the unknown. Like Albertine, she sometimes felt ill at ease and misunderstood even in England. All the same, the elasticity of character which helped her through these diYculties and let her snap out of misery in her youth rarely deserted her later on. She was full of interest for someone who declared that she had always been subject to boredom, needing constantly to be moving, to be

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galvanized into action. This is one reason why she had to have an intellectual as well as practical support system, often in the form of past or present lovers, when she travelled (women were rarely acceptable companions), and why she could seem ruthless about pursuing new experiences and unearthing new sources of excitement. Her native energy stood in stark contrast, too, to the inertia of some male contemporaries and their literary creations, the Rene´s and Adolphes of the age. Removal from what seemed the centre of life, though it threatened to stultify her, in fact fed her creativity. Being deprived of her ideal made her a critical judge of alternative worlds, and she is often most eVective as a writer when she puts idealization aside to investigate the Elsewhere in analytical and rational terms (however unnaturally allegedly ‘male’ rationality came to her). For all its Xaws, enthusiasms, and divagations, De l’Allemagne is exemplary of this kind of integrity. It is such works of Stae¨l’s that best sustain a liberal and intellectual scrutiny. Her attitude to the concept of the ‘woman of achievement’ remained ambiguous, partly because she was used to, and liked, seeing herself as exceptional. She always took the female type that deserved to exert politicial inXuence to be her sort, the kind of woman who had access to statesmen, politicians, and thinkers either as a birthright or as a consequence of possessing unusual gifts. She did not believe that the average woman should have an automatic entre´e to public functions, because she was unconvinced that society could work properly without her sex playing a traditional female role. Obviously, the woman who left her newborn child to the care of others while she went on her travels, who challenged Napoleon, harangued statesman-soldiers such as Wellington, corrected German philosophers, and ticked oV Goethe did not belong to an incapable or selfdenying sex; she was simply (in her eyes) the best example of a particular female type. Although she accepted limitations that were not imposed on men, the nature of the divide between (sexual) inXuence and (gendered) action was never particularly clear to her except when it was deWned in thoroughly negative Bonapartist terms. She never engages in intellectual argument about woman’s right to political representation, because her views on woman’s status as mother, wife, and home-maker are based on feeling rather than reason, and are anyway inconsistent. The female who intrepidly crossed Poland and Russia listening, watching, and note-taking was manifestly not the kind De l’inXuence des passions has in mind when it remarks that love is the story of women’s lives, but a mere episode in men’s. While love was never episodic for Stae¨l, her other preoccupations were also

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absorbing. Nor was she the homme-femme sneered at by some contemporaries: when she told Brinkman that she was a man in her thoughts, she simply meant that her worship of liberty deWned her thus. ‘Man’ on this interpretation is close, if not equivalent, to the generic term ‘human’. The faulty social order she protests against in her writing is neither simply the Napoleonic order that tried to crush her, nor the patriarchal order that in some respects mirrored it, but any order that curbed liberty without suYcient reason. When she makes freedom a guiding principle of life, she means personal freedom in general as much as, and possibly more than, the freedom to which her sex is entitled. The justiWcation for publishing her writings was in her eyes merely the fact that only thus could she, a woman, eVectively work towards creating a climate for liberty. For women, thought translated into written word had to do duty for action. Taken to its furthest extent, such an impulse becomes a kind of religion, one prompted by a concern for mankind and promoting its welfare through a desire to uphold values such as freedom, paciWsm, and sensibility. That is why Stae¨l also told Brinkman that she knew nothing more conducive to the preservation of religious instinct in man than English liberty. De la litte´rature’s description of melancholy as being at the heart of creativity, paradoxical in the light of what Corinne shows as the smiling genius of southern climates, is perhaps equivalent to the sense of incompleteness Stae¨l experienced as a woman writer. The yearning that infuses her work, not merely is a product of exile, but is an abiding state that left her always striving for a reality beyond what she was experiencing. Coppet became the real and Wgurative expression of this inner solitude, empty and somehow alien even when she had Wlled it with friends and echoes of France: hence her insistence on interruption by company even when she was in the throes of composing and writing, lest she be left staring into the abyss. In Stae¨l, whether exiled or not, life always seemed to be being lived slightly away from the centre, even in Paris. It was an absence that exile did not create, but enlarged, and her novels reXect it acutely through their repeated scenes of empty half-detachment—Delphine hiding in church during Le´once’s wedding, or Corinne keeping vigil outside the ballroom where Oswald and his wife are leading the dance. Being outside love is to be denied completeness, and is another form of the foreignness exile represents. De l’inXuence des passions had linked this kind of severance with the very condition of womanhood, and when combined with real exile its force might seem

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particularly corrosive. Yet to resort instead to a state of passionlessness (as if one could choose to do so) was, Stae¨l knew, to embrace a living death. De l’inXuence des passions showed that all passion was destructive of happiness, especially that of love, because it led to melancholy; yet passion could not be helped, and melancholy was a precondition of creativity. Whether this constituted fulWlment Stae¨l does not say. The logic of the argument seems to be that it both does and does not, a typical paradox for her to have formulated. If art does not create a kind of happiness, what is its point? Stae¨l’s answer might have been that it is useful simply as enlightenment, a clarity that lightens suVering, even though suVering may take the form of exile, and even if exile is sometimes like death. Unhappy when not writing (because it was her raison d’eˆtre), unhappy through writing (because it brought expulsion and censorship), she was caught in a double bind of freedom and necessity. Yet contemporaries would not have recognized her as the doomed Romantic heroine this implies. If what she felt was a sense of incompleteness, what they saw was a woman brimming over with life, someone apparently without deprivation or neediness. Of course, as Byron came to realize during his own exile, they did not necessarily see clearly; the caricatural version of Stae¨l as an immense overbearing creature imperiously holding court in the palaces, castles, salons, and dining-rooms of Europe was poles apart from the real woman. She was a genius in both practical and intellectual terms, acquainted with spiritual lack as well as cultural and social exclusion, but knowing how to make good the forms of absence they imposed. So every leavetaking was also, for her, a kind of homecoming.

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—— Madame de Stae¨l et Monsieur Necker (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1925). —— Le Salon de Madame Necker, 2 vols. (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1885). Haussonville, Othenin, comte d’, ‘Albertine vue par Louise’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 40 (1989), 1–19. [Hawkins, Laetitia M.], Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits, Addressed to Miss H. M. Williams, 2 vols. in 1 (London: Hookham & Carpenter, 1793). Hazlitt, William, ‘On the English Novelists’, in Collected Works, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1903), VIII.106–32. Heine, Heinrich, Gesta¨ndnisse, in Werke, 5 vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1974), V.331–93. Hemlow, Joyce, ‘Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books’, PMLA 65 (1950), 732–61. —— The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). Herold, J. Christopher, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Stae¨l (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). Hill, Constance, Juniper Hall (London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1904). Hochschild, Adam, Bury the Chains (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2005). Hofmann, E´tienne (ed.), Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stae¨l et le groupe de Coppet (Oxford and Lausanne: Voltaire Institution and Institut Benjamin Constant, 1982). Holmes, Richard, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974). Isbell, John Claiborne, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Stae¨l’s ‘De l’Allemagne’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). —— ‘Narbonne, Madame de Stae¨l et le programme ‘‘anglais’’ de Coppet sous l’Assemble´e le´gislative’, SVEC 358 (1998), 203–15. Jaume, Lucien (ed.), Coppet, creuset de l’esprit libe´ral (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2000). Jennings, Judith, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997). Kadish, Doris Y., Politicizing Gender (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Kelly, Gary, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996). —— Women, Writing and the Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Kelly, Linda, Juniper Hall (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991). King, Norman, ‘ ‘‘The Airy Form of Things Forgotten’’: Madame de Stae¨l, l’utilitarisme et l’impulsion libe´rale’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 11 (1970), 5–26. —— ‘Apre`s les Cent-Jours: trois lettres ine´dites de Benjamin Constant e´crites en 1815’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 25 (1978), 25–44. —— ‘Coppet en 1809–10’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 24 (1978), 37–62. —— ‘Correspondance sue´doise de Germaine de Stae¨l’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 39 (1987–8), 11–137.

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King, Norman, ‘Lettres de Madame de Stae¨l a` Sir James Mackintosh’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 10 (1970), 7–54. —— ‘Sismondi, Madame de Stae¨l et Delphine: les de´buts d’une intimite´’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 26–7 (1979), 33–76. —— ‘Souvenirs sur Madame de Stae¨l par le baron de Wessenberg’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 22 (1977), 45–53. —— and Candaux, Jean-Daniel, ‘Correspondance de Madame de Stae¨l et de Sismondi’, Cahier Stae¨liens, 31–2 (1982), 21–65. Klein, Herbert S., The Middle Passage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Kloocke, Kurt, Benjamin Constant: une biographie intellectuelle (Geneva: Droz, 1984). Kohler, Pierre, Madame de Stae¨l au chaˆteau de Coppet (Lausanne: Editions Spes, 1929). —— Madame de Stae¨l et la Suisse (Lausanne and Paris: Payot et Cie, 1916). Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, ‘Cecilia ou les me´moires d’une he´ritie`re’, in Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 447–69. Landes, Joan B., Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). —— (ed.), Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Lang, Andre´, ‘L’Amitie´, source des passions de Madame de Stae¨l’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe (q.v.), 193–202. Langford, Paul, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). —— Englishness Identified (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Larg, David Glass, Madame de Stae¨l, la vie dans l’œuvre (1766–1800) (Paris: Champion, 1924). —— Madame de Stae¨l: la seconde vie (1800–1807) (Paris: Champion, 1928). Las Cases, comte de, Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne, ed. Andre´ Fugier, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1961). Le Gall, Be´atrice, ‘Le Paysage chez Madame de Stae¨l’, Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France, 66 (1966), 38–51. Lehtonen, Maija, ‘Le Fleuve du temps et le fleuve de l’enfer: the`mes et images dans Corinne de Madame de Stae¨l’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 68 (1967), 225–42, 391–408; 69 (1968), 101–28. Levaillant, Maurice, Une Amitie´ amoureuse: Madame de Stae¨l et Madame Re´camier (Paris: Hachette, 1951). Le´veˆ que, Laure, ‘Corinne ou l’Italie’ de Madame de Stae¨l (Paris: Editions du Temps, 1999). Lewis, Linda, Germaine de Stae¨l, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2003). Lewis, Matthew, Journal of a West India Proprietor, ed. Judith Terry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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Liechtenstein, Princess Marie, Holland House, 3rd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1875). Luppe´, Robert de, Les Ide´es litte´raires de Madame de Stae¨l et l’he´ritage des Lumie`res (1795–1800) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1969). —— ‘Lettres ine´dites de Sismondi sur la mort de Madame de Stae¨l’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 8 (1969), 23–32. McCarthy, Barbara B. (ed.), Elizabeth Barrett to Mr Boyd: Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). MacCarthy, Fiona, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002). Macdonald, D. L., Monk Lewis (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000). McGann, Jerome J., The Beauty of Inflection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). —— Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Mackintosh, Sir James, Memoirs, ed. Robert James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1835). Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe: Colloque de Coppet (18–24 juillet 1968) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970). Madelin, Louis, The Consulate and the Empire, trans. E. F. Buckley, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1934). Marchand, Leslie, Byron: A Portrait (London: Century Hutchinson, 1971). Marso, Lori jo, (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Stae¨l’s Subversive Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). May, Gita, ‘Le Stae¨lisme de Corinne’, Symposium, 12 (1958), 168–77. Medwin, Thomas, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Mikhailowitch, Grand-Duke Nicolai, L’Impe´ratrice Elisabeth, 3 vols. (St Petersburg: Manufactures des Papiers de l’E´tat, 1908–9). Mitchell, Leslie, Holland House (London: Duckworth, 1980). Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (London: W. H. Allen, 1977). Morris, Gouverneur, Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrice Cary Davenport, 2 vols. (London: Harrap, 1939). Mousset, Sophie, Olympe de Gouges et les droits de la femme (Paris: Fe´lin, 2003). Myers, Sylvia Harcstark, The Bluestocking Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Napoleon I, Memoirs, ed. F. M. Kircheisen, trans. Frederick Collins (London: Hutchinson, n.d.). Necker, Suzanne, Me´langes extraits des manuscrits de Madame Necker, 3 vols. (Paris: C. Pougens, 1798). Necker de Saussure, Albertine, ‘Notice sur le caracte`re et les e´crits de Madame de Stae¨l’, in Stae¨l, Œuvres comple`tes [q.v.], vol. 1, pp. i–ccclxxii. Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘The English on Sunday’, in Beyond Good and Evil, Works, vol. 12, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Helen Zimmern, 18 vols. (London and New York: Allen & Unwin, 1909–13).

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Noe¨ l, Le´on, ‘Madame de Stae¨l et Talleyrand’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 24 (1978), 3–21. Oberkirch, baronne d’, Me´moires sur la cour de Louis XVI et la socie´te´ franc¸aise avant 1789, ed. Suzanne Burckard (Paris: Mercure de France, 1970). Omacini, Lucia, ‘Delphine et la tradition du roman e´pistolaire’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 56 (2005), 15–24. Pange, comtesse Jean de, Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Stae¨l (Paris: Albert, 1938). —— Le Dernier Amour de Madame de Stae¨l (Geneva: La Palatine, 1944). —— ‘Madame de Stae¨l et les ne`gres’, La Revue de France, 19 (1934), 425–43. —— Monsieur de Stae¨l (Paris: Editions des Portiques, 1931). Pange, Victor de, ‘Madame de Stae¨l and her English Correspondents’, 2 vols., D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1955). —— ‘Madame de Stae¨l et la situation politique en France pendant les Cent-Jours’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 21 (1976), 15–37. —— Madame de Stae¨l et le duc de Wellington (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). —— ‘Le Mariage catholique de Victor de Broglie et d’Albertine de Stae¨l’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 24 (1978), 23–35. —— ‘Le Se´jour de Victor de Broglie et d’Auguste de Stae¨l a` Londres en mai 1822’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 17 (1973), 1–58; 18 (1974), 11–43. Pateman, Carole, The Disorder of Women (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). Peck, Louis F., A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Pellegrini, Carlo, ‘Corinne et son aspect politique’, in Madame de Stae¨l et l’Europe [q.v.], 265–72. —— Madame de Stae¨l e il Gruppo di Coppet (Bologna: Patro´n, 1974). Perchellet, Jean-Pierre (ed.), Un deuil e´clatant de bonheur: ‘Corinne ou l’Italie’ (Orle´ans: Paradigme, 1999). Phale`se, Hubert de, Corinne a` la page (Paris: Nizet, 1999). Piozzi, Hester Lynch, Journey through France, Italy and Germany, 2 vols. (London: Strahan & Cadell, 1789). Poovey, Mary, ‘Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing Up Female’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Men by Women: Women and Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes, 1981), II. 39–58. —— The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Postgate, Helen B., Madame de Stae¨l (New York: Twayne, 1968). Poulet, Georges, ‘Corinne et Adolphe: deux romans conjugue´s’, Revue d’histoire litte´raire de la France, 78 (1978), 580–96. —— Etudes sur le temps humain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1949). Pushkin, Alexander, ‘Roslavlev’, in Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings, trans. Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 1998), 92–102. Ravasi, Sofia, Leopardi et Madame de Stae¨l (Milan: Tipografia sociale, 1910).

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Read, Meredith, Historic Studies in Vaud, Berne and Savoy, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897). La Re´ception de ‘Delphine’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 26–7 (1979). Rilliet Huber, Catherine, ‘Notes sur l’enfance de Madame de Stae¨l’, Occident et Cahiers Stae¨liens, 1 (1930–3), 41–7; 2 (1934), 140–6. Rogers, Katharine M., ‘Fanny Burney: The Private Self and the Published Self ’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, 7 (1984), 110–17. —— Fanny Burney: The World of ‘Female Difficulties’ (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Romilly, Samuel Henry, Romilly–Edgeworth Letters 1813–1818 (London: John Murray, 1936). Rosset, Fran
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Solovieff, Georges, L’Allemagne de Madame de Stae¨l (Paris: Klincksieck, 1990). —— ‘Madame de Stae¨l et la police autrichienne’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 41 (1989–90), 13–54. —— ‘Madame de Stae¨l vue par la comtesse Lulu von Thu¨rheim’, ibid. 73–80. —— ‘Sce`nes de la vie de Coppet (re´cits d’hoˆtes europe´ens)’, Cahiers Stae¨liens, 45 (1993–4), 46–66. Spacks, Patricia M., Imagining a Self (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976). Stae¨ l, Germaine de, Appel aux souverains re´unis a` Paris pour en obtenir l’abolition de la traite des ne`gres, in Œuvres comple`tes [q.v], XVII.370–82. —— Choix de lettres, ed. Georges Solovieff (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970). —— Choix de textes, ed. Georges Solovieff (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974). —— Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Tallandier, 1983). —— Corinne ou l’Italie, ed. Simone Balaye´ (Paris: Folio, 1985). —— Correspondance ge´ne´rale, ed. Be´atrice Jansinski, 6 vols. (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1962–93). —— De l’Allemagne, ed. comtesse Jean de Pange and Simone Balaye´, 5 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1958–60). —— De la litte´rature conside´re´e dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, ed. Ge´rard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: Flammarion, 1991). —— De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (Paris: Rivage, 2000). —— Delphine, ed. Simone Balaye´ and Lucia Omacini, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1987). —— Delphine, ed. Be´atrice Didier, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 2000). —— Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Re´volution et des principes qui doivent fonder la Re´publique en France, ed. Lucia Omacini (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1979). —— Dix anne´es d’exil, ed. Simone Balaye´ and Mariella Vianello Bonifacio (Paris: Fayard, 1996). —— ‘Du caracte`re de Monsieur Necker et de sa vie prive´e’, in Œuvres comple`tes [q.v.], XVII.3–127. —— Essai sur les fictions, in Œuvres de jeunesse [q.v.], 131–56. —— Histoire de Pauline, in Œuvres de jeunesse [q.v.], 199–231. —— Journal de jeunesse, Occident et Cahiers Stae¨liens, 1 (1930–3), 75–81, 157–60, 235–42. —— Lettres a` Madame Re´camier, ed. E. Beau de Lome´nie (Paris: Domat, 1951). —— Lettres sur les e´crits et le caracte`re de Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Œuvres de jeunesse [q.v], 33–98. —— Mirza, in Œuvres de jeunesse [q.v.], 159–73. —— Œuvres comple`tes, 17 vols. (Paris: Treuttel and Wu¨rtz, 1820–1). —— Œuvres de jeunesse, ed. Simone Balaye´ and John Isbell (Paris: Desjonque`res, 1997).

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Index

Abelard, Peter 74 Adam style 40 Ade´laı¨de, Mademoiselle 36 African Institute 256 Alexander I of Russia, Tsar 145, 210, 216, 217, 259 Allen, Emma 229, 232 Allen, Jessie 232, 273 America, United States of 182, 192, 217 see also War of American Independence Amiens, Treaty of 110, 112, 119, 216 ancien re´gime 9, 22, 110, 111, 112, 162, 173, 241, 254 Anglophile, Anglophilia 42, 158, 163, 230, 273, 277 Anglophobe, Anglophobia 87 Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar, Duchess 137, 138, 139, 142, 167 d’Arblay, Alexander 114, 118 see also Burney, Fanny d’Arblay, Alexandre 25, 47, 49, 50–4, 62, 77, 114, 115, 117–19, 162, 251, 262, 290 Argyll Street, London 233 Arndt, Ernst Moritz 211 Assemble´e (nationale) constituante 36, 37, 41 Assemble´e des Notables 34 Attila the Hun 196 Augustans 245 August of Prussia, Prince 198–9 Augustine, St, Confessions 73 Austen, Jane 17, 106, 160, 245, 299 Austria 10, 183–5, 188, 191, 194, 201, 204, 207

Bac, rue du, Paris 1, 32, 73, 77, 130 Baert, baron de, Tableau de la GrandeBretagne 235 Balzac, Honore´ de 28, 114, 182 Barras, Paul, vicomte de 77 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 94, 228, 299 Aurora Leigh 175 Bastille 9, 34, 212, 253, 254 Bath, England 239, 267 Bathurst, Lord 237 Beauharnais (family) 95 see also Bonaparte Beckford, William 27, 277 Bentinck, Lady Mary 235 Berlin 2, 10, 23, 124, 137, 138, 144–7, 183 Bernadotte, Jean Baptiste Jules 96, 97, 108, 198, 217, 220, 221, 232, 234, 260, 267 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri Paul et Virginie 102 Berry, Mary 33, 99, 110, 111, 226, 229, 233, 234, 240, 241, 259, 262, 266, 289, 291, 293, 302 Bessborough, Harriet, Lady (earlier Lady Duncannon) 242 Blenheim Palace 233, 236, 283 Blessington, Marguerite, Countess of 225 Blue, blueness, bluestocking 49 Bohemia 201 Boigne, E´le´onore, comtesse de 182, 199, 236, 237, 264, 290 Bonaparte, Hortense (Beauharnais), Queen of Holland 95, 193, 196–7 Bonaparte, Joseph 80, 97, 108, 129, 130, 131

322

index

Bonaparte, Jose´phine (Beauharnais) 95, 111 Bonaparte, Louis, King of Holland 95, 196 Bonaparte, Napoleon (Napole´on I) 1–10, 14, 15, 19–23, 27, 28, 31, 65, 72–81, 83, 90, 94–9, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 128, 129, 136, 137, 145, 151–6, 159, 161–3, 165, 169, 172–5, 179, 180, 182, 183, 191, 193–8, 201–10, 212, 214, 216, 218, 221–2, 225, 226, 231, 232, 242, 244, 246, 248, 249, 251, 253, 258, 259–63, 267–71, 281, 285, 287–8, 292, 293, 296–8, 300–5 Bonstetten, Charles Victor de 278 boredom 21, 42, 63, 153, 199, 230, 235, 270, 302, 303 see also ennui Bourrienne, Louis Antoine de 73, 95 Bowles, William 237 Bowood House 234, 237, 238, 243, 258 Brinkman, C. G. von 165, 218, 219, 263, 264, 302, 305 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, Brissot de Warville 255 Broglie, Victor, duc de 265, 268, 270, 272, 277, 290 Bronte¨ sisters 17, 245 Brougham, Henry, Baron 281–2 Brummell, George (‘Beau’) 246, 264 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 243 Brunet’s Hotel, Leicester Square 223 Bughersh, Lady 277, 279 Bulwer Lytton, Edward 245 Burke, Edmund Reflections on the Revolution in France 248 Burney, Dr Charles 17, 46, 54 Burney, Charles (son of above) 226 Burney, Fanny (Frances, Madame d’Arblay) 15–18, 20, 23–5, 29, 41, 43–62, 77, 106, 110, 114, 116–18, 120, 124, 175, 226, 232, 239, 240, 251–4, 258, 290, 293 Brief Reflections Relating to the Emigrant French Clergy 58 Camilla 49, 54–6, 114, 253

Cecilia 17, 30, 43–5, 49, 50, 54, 56, 60, 74, 87, 253 Evelina 17, 44, 49, 54, 56, 57, 60, 253 Wanderer, The 26, 28, 51, 54, 60, 216, 227, 252–4 Witlings, The 49, 55 Burney, James 252 Byron, Augusta Ada 274 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 8, 13, 20, 21, 27, 103, 105, 153, 170–3, 178, 199, 220, 221, 223–5, 229–31, 234, 236, 240, 242–52, 255, 256, 263, 264, 273–88, 301, 306 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 223, 274, 276, 280, 287 Don Juan 178, 246 Prisoner of Chillon, The 279–81 ‘Sonnet to Lake Leman’ 283 Byron, Lady see Milbanke, Annabella Byron, Miss M., Anti-Delphine 99 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de 34 Carl XIII of Sweden, King 220 Carl August von Sachsen-Weimar, Duke 137 Carlton House, London 265 Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo 166 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount 246 Catherine II, the Great 208, 213 Catholic, Catholicism 52, 96, 101, 104, 237 celebrity 14, 50, 89, 112, 147, 166, 186, 203, 209, 217, 221, 223, 227, 228, 293 censorship 6, 43, 195, 294, 306 Chapone, Hester Letters on the Improvement of the Mind 57 Chapuis, Maison 279 Charlotte, Queen 18, 47, 114 Charrie`re, Isabelle de 43, 70 Caliste 43, 108, 172, 175 Lettres e´crites de Lausanne 10, 172, 175 Trois femmes 140 Chastenay, Catherine, comtesse de 81 chastity 18, 30, 90, 93–4 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois Rene´, vicomte de 160, 168, 170, 173, 194, 197, 199, 286, 291 Atala 100

index Chaˆtre, comte de la 40 Chaˆtre, comtesse de la 40 Chatsworth 235 Chelsea College, London 51, 52 Clairon, Claire de la Tude, mademoiselle 213, 218 Clairmont, Claire 279, 283 Clarkson, Thomas 255 Classicism 137, 195, 287 Code Napole´on 31, 85 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 233 Concordat 96, 120 Condorcet, madame 3 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine, marquis de Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s de l’esprit humain 76 Congress of Vienna 259 Constant, Benjamin 15, 21, 24, 68, 70–3, 77, 79, 80, 82, 91, 95, 107, 108, 113, 119, 120, 131–5, 140, 147–52, 154, 174, 186, 188–90, 199–201, 205, 261, 262, 267–72, 284, 292, 300 Adolphe 15, 20, 22, 71, 134, 135, 165, 172, 190, 284, 285, 298 Ce´cile 80, 108, 134 Constant, Rosalie de 82, 134, 168, 189, 190 Constitutionalist 36, 162 convention 7, 43, 69, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 100, 101, 120, 158, 171, 287, 300, 301 Convention Nationale 9, 254 conversation 34, 44, 52, 53, 55, 57, 71, 72, 101, 110, 111, 121, 129, 131, 133, 139, 154, 161, 167, 168, 185, 203, 210, 218, 228, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237, 240, 242, 243, 248, 249, 251, 254, 265, 277, 290, 295 Coppet 1, 19, 21, 25, 29, 33, 36, 38, 62, 63, 66, 70, 73, 77, 78, 79, 81, 97, 119, 121, 122, 182, 183, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 197–201, 208, 270, 273, 275–8, 282, 284, 286, 288–90, 293, 297, 302, 305 Cre´billon fils 185 Croker, John Wilson 227 Curzon Street, London 233, 241 Custine, Astolphe, marquis de 27–8, 269

323

Damer, Anne 99 dandies 246, 301 Danton, Georges Jacques 68 David, Jacques Louis 113 Davy, Sir Humphry 224, 244 Davy, Lady 111, 241, 265, 276 decorum 4, 20, 60, 293 Descartes, Rene´ 195 despot, despotism 2, 78, 96, 120, 186, 188, 202, 205, 214, 216, 219, 221, 231, 242, 251, 261, 268 Deutschtum 194 deviant, deviation (sexual) 27 Devonshire, Elizabeth, Duchess of 163, 222, 270, 276 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of 56, 57, 235 Devonshire House 226, 235, 241 Dickens, Charles 245 Diderot, Denis 75, 184, 212, 215 Fils naturel 213 Pense´es philosophiques 75 Religieuse, La 95 Supple´ment au Voyage de Bougainville 28 Diodati, Villa 275, 284 Directory 78, 292 Disraeli, Benjamin 245 dissidence, dissident 155, 172, 260, 292, 293, 301 divorce 27, 43, 95, 98, 104, 146, 179 domestic, domesticity 3, 4, 6, 8, 58, 74, 84, 87, 94, 102, 104, 106, 109, 134, 160, 161, 164, 209, 226, 233, 234, 256, 286, 295, 298 douceur de vivre 241, 266 Dumont, E´tienne 211, 220, 222, 226, 227, 238, 239, 250, 258 Duncannon, Harriet, Lady 56 see also Bessborough e´clat 110, 240, 270, 302 Edgeworth, Maria 176, 219, 226, 227, 237, 239, 265, 288, 290, 296 Patronage 252 Edgeworth, Richard (‘Old’) 239 Edinburgh Review 99, 248, 282 egotist, egotism 151, 188, 276, 294, 295, 297 Elba 98, 242, 268

324

index

Fanshawe, Maria 231, 279 femininity 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 19, 60, 105, 148, 229, 293, 299 feminism 10, 58, 75 Fersen, Axel, Count 36 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 139–40, 146, 183, 238 Foster, Lady Elizabeth 56, 57, 236 see also Devonshire, Elizabeth, Duchess of Fox, Charles James 244 Francis II of Austria, Emperor 204

gender 11, 40, 57, 245, 268, 304 Geneva 39, 45, 79, 120, 122, 125, 128, 181, 183, 188, 190, 191, 197, 199, 201, 237, 270, 273, 277, 279, 280, 284, 289, 298 Geneva, lake 27, 40, 291 genius 22, 42, 43, 75, 85, 102, 146, 155, 158, 164, 171, 173, 176, 178, 180, 184, 211, 228, 237, 239, 246, 247, 249, 278, 280, 285, 286, 288, 297, 298, 299, 300, 305, 306 Genlis, Ste´phanie Fe´licite´, comtesse de 9, 70, 120 George III, King 25, 43, 47 see also Prince Regent (George IV) George Street, Hanover Square 233 Germany 14, 19, 23, 113, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130–46, 148, 153, 155, 165, 166, 191, 192–5, 217, 251, 260, 287, 293, 294, 303 Ghent 268, 270, 271 Gibbon, Edward 37, 39, 45, 49, 64, 233, 283 Godwin, Mary see Shelley Godwin, William 252 Goethe 136, 137, 141–6, 158, 167, 174, 304 Die Braut von Korinth 143 Die Leiden des jungen Werther 136 Die natu¨rliche Tochter 143 Gogol, Nikolai Dead Souls 212 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de La Femme au dix-huitie`me sie`cle 9–10 Gothenburg 223 Gouges, Olympe de De´claration des droits de la femme 9 Grande Arme´e 205, 211, 240 Grattan, Henry 224 Greatheed, Bertie 51, 112 Grenelle, rue de, Paris 118, 266 Guiffardie`re, Charles de 55 Guilleragues, Gabriel de Lavergne de 74

Galicia 201, 206 Garrick, David 212 Gaskell, Elizabeth Cranford 160 Gell, Sir William 226

Hardenberg, Charlotte von 188–91 Hardwicke, Elizabeth Yorke, Countess of 234, 261, 291 Harrowby, Lord 257, 258 Harwich 223

Eliot, George 175 The Mill on the Floss 299 Elliot, Sir Gilbert (Lord Minto) 243 elite, elitism 98, 215, 230 Elizabeth of Russia, Tsarina 210, 211, 216 emigration 25, 26, 69, 160, 183, 263, 287 e´migre´ 25, 26, 32, 79, 85, 96, 119, 136, 162, 173, 214, 253 England, English 1, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32–62, 87, 99, 103, 106, 109, 110, 111, 125, 133, 146, 155, 159, 161, 162, 164, 175, 176, 179, 193, 194, 216, 219, 221–65, 272, 273, 277, 290, 298, 299, 301, 305 enlighten, Enlightenment 42, 84, 91, 103, 137, 207, 236, 292, ennui 21, 164, 182, 183, 186 see also boredom Espinchal, Thomas, comte d’ 46 Europeanism 1, 10, 24, 214, 231, 303 exile 1, 2, 6, 11, 14, 20, 23, 28, 33–5, 39, 40, 43, 60, 65, 69, 70, 72, 81, 83, 92, 93, 96, 97, 101–8, 122–6, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 138, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 164, 170, 179, 181–9, 191–6, 202–3, 214, 222, 224, 232, 240, 246, 250, 260, 261, 266, 267, 270, 273–6, 280, 283, 287, 292–7, 300, 301, 305–6

index Hazlitt, William 252 Heine, Heinrich 139, 194 Gesta¨ndnisse 26, 138 Heloı¨se 74 Henry VIII, King 43 Herder, Johann Gottfried 137, 139 Hertford, Isabella, Countess of 235 Hertford House 235 Hobhouse, John Carr (later Baron Broughton) 249, 284 Hochet, Claude 2, 90, 98, 121, 126, 128, 131, 137, 139, 142, 144, 196, 199, 200, 202, 217, 218, 270, 302 Holland 42 Holland, Henry, 3rd Baron, 226, 227, 230, 232, 242, 244, 252 Holland, Sir Henry 227, 248 Holland, Lady (Elizabeth, earlier Lady Webster) 227, 229, 230, 242, 243, 244 Holland House 111, 226, 227, 231, 241–5, 248 homme-femme 305 homosexual, homosexuality 27–8, 269, 274–5 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 23, 136 Hundred Days, The 268–70 Hutton, James 46–7 Imlay, Gordon 254 improvisation, improvvisatrice 29, 165–6, 203 incest 273–4 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 195 Italy 7, 14–15, 19, 24, 27, 78, 83, 153–70, 285, 287, 293–4, 303 Jacobin 37, 41 James, Henry 297, 300 The Aspern Papers 297 Jaucourt, Franc¸ois, chevalier de 41, 63, 73 Jefferson, Thomas 182 Jersey, Sarah, Countess of 223 Juniper Hall 40–62 passim Juniperian 40, 44–5 Kauffman, Angelica 156 Kent, William 235 Knebel, Henriette 138–9, 141

325

Lacan, Jacques 14 Laclos, Merteuil, marquise de 11 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 11, 43, 46, 50 Les Liaisons dangereuses 11, 44, 104, 184 Laclos, Valmont, vicomte de 46 Lafayette, Marie Madeleine, comtesse de 43, 68, 74 La Princesse de Cle`ves 43, 74 Lamb, Lady Caroline 242, 274, 276 Glenarvon 275–6, 284 Lan´cut 206 Lansdowne, William, Marquess of 224, 229, 234, 237–8, 258, 273, 277 Las Cases, Emmanuel, comte de 2, 95, 98, 154 Me´morial de Sainte-He´le`ne 2, 78, 97 Laval, vicomtesse de 68, 115, 117–18 Leicester Square, London 223 Leigh, Augusta 27, 231, 273–4, 278, 282 Lekain, Henri Louis 212–13 Leopardi, Giacomo, conte 195 Levasseur, The´re`se 59 Levin, Rahel 10, 145 Lewis, Matthew (‘Monk’) 95, 243, 255 The Monk 95 liberal, liberalism 33, 36, 41–2, 44–5, 59, 76, 89, 91, 95, 144, 158–9, 162, 218, 221, 226, 230, 237, 244, 248, 258, 268, 277, 292, 296 libertine, libertinism 46, 101, 111, 184, 264 Ligne, Charles Joseph, prince de 212, 214 Liverpool, Robert, Earl of 227 Locke, William 44, 114, 159, 238 Locke, Fredy 44, 50–1, 61, 118, 159 London 2, 6, 23, 25, 40, 44–5, 51, 53, 55, 99, 109, 111, 124, 126, 185, 193, 208, 212, 219, 221–65 passim, 279, 283, 285–6, 289, 301, 303 Louis XV, King 36 Louis XVI, King 9, 36, 38, 45 Louis XVIII, King 244, 256, 259, 265, 267–8, 270–2, 289 Luise, Queen 138, 145 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 242 Mackintosh, Sir James 177, 227, 229, 236, 240, 248–9, 251, 252, 258, 289, 301 Vindiciae Gallicanae 248

326

index

Mackintosh, Lady 236, 240 Maistre, Joseph de 215 mal du sie`cle 15, 298 male 3, 4, 6–16 passim, 18–20, 28, 30, 31, 36, 49, 60, 69, 76, 83–7, 91–3, 101, 104, 106, 116, 120, 133, 135, 148, 161–3, 165–6, 170, 172, 175–6, 178, 204, 219, 227, 239, 274, 281, 284–5, 288, 292, 298–300, 304 see also masculine, masculinity Maria Feodorovna, Tsarina 216 Marie-Antoinette, Queen 9, 34, 36, 47, 54, 58–9, 63, 65, 184, 214, 230, 254 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of 233 marriage 4, 5, 13, 38, 47, 49, 51–2, 54, 60, 70, 74, 95, 101, 104, 150–1, 152, 157, 159–60, 162, 174, 176, 178, 188–90, 219, 253–4, 264–5, 269, 272, 274, 279, 282–3, 288, 294, 296, 298 masculine, masculinity 7, 15, 20, 108 Meister, Henri 119, 136, 138, 191, melancholy 25, 57, 61, 71, 86, 106, 165, 170, 279–80, 305–6 Melbourne, Elizabeth, Viscountess 224, 234, 247, 273–5, 281 Me´ricourt, The´roigne de 9 Me´zery 66–8, 70–1 Milbanke, Annabella 274–5, 281–2 Milton, John 50 misogyny, misogynist 3–4, 39, 84, 227, 245, 298 monarchy 36–7, 43, 218, 244–6, 261, 266–8, 271, 292, 299 - , absolute 36, 244 - , constitutional 36, 37 Montagu, Elizabeth 49 Montaigne, Michel de 1, 23 Montesquieu, Charles de, Secondat, baron de 42, 83, 185 De l’esprit des lois 42, 185 Montesson, madame de 81 Montmorency, Mathieu de 63, 68, 70, 73, 115, 121–3, 128, 132, 186, 198, 270 Moore, Thomas 225, 275, 283

Moravia 46, 201, 206 Morris, Gouverneur 35, 182 Moscow 207–11, 214–16, 240, 286 motherhood/maternity 7, 8, 11–12, 14, 27, 58, 103, 105, 200, 218, 237 Murray, John 153, 247, 250, 252, 276–7, 283, 290 Naples 157–8, 168, 170 Narbonne-Lara, Louis, vicomte de 15 nationalism 10 nationality 8 Necker, Jacques 5, 6, 16, 21, 31, 33–6, 38, 39, 45, 48, 63, 65, 67–8, 70, 77–9, 81, 119, 122, 127–8, 132, 149, 150, 153, 155, 196, 204, 250, 269, 286, 296, 300, 303 Compte rendu au Roi 33 De l’administration des finances de la France 34 Dernie`res vues sur la politique et la finance 122 Essai sur la le´gislation et le commerce des grains 33 Necker, Suzanne 16, 33, 34, 39, 45–6, 67–8, 71, 75, 103–4, 149, 255, 265, 281, 303 Me´langes 7 Nouveaux Me´langes 103 Necker de Germany, Louis 81 Necker de Saussure, Albertine 16, 29–30, 62, 97, 121, 127–8, 156, 174, 193, 261–2 Nicolle, 167, 193 Nietzsche, Friedrich 194, 235 Norbury Park 44, 61–2, 159 novel, epistolary 104 novel, political 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 105–6, 158, 159, 178, 253 O’Donnell, Moritz, Count 186, 190 opium 122, 181, 290 Ord, Anne Dillingham 52, 57 Ossian 195 Pange, Franc¸ois de 73 Paris 1–3, 6, 8–9, 14, 18–19, 21, 23, 29, 32–3, 36–8, 41, 45, 47, 52, 58, 65, 70, 73, 77, 79, 80–3, 96, 97,

index 99–100, 111–14, 116–19, 122, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136–8, 154–5, 165, 173, 186, 189, 192, 196–7, 212, 214, 216, 221, 228, 235, 245, 253–4, 259–63, 265–72, 276, 280, 288, 290, 292, 301–3, 305 Pascal, Blaise 195 passion 5, 11, 30, 39, 42, 49, 61, 68–9, 72–6, 86, 99, 104, 141, 169, 172, 175, 200, 207, 221, 256, 306 ‘passion re´fle´chissante’ 175 patriarchy 4, 15, 24, 30, 91, 300 Paul, Tsar 214 ‘perfectionnement’, perfectibilism 76, 105 Philippe-E´galite´ 81 Phillips, Susanna (ne´e Burney) 41, 44–7, 52, 61, 115, 118 philosophes 28 Pitt, William, the Younger 5, 26 Poland 201, 206, 303–4 politics 2–4, 7, 13, 28, 53, 58–60, 89–90, 97, 99, 110, 119, 123, 150, 156, 203, 224, 226, 229, 242, 244, 266, 286, 294 see also woman and politics Pope, Alexander 74, 96 Eloisa to Abelard 74 Potemkin, Grigorii Alexandrovich 208 Pre´vost, Antoine Franc¸ois, abbe´ 28 Manon Lescaut 28 Prince Regent (later George IV) 225–6, 230 private sphere 3, 5, 7–8, 10–11, 15, 19, 54, 92–3, 106, 108, 120, 158, 195, 295–6 propriety 3, 7, 11, 15, 18, 31, 42, 53–5, 100, 106–7, 135 protestant, Protestantism 30, 32, 96, 101, 104, 158, 180, 295 public sphere 3–4, 7, 10–15, 19, 25, 54, 92, 103, 106, 108, 256, 288, 295 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich 8, 144, 209–11, 214 Journey from Moscow to St Petersburg 214 Roslavlev 144, 209 Racine, Jean 68, 137, 195, 197, 213, 218–19, 262, 267 Athalie 218–19

327

Iphige´nie 218–19 Phe`dre 213 Randall, Fanny 200, 275, 277–8, 289–90 rationality, reason 9–11, 13, 29–30, 32, 69, 76, 86, 89, 104, 107, 188, 211, 304 realism, realist 54–6, 61, 95, 122, 180, 295–6 Re´camier, Juliette 3, 28, 62, 85, 111–13, 123, 129, 145, 149, 163, 181–2, 191, 195, 198–9, 221, 270, 273, 291 republic, republican, republicanism 7, 13, 39, 42, 53, 59, 73, 84, 98, 106, 109, 130, 204, 206, 214–15, 220, 230, 244, 259, 261, 271, 293–4 Republic of Letters 293 Restoration (i.e. of Bourbon monarchy) 244, 249, 259, 261, 267–8, 271 Revolution, French (1789) 9–10, 12, 20, 22, 25–6, 29, 35, 41, 46–8, 56, 58, 60, 64, 76–7, 85, 87, 89, 90–1, 94, 97, 101, 105, 107, 111–13, 145, 158, 173, 184, 207, 214, 230, 241, 248, 251–4, 259, 269, 296 Ribbing, Adolf, Count 66–8, 70–2, 186 Richardson, Samuel 46, 87, 176 Clarissa 46, 87, 176, 225 Richmond, London 233–4 Robespierre, Maximilien 66–8, 70, 154, 254 Robinson, Henry Crabb 23, 142–3, 156, 250 Rocca, John 178, 199–201, 203, 205–6, 213, 230, 239, 248, 277–9, 281, 288 Rogers, Samuel 225, 239, 243, 257, 283 Roland, Jeanne Marie (Manon) 9 Romantic, Romanticism 8, 93, 95, 100, 146, 168, 194–5, 238, 280, 287, 306 Rome 2, 27, 84, 87, 156, 164, 166–8, 170, 209, 289 Romilly, Lady (Anne) 218–19, 227, 238, 264–5, 281–2 Romilly, Sir Samuel 252, 256 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 12–13, 25, 39, 48, 59, 74, 99, 102, 108–9, 114, 176, 185, 195, 203, 232, 280–1, 283, 288, 291, 296, 299, 302

328

index

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (cont.) Confessions 25 Discours sur l’origine de l’ine´galite´ 13 Du contrat social 299 E´mile 12–13 La Nouvelle He´lo¨ı se 39, 74, 93, 99, 110, 182, 232, 280 rout 145, 235–6 Rovigo, Rene´, duc de (previously Savary) 192–3, 201, 217 Royale, rue, Paris 288 royalism, royalist 7, 26, 40, 73, 98, 136, 221, 244, 271, Russia 6, 14, 145, 198, 201, 204–16 passim, 218, 220, 234, 259, 262, 265, 267, 271, 293–4, 303–4 Saalnix, Die 156 Sabran, Delphine de (later marquise de Custine) 27, 81 Sade, Donatien Alphonse, marquis de 184 St Domingue 36, 37, 69, 114, 254, 256, 259 St Helena 4, 20, 95, 242, 246, 280 Saint-Ouen 79, 80, 82 St Petersburg 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216, 219 salon, salonnie`re 9, 10, 29, 35, 36, 40, 49, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 111, 130, 156, 218, 221, 228, 231, 233, 241, 266, 284, 286, 293, 301, 306 Savary see Rovigo Schiller, Friedrich von 136, 139, 141, 143, 144, 207 Don Carlos 184 Jungfrau von Orleans, Die 184–5 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 24, 137, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 156, 169, 183, 194, 197, 203, 205, 206, 209, 217, 219, 230, 231, 234, 261, 269, 289, 294 Schlegel, Friedrich 146, 147, 194 Scott, Sir Walter 245, 250 Waverley 252 Se´gur, Philippe, comte de 212 serf, serfdom 208, 213, 215 Se´vigne´, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de 243

Sharp, Granville 255 Sheffield, Lord 37 Shelley, Mary (ne´e Godwin) 279, 283, 299 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 279, 280 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 224, 230, 243 Sie´ye`s, Emmanuel Joseph 79–80 Sismondi, Jean Charles, Simonde de 91, 103, 127, 169, 192, 229, 232, 259, 268, 275, 277 slavery 37, 208, 237, 250, 254, 255–6, 259–60 women’s 95, 226 Smith, Sydney 99, 233, 242 sociability 16, 22, 120, 130, 141, 165, 170, 236, 258, 293 sodomy 27–8, 274 Socie´te´ des Amis des Noirs 255 Soemmering, Samuel Thomas von 133 Soho, London 223 Souza, Pedro de 168, 181, 186 Spectateur du Nord, Le 131, 136 Stae¨l, Albert de 128, 147, 197, 234, 240 Stae¨l, Albertine de (duchesse de Broglie) 121, 127, 128, 133, 149, 169, 183, 192, 200, 201, 205, 217, 218, 231, 240, 258, 259, 260, 263–5, 269, 272, 277, 283, 289, 303 Stae¨l, Auguste de 38, 127–8, 147, 169, 182, 190, 193, 198, 203, 213, 231, 234, 239, 240, 258, 261–2 Stae¨l-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine, baronne de: devotion to Paris 1 devotion to father 5, 21 disaffection with native Switzerland 1 Napoleon exiles from Paris 1–2 (etc); involvement in politics 2–3, 12, 28, 35 and ethos of ‘proper lady’ 3, 8, 17–20, 31 offends Napoleon as ‘negligent’ mother 3 and traditional notions of womanhood 4–5, 19, 22 and male stereotypes 15 on unreliability of men 5 and dissent 6 on public vs. private sphere 7–8, 10, 14

index paradoxically ‘freed’ by exile 8, 24 preference for male society 10–11 and female writer 16, 18, 20 addiction to sociability 16, 22, 29–30 relationship with Narbonne 18, 32, 35–40, 65–9 marriage to Eric de Stae¨l 30–1, 35 at Juniper Hall, Surrey 40–64 idealizing of England 42–4 exile in Switzerland 65–77 passim affair with Ribbing 66–72 passim meets Benjamin Constant 70–3 and leaves for Paris with him 73 exiled again to Switzerland 73 allowed back to France 77 meets Napoleon 78 shuttles between France and Switzerland 79–82 torments of affair with Constant 82, 150–2, 188–91 turns to novel-writing (Delphine) 89, 108 Napoleon’s fury at Delphine’s libertarianism 95–9, 107 illness and death of husband 120–2 travels to and around Germany 131–48 death of father 148–51 meets and ‘bags’ Schlegel 137, 146–9, 153 researches and writes Corinne 155–80 writes De l’Allemagne 191 Napoleon prohibits its publication 193 Stae¨l meets her future husband Rocca 199 gives birth to their child 200–1 travels to Russia via Austria and Galicia 203-7 stays in Moscow and St Petersburg, meeting Tsar Alexander 208–16 travels on to Sweden 217–20 arrives in England 223 lionized in London, meets Prince Regent, consorts with Whigs, and encounters Byron, Wellington and Wilberforce 223–64 returns to France and resists Napoleon’s overtures during Hundred Days 266–71

329 back at Coppet, gives support to selfexiled Byron 273–84 suffers stroke and dies 289–90 see also (main index) woman, nature/status of; woman writer; woman and politics works: Appel aux souverains pour en obtenir l’abolition de la traite des ne`gres 259 Conside´rations sur la Re´volution franc¸aise 5, 6, 18, 26, 29, 60, 81, 108, 147, 155, 161, 226, 242, 259, 299 Corinne 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 18, 22, 23, 24, 31, 56, 68, 75, 76, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94, 103, 106, 153–80 passim, 181, 184, 190, 203, 209, 218, 222, 228, 234, 235, 248, 250, 260, 280, 284–5, 287, 288, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 303, 305 De la litte´rature 5, 14, 18, 25, 29, 31, 38, 61, 69, 83–7, 89, 106, 126–7, 136, 137, 138, 146, 155–9 passim, 167, 170, 173, 175, 176, 183, 194, 208, 213, 224, 234, 241, 249, 288, 296, 299, 305 De l’Allemagne 4–6, 8, 18, 31, 61, 76, 86–7, 95, 127, 138, 140, 145–7, 155, 171, 174, 178, 183–4, 187, 191–6 passim, 222, 224, 235, 236, 238–9, 241, 249–51, 256, 269, 288, 299, 301, 304 De l’influence des passions 5, 18, 22, 54, 56, 59, 62, 69, 74–7, 141, 171, 241, 251, 294, 296, 299, 304, 305–6 Delphine 4, 5, 7, 8, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27–8, 31, 61, 68, 75–6, 81, 84–6, 87, 89–124 passim, 126, 137, 157–9, 163, 171, 175, 179–80, 190, 209, 240, 250, 260, 269, 271, 280, 281, 288, 294–7, 300, 302, 303, 305 Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Re´volution 295 Dix anne´es d’exil 1, 2, 3, 5–6, 8, 18, 21, 31, 65, 80, 96, 122, 138, 155, 183, 201, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215, 216, 220, 222, 246, 249, 270, 288, 292, 299, 303

330

index

Stae¨l-Holstein, Anne Louise (cont.) Du caracte`re de Monsieur Necker 149–50 Essai sur les fictions 17, 30, 33, 43, 74, 89, 93, 141, 172, 225 Lettres sur Rousseau 25, 59, 176, 281 Mirza 22, 23, 69, 171, 209, 255, 260, 300 Pauline 69–70, 171, 255, 260, 300 Quelques re´flexions sur le but moral de ‘Delphine’ 100–1, 123, 179 Re´flexions sur la paix 73 Re´flexions sur le proce`s de la Reine 58, 63, 296 Re´flexions sur le suicide 171, 251 Sappho 22, 164–5, 178, 243, 300 Zulma 69–70, 251, 300 Stae¨l von Holstein, Eric Magnus, baron 30, 32, 38, 63, 65, 77, 118, 121, 126, 165, 213 States General 34 Stendhal 259, 284, 285, 286 Stockholm 23, 165, 217–18 sublimity 74, 186–7 suicide 23, 37, 60, 69, 72–3, 90, 154–5, 171, 251, 297, 300 Sweden 10, 165, 198, 201, 210, 217–21, 222, 264, 293 Switzerland 2, 6, 33, 38, 39, 42, 62–4, 67, 73–4, 78, 79, 83, 99, 105, 111, 112, 120, 127, 181–2, 186–7, 198, 246, 266, 277 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 35, 36, 37, 44, 62, 63, 78, 79, 80, 81, 90, 108, 232, 236, 242, 266, 277, 300 Talma, Franc¸ois 71 Talma, Julie 71, 75, 80, 196 Tatichev, Prince 262, 271 Terror, the 9, 40, 68, 253, 263, 292 Thermidor, Thermidorean 68, 73 Thrale (later Piozzi), Hester 50, 54, 57, 119, 166, 185 Ticknor, George 139–40, 238, 289 Tierney, George 226, 238, 289 Tocqueville, Alexis de 194 De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique 194

tolerance 221, 250, 285, 292 Tory, Tories 52, 224, 226, 244 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Franc¸ois Dominique 37, 114, 254, 255 Trappist convent 198, 293 Tuileries 37, 111 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 33 Turku 217 tyranny 9, 21, 24, 65, 113, 155, 165, 188, 206, 230, 244, 254, 260, 268, 271 Uginet, Joseph (Euge`ne) 121, 183, 205 Unspunnen 186–7 utilitarianism 238 Vandeul, Ange´lique de 103 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl 145–6 Venice 170, 186, 275, 277, 285 Vesuvius 168–9 Vienna 2, 23, 183, 186, 204–6, 215, 259, 286 Vige´e Le Brun, Elisabeth Louise 9, 34, 41, 59, 109, 110, 112, 155, 165–6, 168, 186, 204, 213, 214, 216, 235, 266 Souvenirs 9 Villers, Charles de 89, 107, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137 virtue 12, 57, 87, 101, 172, 180, 238, 302, 303 Voltaire 42, 213, 267, 277, 283, 284, 291 Lettres philosophiques 42 Waddington, Mary 240, 251, 252 Walpole, Horace 33, 34 War of American Independence 33, 42, 263 Waterloo 194, 245, 260, 269, 271, 272 Webster, Sir Geoffrey 242 Wedgwood 40 Weimar 123, 124, 136–9, 141, 143–5, 155, 156, 167, 286 Wellesley, Richard, Lord 229, 232 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of 2, 4, 11, 19, 220, 237, 245, 246,

index 259, 260, 263, 267, 268, 271, 272, 277, 302, 304 Werner, Zacharias 189 Wessenberg, Graf von 228 Whigs 19, 224, 226, 230, 236, 237, 244, 248, 254 Whitbread, Samuel 224, 226, 243 Wilberforce, William 254–9 Letter to his Yorkshire Constituents 259 Wilde, Oscar 275 William III, King 220 Wimpole Hall 234 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 27 Wollstonecraft, Mary 9, 13, 21, 31, 39, 47, 106, 220, 254, 295 A Short Residence in Sweden 220 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 9, 13, 21

331

woman, nature/status of 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 20, 25, 31, 56, 60, 69, 85–7, 89, 91, 95, 100–2, 106–7, 120, 135–6, 158–9, 161–2, 173–4, 179–80, 225–6, 238, 240, 260, 288, 294–6, 299–301, 304–5 woman writer 15–19, 28–9, 104, 105–4, 305 woman and politics 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 14, 28, 35, 58, 88–91, 97, 106, 120, 158, 203, 219, 228, 233, 240, 242, 268, 295, 305 Woolson, Constance Fenimore 297–8, 300 ‘At the Chaˆteau of Corinne’ 297–8 Wordsworth, William 194, 254