CHAPTER IV.
NECKER'S SHORT-LIVED TRIUMPH.
Some spiteful ridicule awaited the young ambassadress on her first entrance into official life, and, strangely enough, among these detractors was Madame de Boufflers herself, who wrote to Gustavus III.: "She has been virtuously brought up, but has no knowledge of the world or its usages.... and has a degree of assurance that I never saw equalled at her age, or in any position. If she were less spoilt by the incense offered up to her, I should have tried to give her a little advice." Another courtier's soul was vexed because Madame de Staël, when presented on her marriage, tore her flounce, and thus spoilt her third curtsey. As much scandal was caused by this gaucherie as if it had been some newly-invented sin; but the delinquent herself, when the heinousness of her conduct was communicated to her, simply laughed. She could, indeed, afford to despise all such censure, for, if too obstreperously intellectual and ardent for artificial circles, she soon attained to immense influence among all the thinking and quasi-thinking minds of France.
Politics were now beginning to be the one absorbing subject whose paramount importance dwarfed every other; and Madame de Staël, always in the vanguard of ideas, threw herself with characteristic enthusiasm into the questions of the day. To talk about the glorious future of humanity was the fashionable cant of the hour, but Madame de Staël really believed in the regeneration about which others affectedly maundered; and at all social gatherings in the Rue Bergère, or at St. Ouen (where her presence was as frequent as of yore), she held forth on this subject to the crowd of dazzled listeners, whom she partially convinced and wholly overpowered.
She had been married but little more than a year when the first shadow of coming events dimmed the lustre of her new existence. In a speech pronounced at the Assembly of Notables in April 1787, M. de Calonne impugned the accuracy of the famous Compte Rendu. M. Necker indignantly demanded from the King the permission to hold a public debate on the subject, in the presence of the Assembly before which he had been accused. Louis XVI. refused; and M. Necker then immediately published a memoir of selfjustification. The result was a lettre de cachet which exiled him to within forty leagues of Paris. The order, conveyed by Le Noir, the Minister of Police, reached M. Necker in the evening, when he was sitting in his wife's salon, surrounded by his daughter and some friends. The liveliness of Madame de Staël's indignation may be imagined. She has described it herself in her Considérations sur la Révolution Française, and declared that the King's decision appeared to her an unexampled act of despotism. Its parallel would not have been far to seek, and acts a thousand times worse disgrace every page of the annals of France. But Madame de Staël, always incapable of judging where the "pure and noble" interests of her father were concerned, can be pardoned for her exaggeration in this instance, as she had half France to share it. "All Paris," she says, "came to visit M. Necker in the twenty-four hours that preceded his departure. Even the Archbishop of Toulouse, already practically designated for M. de Calonne's successor, was not afraid to make his bow."
Offers of shelter poured in upon M. Necker, and the best châteaux in France were placed at his disposal. He finally elected the Château de Marolles, near Fontainebleau, although not, as he naïvely confesses in a letter to his daughter, without some secret misgivings as to "the decided taste in all things good and bad of dear mamma."
Thither Madame de Staël hastened to join him, and to console by her unfailing sympathy, her constant applause, and inexaustible admiration, a misfortune which, after all, had been singularly mitigated. M. Necker accepted all this homage as his due, and his magnanimous wish, that the Archbishop of Toulouse might serve the State and King better than he would have done, is recorded by his daughter with the unction of a true devotee. There is something adorably simple and genuine in all her utterances about this time. In a letter to her husband (who apparently never objected to play second fiddle to M. and Madame Necker) she directs him exactly how to behave at Court, so as to bring home with dignity, yet force, to their Majesties the wickedness of their conduct towards so great and good a man; and she adds that but for her position as Ambassadress she would never again set foot within the precincts of Versailles. This she wrote even after the lettre de cachet was cancelled. A few months later a reparation was offered to her father with which even his own sense of his worth and the idolatry of his family should have been satisfied; for he was recalled to power—unwillingly recalled, it is true. The King's hand was forced. His present sentiments to M. Necker, if not hostile, were cold; while those of the Queen had changed to aversion. But the Marquis de Mirabeau had defined the position of France as "a game of blind-man's bufF which must lead to a general upset"; consternation had invaded even the densest intelligencies; and the voice of the public clamoured for its saviour. This time, again, the title given to M. Necker was Director-General of Finance; but, on the other hand, the coveted entry into the Royal Council was accorded him. It was the first instance, since the days of Sully, of such an honour being granted to a Protestant; it was given at a moment when the suggestion to restore civil rights to those of alien faith had been bitterly resented by the French clergy; and it was one of the many signs (for those who had eyes to see) that the last hour of the old régime had struck.
The nomination was hailed with a burst of applause from one end of France to the other. Madame de Staël hurried to St. Ouen with the news, but she found her father the reverse of elated. Fifteen months previously—the fifteen months wasted by the ineptitude of Brienne—he said he might have done something; now it was too late.
Madame de Staël was far from sharing these feelings. When anything had to be accomplished by her father, she was of the opinion of Calonne, in his celebrated answer to Marie Antoinette—"Si c'est possible, c'est fait; si c'est impossible, cela se fera." And undoubtedly M. Necker did his best on returning to power; but, in spite of his honesty, good faith, and unquestionable abilities, he was not the man for the hour.
Very likely, as his friends, and especially his daughter, asserted, no Minister, however gifted, could have succeeded entirely in such a crisis; and doubtless he was as far as any merely pure-minded man could be from deserving the storm of execration with which the Court party eventually overwhelmed him. We have said that he did his best: his mistake was that he did his best for everybody. In a moment, when an unhesitating choice had become imperative, he was divided between sympathy with the people and pity for the King.
He returned to power without any plan of his own; but finding Louis XVI. was pledged to assemble the States-General, he insisted that the representation of the Tiers Etât should be doubled, so as to balance the influence of the other two parties. Royalists affirm that this was a fatal error, since from that hour the Revolution became inevitable. Madame de Staël, jealous of her father's reputation, maintains that reasonable concessions on the part of the Court faction and the higher clergy would have nullified the danger of the double representation. But the point was that such an aristocracy and such a clergy were by nature unteachable; and every moment wasted in attempting to persuade them was an hour added to the long torture of oppressed and starving France.
The kind heart, liberal instincts, and administrative ability of Necker taught him that without the double representation the voice of the people might be lifted in vain. But the weakness of his character, and the awe of his bourgeois soul for the time-honoured fetich of monarchy, prevented his understanding that the power he invoked could never again be laid by any spell of his choosing. By seeking to arrange this or that; to pare off something here and add something there—in a word, by trying to be just all round, when nobody cared for mutual justice but himself, he rendered a divided allegiance to his country and his King. If there were no conscious duplicity in his character, there was abundance of it in his opinions; and to say that nobody could have succeeded better is to beg the question. In the face of the savage, inflexible arrogance of the aristocrats and clergy there was but one course open to a really high-minded man, and that was to leave the Court to its own devices, and, throwing himself with all of earnestness and wisdom that he possessed into the popular cause, to be guided by it, and yet govern it by force of sympathy and will.
He might have failed; in the light of later events, it can even be said that he would have failed. But such a failure would have been grander, more vital for good and sterile for harm, than the opprobrium which eventually visited the honest Necker and pursued him to his grave.
Needless to say that opinions such as these never found their way into Madame de Staël's mind. On occasions—perhaps too frequently renewed—the portals of that enchanted palace were guarded by her heart. In her view, everything might yet be saved, were Necker only listened to and obeyed. "Every day he will do something good and prevent something bad," she wrote to the reactionary and angry Gustavus; and thus betrayed that preoccupation with the individual, his virtues or his crimes, which, for all her intellect, blinded her not rarely to the essential significance of things.
With breathless interest and varied feelings of sympathy and indignation she watched the great events which now followed in rapid succession. Her father was monarchical, and believed that a representative monarchy on the English model was the true remedy for France. Madame de Staël—incapable of differing with so great a man—endorsed this opinion at the time, although eventually she became republican.
But nobody was republican then—that is in name; people had not yet realised to what logical conclusions their opinions would carry them. Madame de Staël, hating oppression, blamed the sightless obstinacy of the nobles, but, on the other hand, was but little moved by the famous Serment du Jeu de Paume. She deplored the rejection of Necker's plan—that happy medium which was to settle everything, and stigmatised as it deserved the imbecility of the Court party, as illustrated by confidence in foreign regiments and the Declaration of the 23rd June. Always optimist, and confident of the inevitable triumph of Right over Might, she clung to the belief that a thoroughly pure character, in such a crisis, was the one indispensable element of success.
The mysterious nature of Sièyes repelled her; she preferred the virtuous Malouet to the titanic Mirabeau, and was almost as blind as her father to the enormous electric force of the tribune's undisciplined genius. For if often prejudiced, she rarely was morbid, and false ideas did not dazzle her. No splendour of achievement unaccompanied by loftiness of principle could win her applause. But she failed to grasp the fact that perfection of moral character, by its very scruples and hesitations, is necessarily handicapped in any race with the velocity of public events. No man can bring his entire self—very rarely can he even bring all that is best of himself—into a struggle with warring forces and contradictory individualities. In such a contest, swiftness of insight, power of expression, and force of organic impulse are the only factors of value. In supreme moments of action, men are greater than themselves—made so by the sudden, unconscious contraction of their complex personality into one flame-point of consuming will.
All this Madame de Staël seems never to have felt. If she loved unworthy people (and how many she did love!), it was because she deceived herself regarding them, as all her life she deceived herself about her father. She was intolerant of any triumph but that of virtue; and was thus rendered unjust to the great deeds of men who, imperfect and erring themselves, can sympathise with the aspirations of the human heart because its baseness is not unknown to them.
On the 11th of July, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, M. Necker, who had become a sort of Cassandra to the Court party and was detested in proportion, received a letter from the King ordering him to quit Paris and France, and to accomplish the departure with the utmost secrecy and despatch. He was at table with some guests when this order was handed to him; he read it, put it into his pocket, and continued his conversation as though nothing had happened.
Dinner over, he took Madame Necker aside, and informed her of what had occurred. Nothing was communicated to Madame de Staël; probably her father thought she would be too much excited. M. and Madame Necker hastily ordered their carriage and, without bidding anybody farewell, without even delaying to change their clothes, they had themselves conveyed to the nearest station for post-horses. Thence they continued their journey uninterruptedly, fleeing like culprits from the people whose indignation was feared by the King.
Madame de Staël is lost in admiration of this singleminded conduct of her father, and lays especial stress on the fact that, even during the journey, he made no effort to win for himself the suffrages of the multitude. "Where is another man," she naïvely asks, "who would not have had himself brought back in his own despite?"
Certainly an ambitious man might have adopted this theatrical plan; but it is much more likely, under the actual circumstances, that an ambitious man would never have left at all. M. Necker had only to announce his disgrace to the people of Paris, and go over once for all to the popular side, to have received an intoxicating ovation. As it was, the news of his dismissal cast the capital into consternation. All the theatres were closed; medals were struck in the fallen Minister's honour; and the first cockade worn was green—the colour of his liveries. What a career might then have been his if, instead of being an obedient subject, he had chosen to be a leader!
Madame de Staël thought that it was to the last degree noble and disinterested of him to vanish from the sight of an adoring multitude rather than bring fresh difficulties on the master who had deserted him. But the destinies of a nation are of higher value than the comfort of a monarch; and there are certain responsibilities which no man who does not feel himself incapable (and that was not Necker's case) is justified in declining. To throw back the love and influence offered him then for the last time by France; to sympathise with the popular cause and yet to abandon it; and to do all this out of obedience to the senseless caprice of a faction and the arbitrary command of a king, was to behave like a Court Chamberlain, but in no sense like a statesman.
The taking of the Bastille, and the King's declaration at the Hôtel de Ville, followed immediately on Necker's retirement. Madame de Staël records these events in a very few words, and shows herself, at the moment and henceforward through all the opening scenes of the Revolution, more alive to the humiliation and dismay of the Royal Family than to the apocalyptic grandeur of the catastrophe.
The acts committed, as one reads of them quietly now, are revolting in their mingled grotesqueness and terror. To those who witnessed them, they sickened where they did not deprave. The livid head of Foulon on the pike; the greasy, filthy, partly drunken populace, who rose as from the depths of the earth to invade the splendid privacy of royal Versailles; the degraded women dragged from shameful obscurity and paraded in the lurid glare of an indecent triumph; Madame de Lamballe's monstrous and dishonoured death; Marat's hellish accusations, and Robespierre's diseased suspicions, were things that must have destroyed in those who lived through them all capacity for admiration.
The fact that Madame de Staël did not lose heart altogether remains an abiding witness to her faith and courage. She was wounded in her tenderest part by the Court's ingratitude and the Assembly's indifference towards her father. Every natural and cultivated sentiment in her was wounded by what she saw. Unlike Madame Roland, she had no traditions and no past of her own to attach her, in spite of everything, to the people. She was insensible to the merely physical infection of enthusiasm, and never even for a moment possessed by the vertigo of the revolutionary demon-dance. She remained, from first to last, an absolute stranger to every act and every consideration that was not either manifest to her intellect or strong in appeal to her heart; and yet such was her force of mind and rectitude of insight that, under the Directory, we shall find her no less interested in public events than under the Monarchy.
The grief that Madame de Staël undoubtedly experienced at her father's banishment was not destined to be of long duration. He had hardly reached the Hôtel des Trois Rois at Bâle, when, to his great astonishment, Madame de Polignac asked to speak to him. She was the last person that he expected to see there; but surprise at her presence was soon swallowed up in the far greater amazement excited by all she had to tell. The taking of the Bastille; the massacre of Foulon and Berthier and De Launay; the critical position of De Besenval, and the stampede of the aristocrats—what a catalogue of events! He had never, his daughter says, admitted the possibility of proscriptions, and he was a long while before he could understand the motives which had induced Madame de Polignac to depart. He had not much time to reflect on all he had heard before letters from the King and from the Assembly arrived urging him to return. He did so most unwillingly, according to Madame de Staël, for the murders committed on the 14th July, although few in number, affrighted him, and "he believed no longer in the success of a cause now blood-stained." He seems to have abandoned all sympathy with the people from this moment, and to have returned avowedly with no intention than that of using his popularity as a buckler with which to defend the royal authority.
Madame de Staël, informed by letters from her father of his departure from France and ultimate destination (which was Germany), had hastened after him with her husband and overtook him first at Brussels. There the party had separated momentarily; M. Necker hurrying forward with the Baron de Staël, and Madame Necker, who was suffering in health, following by slower stages with her daughter. The consequence was that Madame de Staël arrived at Bâle after her father's interview with Madame de Polignac, and almost at the same time as he received the order to return.
In this way she had the profound joy of witnessing the enthusiasm which greeted him on every step of his way. No such ovation, she truly says, had ever before been bestowed upon an uncrowned head. Women fell on their knees as the carriage passed; the leading citizens of the towns where it stopped took the places of the postilions, and the populace finally substituted themselves for the horses. They met numbers of aristocratic fugitives on the journey, and M. Necker, at their request, showered on them autograph letters to serve as passports and enable them to cross the frontiers in safety.
Whenever the carriage stopped, the popular idol harangued the crowd and impressed on them the necessity of respecting persons and property; he entreated of them, as they professed so much love for him, to give him the most striking proof that they could of it, by always doing their duty. Madame de Staël says that her father was fully aware of the fleeting nature of popularity; and, under these circumstances, one wonders that he took the trouble, in such a crisis, to make so many speeches. But it is probable that the intoxication of praise was a little too much for him; and he had at all times the sacerdotal tendency to preach.
At ten leagues from Paris, news was brought to the travellers that De Besenval had been arrested by order of the Commune, and was to be taken to the capital, where he would, said the pessimists, be infallibly torn to pieces by the populace. M. Necker, entreated to intervene, took upon himself to rescind the order of the Commune, and promised to obtain the sanction of the authorities to his act.
On arriving in Paris, consequently, his first care was to proceed, in company with his family, to the Hôtel de Ville. The streets, the roofs, the windows of every house were densely thronged. Cries of "Vive Necker!" rent the air, as the redeemer of the country appeared on a balcony and began his discourse.
He demanded the amnesty of De Besenval and of all those who shared De Besenval's opinion. This extensive programme committed all those who accepted it to a reactionary policy, since to pardon the people's enemies unconditionally was to condone, and in a measure to sanction, their crimes.
But no such considerations presented themselves at that moment to impair Necker's triumph. The popular enthusiasm accorded him what he asked; fresh thunders of applause broke forth, and Madame de Staël, overcome with emotion, fainted.