Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/61

Rh would descend upon that offending land immediately. She next passed to pleasantries, and succeeded so well in cajoling her visitors that they finally allowed themselves to be gracefully bowed out. Four days later a false passport supplied by a friend of Madame de Staël allowed Narbonne to escape to England.

The Swedish ambassadress herself could easily have left France at any moment, but she lingered on from day to day, unwilling to quit the country while so many of her friends were in danger; and she was rewarded at last by the opportunity of interfering to save Jaucourt, who had been conveyed to the Abbaye—now aptly named "the Ante-chamber of Death." Madame de Staël knew none of the members of the Commune, but, with her unfailing presence of mind, she remembered that one of them, Manuel, the procureur, had some pretensions to be literary. These pretensions being greater than his talent, Madame de Staël rightly concluded that he possessed sufficient vanity to be moved by solicitation. She wrote to ask for an interview, which was accorded her for the next morning at 7 o'clock in the official's own house.

"The hour was democratic," she remarks, but she was careful to be punctual. Her eloquence achieved an easy victory over Manuel, who, unlike so many of his colleagues, was no fanatic; and on the 1st of September he made Madame de Staël happy by writing to inform her that, thanks to his good offices, Jaucourt had been set at liberty.

She now, at last, determined to quit France the next day, but not alone. Resolute to the end in risking her life for that of others, she consented to take the Abbé de Montesquion with her in the disguise of a domestic, and convey him safely into Switzerland. A