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.
CHAPTER V.
MADAME DE STAËL IS COURAGEOUS FOR HER FRIENDS.
Table of Contents Necker's victory over the rage of the populace was a fleeting one. He had, indeed, overstepped the prerogatives of a Minister in asking for the amnesty. Misled by the elation of his gratified vanity and the impulse of his benevolent heart, he, an ardent defender of order, forgot that in placing himself between the Assembly and King on the one hand and the people on the other, he practically recognized the right of a faction to act without the consent of the Government. It was for the latter to reverse the decree of the Commune and not for the electors of Paris.
His dream of smiling peace installed by his hand on the ruins of the Revolution was rudely and rapidly dispelled. Madame de Staël sorrowfully records that on the very evening of that glorious day the amnesty was retracted, and ascribes this result in great part to the influence of Mirabeau. But, in truth, a very little reflection must have sufficed to convince anybody that the utopian demands of Necker were singularly misplaced. The very electors who had acceded to them asserted that all they had ever intended was to shield the arrested royalists from the fury of the populace, but in no sense from the action of justice. The Assembly confirmed this view, and from that moment Necker's influence was practically gone. It was proved to be a bubble; and his triumph, respectable as were some of the motives which had urged him to invoke it, became ludicrous when contrasted with the stern and tragic realities of the moment. This Madame de Staël did not, could not see. She was fain to console herself with the compassionate reflection that, after all, De Besenval-an old man-was saved.
She narrates with dolorous pride the efforts honestly, courageously, and to a certain degree successfully, made by her father, during fifteen months, to avert the disaster of famine; and innocently appeals to them against the failure as a statesman, to which she resolutely shuts her eyes.
One measure after another opposed by Necker was voted-the confiscation of the property of the clergy, the suppression of titles of nobility, and the emission of assignats. No popularity could have resisted such successive blows; and Necker was popular no longer. Still, Madame de Staël touchingly begs the world, in her writings, not to allow itself to be turned from the paths of virtue by the spectacle of a good man so persecuted by fate. She claims our admiration for a series of quixotic acts, and is perpetually insisting on the amazing magnanimity which would not allow her father to become base because he had ceased to be useful.
Thoroughly discouraged at last (perhaps partly convinced that to preach kindness to savages, and self-abnegation to the vile, was a task to be resumed in better times) Necker tendered his resignation, and had the mortification of seeing it accepted with perfect indifference both by the Assembly and the King.
Before leaving Paris forever, he deposited in the royal treasury two millions of his own property. The exact object of this munificence is not clear; even Madame de Staël failed to explain it on any practical grounds. But she admired it extremely, and so may we.
The journey with the terrified and suffering Madame Necker to Switzerland was a great contrast to the return in the previous year to Paris. Then it had been "roses, roses all the way"; now it was nothing but insults. At Arcis-sur-Aube the carriage was stopped by an infuriated crowd, who accused M. Necker of having betrayed the cause of the people in the interests of the emigrant nobles. The accusation was an absurd one, since he had only endeavored to be superhumanly kind to everybody. He had wished to preserve the people from crimes and starvation, the clergy from ruin, and the emigrant nobles from detection, and this was the result. It was hard, but inevitable, and as there were many worse fates than M. Necker's in those days one cannot quite free oneself from a feeling of impatience at Madame de Staël's perpetual lamentations over the inconceivable hardships of her parent's lot.
We now approach an episode in Madame de Staël's life which it is necessary to touch on with discretion. This is her connection with the Count Louis de Narbonne. The stories circulated in regard to them are familiar to all readers of Madame d'Arblay's memoirs. Dr. Burney thought himself in duty bound to warn his little Fanny against her growing adoration for Necker's great, but, according to him, not blameless daughter, who, during her stay at Mickleham, exerted herself to win the friendship of the author of Cecilia. Fanny, as we know, was at first greatly shocked, and completely incredulous. She described Madame de Staël as loving M. de Narbonne tenderly, but so openly, and in a manner so devoid of coquetry, that friendship between two men, in her opinion, could hardly be differently manifested. But the seed of suspicion once cast in the little prude's mind, quickly germinated, and led eventually to a total cessation of her acquaintance with the woman whose brilliancy and goodness had so fascinated her. This is not the place in which to discuss Fanny's conduct; but was the information on which she based it correct? Who shall say? Madame de Staël was extremely imprudent, and she seems to have been dangerously near to loving a number of men.
Miss Berry, in her memoirs, accuses her of a "passion" for Talleyrand, and spoke as though concluding it to be a theme of common gossip. She certainly liked to absorb a great deal of her friends' affection, and was avowedly displeased when they married. Her sentiments towards Baron de Staël, full of a sweet and fresh cordiality at first, seems rapidly to have changed to aversion. As far as it is possible to judge, she unhesitatingly sacrificed him on all occasions to her filial love or her intellectual aims. When he was in Paris she left him in order to console M. Necker in his mournful retirement at Coppet. When he was at Coppet she remained in Paris, there to form and electrify a constitutional salon. Various anecdotes attest to the scandal uttered about her, and the truth of some of these stories admits of little doubt. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that detraction is ever busiest with the greatest names; that Madame de Staël, always preoccupied with her subject and never with herself, irritated the nerves and stirred the bile of inferior people who were proportionately gratified to hear her attacked; and that she lived in the midst of a society where conjugal fidelity was rare enough to be hardly believed in. Countless passages in her writings prove how exalted was her ideal of family life; and if they also prove her constant, restless yearning after some unattained, unattainable good, there is at least no sign of the satiety of exhausted emotion in them. Let us be content, then, that in many instances a veil should hide from us the deeper recesses of Madame de Staël's heart. Grant that there were two Germaines-one her father's daughter, lofty-minded, pure, catching the infection of exalted feelings, and incapable of error; the other her husband's wife, thrust into the fiery circle of human passion, thence to emerge a little scorched and harmed. The hidden centre of that dual self cannot be revealed to us; but what we do know is sometimes so grand and always so great that we can afford to be indulgent when reduced to conjecture.
In 1791, after having paid a visit of condolence to her father at Coppet, Madame de Staël had returned to Paris, and made her salon the rallying-point for the most distinguished Constitutionels. Conspicuous among these, in principles although not in name, was De Narbonne, described by Madame de Staël herself as "Grand seigneur, homme d'esprit, courtisan et philosophe." He was a brilliant, an...
