Part 22 (1/2)
When he returned from Egypt and found her away,--she had gone to meet him, but missed him,--his suspicions were aroused as to her fidelity, as she had been accused of many misdeeds. When the reconciliation finally took place, after a day of sobbing and pleading, she put to work all her tact and knowledge of Parisian society to help her husband to the _coup d'etat_.
She was always of great service to Napoleon in his relations with the men of whom he wished to make use; fascinating them and drawing them over to him, she charmed such persons as Barras, Gohier, Fouche, Moreau, Talleyrand, Sieyes, and others. By her skill she kept hidden Napoleon's plans until all was ripe for them. She was in the secret of the 18th Brumaire; ”nothing was concealed from her. In every conference at which she was present, her discretion, gentleness, grace, and the ready ingenuity of her delicate and cool intelligence were of great service.” During the Directorate she allayed jealousies and appeased the differences between Republicans and Royalists. As wife of the First Consul, she conciliated the _emigres_. At that time she was probably the most important figure in France. The _emigres_ would call at her salon in the morning so as to avoid meeting her husband, with whom they refused to a.s.sociate. Her task was not easy, but she knew so well how to say a kind word to all, and her tact was so great that when she became empress the duties and requirements of that office were natural to her. She won the Republicans by her friends.h.i.+p with Fouche, the representative of the revolutionary element--the aristocracy, by her dignity and refinement. Her whole appearance had a peculiar charm.
In 1803 the conditions began to be reversed. In 1796 Josephine had worried Napoleon on account of her inconstancy; she was then young and beautiful, while he was penniless and ailing. In 1803 he was thirty-four and she forty--he in his prime, wealthy and popular, she faded and powerless, no longer able to give cause for suspicion.
However, nothing could make Napoleon reject her, because she was useful to him. ”Her kindness was a weapon against her enemies, a charm for her friends, and the source of her power over her husband.” ”I gained battles, Josephine gained me hearts,” are the well-known words of Napoleon. As empress she had every wish gratified, but she realized that a woman of her age could not continue indefinitely her fascination over a man as capricious as Napoleon. In the brilliant court of Fontainebleau she held the highest place, and no one could suspect the anxieties that tormented her, so cool and happy did she appear.
Josephine did many things that later on gradually helped reconcile Napoleon to a divorce: her pride, her aristocratic tendencies, extravagance and lavishness; her objection to the marriage of Hortense to General Duroc on the grounds of humble birth; her religious tendencies; her difficulty in keeping secrets, which led to highly tragic scenes between her and Bonaparte; the encouragement she gave to the jealousies and hatred of her brothers and sisters-in-law, who maliciously slandered her at every opportunity; and finally, her barrenness.
Her career after her divorce was honorable, and to-day Josephine is still held in the highest esteem in France and in the world at large.
Her greatness is not in having been the wife of a great emperor, but in knowing how to adapt herself to the conditions in France into which she was suddenly thrust. As a conciliator and a mediator between two almost hopelessly irreconcilable cla.s.ses of society, she deserves a prominent place among great French women.
CHAPTER XIV
WOMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Among the unusually large number of prominent French women which the nineteenth century produced, possibly not more than a half-dozen names will survive,--Mme. de Stael, George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, Sarah Bernhardt, Mme. Lebrun, and Rachel. This circ.u.mstance is, possibly, largely due to the character of the century: its activity, its varied accomplishments, its wide progress along so many lines, its social development, its absolute freedom and tolerance--all of which tended to open a field for women more extensive than in any preceding century.
The salon, in its old-time glory, became a thing of the past; and the pa.s.sing of this inst.i.tution lessened, to a large extent, the possibility of great influence on the part of women. In short, the mode of life became, in the nineteenth century, unfavorable to the absolute power exercised by woman in former times. She was now on a level with man, enjoying more privileges and being looked upon more as the equal and possible rival of man. It became necessary for woman to make and establish her own position, whereas, under the old regime, her power and position were established by custom, which regarded her vocation as entirely distinct from that of man. The result was a host of prominent and active women, but few really great ones. Undoubtedly by far the most important and influential was Madame de Stael, but her influence and work are so intimately a.s.sociated with her life that any account of her which aims at giving a true estimate of her significance must necessarily involve much biography.
Her mother, the Mme. Necker of salon fame, endeavored to bring up her daughter as the _chef d'oeuvre_ of natural art,--pious, modest in her conversation, dignified in her behavior, without pride or frivolity, but with wide knowledge. In this ambition she partly succeeded. At the age of eleven the young girl was present at receptions, where she listened to discussions by such men as Grimm, Buffon, Suard, and others. Her parents took her to the theatre, and she would subsequently compose short stories on what she had heard and seen.
Rousseau became her ideal, but she enjoyed all literature, showing an insatiable desire for knowledge. From her early youth to her death, her conversation was ever the result of her own impulse; consequently, it was uncontrolled and lacked the seriousness imparted by deep reflection.
Interested in all things except Nature, which seemed mournful to her, while solitude horrified her, society was her delight. At the age of twenty she wrote: ”A woman must have nothing to herself and must find all power in that which she loves.” Her masculine ideal was a man of society, of success, a hero of the Academy, a superior genius, animated more by the desire to please than to be useful. During these early years she wrote a great deal, her work being mostly in the form of sentimental utterances, but very little has survived her.
When she reached marriageable age, many ambitions of her parents were frustrated by her independent will. Pitt, Mirabeau, Bonaparte, were considered, but destiny had in store for her a Swedish amba.s.sador, Stael-Holstein, a man of good family, but with little money and plenty of debts, who had been looking out for a comfortable dowry. In 1786, at the time when Marie Antoinette was at the height of her popularity, this girl of twenty years was married to a man seventeen years her senior, who had no affection for her and whom she could not love.
At Paris she immediately opened a salon, which soon eclipsed, both in beauty and wit, that of her mother; there her eloquence, enthusiasm, and conversational gifts captivated all, but her imprudent language, the recklessness of her conduct, her scorn of all etiquette, her outspoken preferences, frightened away women and stunned men. Her sympathy for her friends, Talleyrand, Narbonne, De Montmorency, together with the approaching Revolution, drew her into politics. When her father was called by the nation to the control of its finances, his daughter shared his glories.
Her salon was the centre of the elite and of all literary and political discussions; but as the majority of its frequenters were partisans of the English const.i.tution and expressed their views openly and freely, her enemies became numerous. When Narbonne was made minister of war, a great triumph for her and her party, the eloquence of his reports was attributed to her, and when he fell into disgrace she rescued him. However, the atmosphere of Paris was too unfriendly, so she left in 1792 for her home at Coppet, which became an asylum for all the proscribed. When she visited England, she began a thorough study of its mode of life, its customs, and its parliamentary inst.i.tutions. Upon her return to Coppet she wrote _Reflexions sur le Proces de la Reine_, to excite the commiseration of the judges. After the death of her mother in 1794, she devoted her energies to the education of her two boys.
After the violence of her love for Benjamin Constant, who drew her back to politics, was somewhat cooled, she became an ardent Republican, writing her treatise _Reflexions sur la Paix adressees a M. Pitt et aux Anglais_, which facilitated her return in 1795 to Paris, where she found her husband reinstalled as amba.s.sador. Her hotel in the Rue de Bac was reopened, and she proceeded to form a salon from the debris of society floating about in Paris. It was an a.s.sembly of queer characters--elements of the old and new regime, but not at all reconciled, converts of the Jacobin party returning for the first time into society, surrounded by the women of the old regime, using all imaginable efforts and flattery to obtain the _rentree_ of a brother, a son, or a lover; it was composed of the most moderate Revolutionists, of former Const.i.tutionalists, of exiles of the Monarchy, whom she endeavored to bring over to the Republican cause.
Through the influence of Mme. de Stael, the decree of banishment was repealed by the convention, thus opening Paris to Talleyrand. In 1795 appeared her _Reflexions sur la Paix Interieure_; the aim of that work being to organize the French Republic on the plan of the United States; it strongly opposed the restoration of the Monarchy. The Comite du Salut Publique accused her of double play, of favoring intrigues, and, seeing the plots of the Royalists, she adopted a new plan in her salon; politics being too dangerous, she decided to devote herself more to literature. In her book _Les Pa.s.sions_ she endeavored to crush her calumniators; she wrote: ”Condemned to celebrity, without being able to be known I find need of making myself known by my writings.”
It was not safe for her to return to Paris until 1797, when her friend Talleyrand was made minister of foreign affairs. Her efforts to charm Napoleon led only to estrangement, although he appointed her friend Benjamin Constant to the tribunate; but when he publicly announced the advent of the tyrant Napoleon, she was accused of inciting her friends against the government, and was again banished to Coppet, where she wrote the celebrated work _De la Litterature Consideree sous ses Rapports avec les Inst.i.tutions Sociales_, a singular mixture of satirical allusions to Napoleon's government and cabals against his power; in that work she announced, also, her belief in the regeneration of French literature by the influence of foreign literature, and endeavored to show the relations which exist between political inst.i.tutions and literature. Thus, she was the first to bring the message of a general cosmopolitan relations.h.i.+p of literatures and literary ideas.
In 1802 she returned to Paris and began to show, on every possible occasion, a morbid hatred for Napoleon. When her father published his work _Dernieres Vues de Politique et de Finance_, expressing a desire to write against the tyranny of one, after having fought so long that of the mult.i.tude, the emperor immediately accused Mme. de Stael of instilling these ideas into her father. Her salon and forty of her friends were put into the interdict.
After the death of her husband in 1802, she was free to marry Benjamin Constant; and after refusing him, she wrote her novel _Delphine_ to give vent to her feelings. The two famous lines found in almost every work on Mme. de Stael may be quoted here, as they well express her ideas on marriage: ”A man must know how to brave an opinion, and a woman must submit to it.” This qualification Benjamin Constant lacked, and at that time she was unable to give the submission.
Her travels in Germany, Russia, and Italy were one great succession of triumphs; by her brilliancy, her wonderful gift of conversation, and her quickness of comprehension, she everywhere baffled and astounded those with whom she conversed. Schiller declared that when she left he felt as though he were just convalescing after a long spell of illness. One day she abruptly asked the staid old philosopher Fichte: ”M. Fichte, can you give me, in a short time, an _apercu_ of your system of philosophy, and tell me what you mean by your ego? I find it very obscure.” He began by translating his thoughts into French, very deliberately. After talking for some ten minutes, in the midst of a deep argument she interrupted him, crying out: ”Enough, M. Fichte, quite enough! I understand you perfectly; I have seen your system in ill.u.s.tration--it is an adventure of Baron Munchhausen.” The philosopher a.s.sumed a tragic att.i.tude, and a spell of silence fell upon the audience.
The result of her visit to Italy was her novel _Corinne_, in which the problems of the destiny of women of genius--the relative joys of love and glory--are discussed. This work remained for a whole generation the standard of love and ideals, and at the same time revealed Italy to the French, After a second visit to Germany, she began to labor seriously on her work on that country, in 1810 going _incognito_ to Paris to have it printed. Ten thousand copies, ready for sale, were destroyed before reaching the public. This work opened the German world to the French; it applied, to a great nation, the doctrine of progress, defending the independence and originality of nations, while endeavoring to show that the future lay in the reciprocal respect of the rights of people, declaring that nations are not at all the arbitrary work of men or the fatal work of circ.u.mstances, and that the submission of one people to another is contrary to nature. She wished to make ”poor and n.o.ble Germany” conscious of its intellectual riches, and to prove that Europe could obtain peace only through the liberation of that country. The censors accused her of lack of patriotism in provoking the Germans to independence, and of questionable taste in praising their literature; consequently, the book was denounced, all the copies obtainable were destroyed, and a vigorous search for the ma.n.u.script was undertaken. After this episode, her friends were not permitted to visit her at Coppet.
In 1811 she was secretly married to a young Italian officer, Albert de Rocca, a handsome man of twenty-three--she was then forty-five. In him she realized the conditions which she described in _Delphine_, namely, a man who braved an opinion and prejudices; and she was ready to submit herself to him, Coppet became the centre for endless pleasures and fetes; Mme. de Stael began to write comedies and to forget Paris entirely. This blissful happiness was suddenly checked by the emperor, who determined to show his displeasure and also to give evidence of his power by banis.h.i.+ng Schlegel and exiling Mme. Recamier and De Montmorency, who continued to visit Mme. de Stael. Fear for the safety of her husband and children influenced her to leave for Russia, where the czar ordered all Russians to honor her as the enemy of Napoleon.
Indeed, she was everywhere received like a visiting queen.
In the autumn of 1816 she returned to Paris, and spent a number of months very happily in her old style--in the society of the salon.
Though devoured by insomnia, enervated by the use of opium, and besieged by fear of death, she accepted all invitations, and kept open house herself, receiving in the morning, at dinner, and in the evening; and though at night she paced the floor for hours or tossed about on her bed until morning, she was yet fresh for all the pleasures of the next day. But this mode of existence was undermining her health.