Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/464

 440 S T A E L its withdrawal, and the marriage took place on January 14, 1786. The husband was thirty-seven, the wife twenty. Madame de Stael was accused of extravagance, and latterly an amicable separation of goods had to be effected between the pair. But this was a mere legal formality, and on the whole the marriage seems to have met the views of both parties, neither of whom had any affection for the other. They had three children ; there was no scandal between them ; the baron obtained money and the lady obtained, as a guaranteed ambassadress of a foreign power of con- sideration, a much higher position at court and in society than she could have secured by marrying almost any Frenchman, without the inconveniences which might have been expected had she married a Frenchman superior to herself in rank. The particular fancy of Marie Antoinette for Sweden, caused by the fantastic devotion of Count Fersen and the king himself to her, secured moreover a reception which might have been otherwise difficult to gain. Madame de Stael was not a persona grata at court, but she seems to have played the part of ambassadress, as she played most parts, in a rather noisy and exaggerated manner, but not ill. Then in 1788 she appeared as an author under her own name (Sophie had been already published, but anonymously) with some Lettres sur J. J. Rousseau, a fervid panegyric showing a good deal of talent but no power of criticism. She was at this time, and indeed generally, enthusiastic for a mixture of Rousseauism and constitutionalism in politics, and her father's restora- tion to power excited extravagant hopes in her, though Necker himself knew better. She exulted more than ever iu the meeting of the states-general, and most of all when her father, after being driven to Brussels by a state intrigue, was once more recalled and triumphally escorted into Paris. Every one knows what followed. Her first child, a boy, was born the week before Necker finally left France in unpopularity and disgrace ; and the increasing disturbances of the Revolution made her privileges as ambassadress no mere matters of ornamental distinction gratifying to vanity, but very important safeguards. She visited Coppet once or twice, but for the most part in the early days of the revolutionary period she was in Paris taking an interest and, as she thought, a part in the councils and efforts of the Moderates. At last, the day before the September massacres, she fled, befriended by Manuel and Tallien. Her own account of her escape is, as usual, so florid that it provokes the question whether she was really in any danger. Directly it does not seem that she was ; but she had generously strained the privi- leges of the embassy to protect some threatened friends, and this was a serious matter. She betook herself to Coppet, and there gathered round her a considerable number of friends and fellow- refugees, the beginning of the quasi-court which at inter- vals during the next five-and-twenty years made the place so famous. In 1793, however, she made a visit of some length to England, and established herself at Mickleham in Surrey as the centre of the Moderate Liberal emigrants, Talleyrand, Narbonne, Jaucourt, Guibert, and others. There was not a little scandal about her relations with Narbonne ; and it is very much to be doubted whether this can safely be set down, as her panegyrists usually set it, to the mere spite of the first or royalist emigrants, to whom she and her party were almost more obnoxious than the Jacobins. It is certain that this Mickleham sojourn (the details of which are known from, among other sources, the letters of Fanny Burney) has never been altogether satisfactorily accounted for. In the summer she returned to Coppet and wrote a pamphlet on the queen's execution. The next year her mother died, and the fall of Robespierre opened the way back to Paris. M. de Stael (whose mis- sion had been in abeyance and himself in Holland for three years) was accredited to the French republic by the regent of Sweden ; his wife reopened her salon and for a time was conspicuous in the motley and eccentric society of the Directory. She also published several small works, the chief being an essay De I'Influence des Passions (1796), and another De la Litterature Consideree dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales (1800). It was during these years that Madame de Stael was of chief political importance. Narbonne's place had been supplied by Benjamin Constant, who had a very great influence over her, as in return she had over him. During the Directory she had some real and more imaginary power as a politician, and both personal and political reasons threw her into opposition to Bonaparte. Her own pre- ference for a moderate republic or a constitutional mon- archy was quite sincere, and, even if it had not been so, her own character and Napoleon's were too much alike in some points to admit of their getting on together. For some years, however, she was able to alternate between Coppet and Paris without difficulty, though not without knowing that the First Consul disliked her. In 1797 she, as above mentioned, separated formally from her husband. In 1799 he was recalled by the king of Sweden, and in 1802 he died duly attended by her. Besides the eldest son Auguste Louis, they had two other children, a son Albert, and a daughter Albertine, who afterwards became the Duchesse de Broglie. The exact date of the beginning of what Madame de Stael's admirers call her duel with Napoleon is not easy to determine. Judging from the title of her book Dix Annees d'Eadl, it should be put at 1804; judging from the time at which it became pretty clear that the first man in France and she who wished to be the first woman in France were not likely to get on together, it might be put several years earlier. The whole question of this duel, however (marked as it was by Napoleon's unscrupu- lous exercises of power, which reached a climax in the suppression of the De VAllemagne after it had been carefully submitted to his censorship), requires considera- tion from the point of view of common sense. It dis- pleased Napoleon no doubt that Madame de Stael should show herself recalcitrant to his influence. But it prob- ably pleased Madame de Stael to quite an equal degree that Napoleon should apparently put forth his power to crush her and fail. Both personages had the curious touch of charlatanerie so common in the late 18th century, and " made believe " in a fashion bewildering and a little incredible to posterity. If Madame de Stael had really desired to take up her parable against Napoleon seriously, she need only have established herself in England at the peace of Amiens and have lived quietly there. She did nothing of the kind. She lingered on at Coppet, con- stantly hankering after Paris, and acknowledging the hankering quite honestly. In 1802 she published the first of her really noteworthy books, the novel of Delphine, in which the " femme incomprise " was in a manner intro- duced to French literature, and in which she herself and not a few of her intimates appeared in transparent dis- guise. In the autumn of 1803 she returned to Paris. Whether, if she had not displayed such extraordinary anxiety not to be exiled, Napoleon would have exiled her remains a question ; but, as she began at once appealing to all sorts of persons to protect her, he seems to have thought it better that she should not be protected. She was directed not to reside within forty leagues of Paris, and after considerable delay she determined to go to Germany. She journeyed by Metz and Frankfort to Weimar, and arrived there in December. There she stayed during the winter, and then went to Berlin, where she