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CHAPTER VIII.

MADAME DE STAËL MEETS NAPOLEON.

THE hostility between Madame de Staël and Napoleon was inevitable; since not a single point of sympathy existed between them. Her moral superiority, unselfishness, romantic ardour, and sincerity, were precisely the qualities for which he would feel contempt, as being incompatible with the singleness of individual purpose, serene indifference to suffering, and calm acceptance of means which are necessary to material success. Madame de Staël was intimately convinced that not only honesty, but every other virtue constituted the best policy. Napoleon treated all such amiable theories as mere sentimentalism. occasionally sensual from love of excitement, he was essentially passionless, and looked upon women as toys, not as sentient beings. He hated them to have ideas of their own; he liked them to be elegant, graceful, and pretty. He was brought into contact with Madame de Staël-a woman overflowing with passion, energy and intellect, large of person, loud of voice, careless in attire. She had generally found her eloquence invincible, and he meant nothing to be

If

invincible but his system. She had every reason to believe in her talent, and proclaimed that belief somewhat obstreperously; while he was disgusted at not being able to differ from her, and at finding that there was still one light which could shine unquenched beside his star. He usually succeeded in repressing people so entirely, as to leave alive in them no possibility of protest; but she was, by her nature, irrepressible. It is true that she records having felt suffocated in his presence; but such a feeling could not have endured in her long. A very little familiarity would have transformed it into impatient rebellion. For Napoleon society, with a few exceptions, was composed of dummies, some of them a little more tangible and resisting than others, consequently more difficult to thrust out of the way. The individual had no intrinsic value for him, but was simply a factor in the sum of success. Madame de Staël admired everybody who was clever, loved everybody who was good, pitied everybody who was sorrowful. She detested oppression, and fought against it and conquered, if not materially, at least morally, although sometimes she hardly foresaw, when engaging in it, how much the fight would cost her. In the beginning of her acquaintance with him, Madame de Staël evidently entertained an admiration for Napoleon, greater than that which she eventually cared to avow. Bourrienne goes so far as to assert that she was in love with him, and that she wrote him perfervid letters, which he disdainfully threw into the fire. It is not necessary to accept the whole of this story. Bourrienne as a returned émigré can have felt but a meagre sympathy for Madame de Staël, and he probably yielded to the temptation of making his

account of her as piquant as possible.

But as she

never did anything by halves, and always wrote with the most unconventional ardour, it is certain that her first sentiments towards the conqueror of Italy were expressed in a form to weary rather than gratify him. She presumably praised him for views which he did not hold, and for a disinterestedness that he was far from feeling. He must have understood that to an intellect such as hers, the first shock of disappointment would bring enlightenment, and then his schemes would be penetrated before they were ripe for execution. Add to all these elements of antipathy the fact that every intelligent man in Paris would find his way to Madame de Staël's salon, with the further fact that she herself was not to be silenced, and it becomes easy to understand how Bonaparte could condescend from his greatness to hate her.

His aversion, owing to his Italian blood, had a strain of Pulcinello-like malignity, and every fresh outbreak of clamour from his victim only roused him to strike harder. That he should exile her in the first instance was not only comprehensible but justifiable. He had undertaken a gigantic task, that of accomplishing by the single force of his own will, and in the brief space of his own life-time, what, in the natural course of events, would have required the slow action of generations. That is, he sought to weld into his own system the mobile, alert, and impressionable mind of France.

To crush a thing so impalpable, to extinguish a thing so fiery, was an impossible undertaking, and to anybody but Napoleon it must have seemed so. He, at least, so far understood its magnitude, as to appreciate the full danger of even a momentary reaction. And what, in that sombre but electric atmosphere,

charged with suppressed fire, was so likely to provoke a reaction as the influence of Madame de Staël—a woman of amazing talent, of high position, and great wealth; notoriously disinterested, and, although ever true to her principles, yet strongly swayed by personal influences.

Moreover, she represented the Opposition. Let anybody consider what public opinion is, even in wellordered England, how it reverses in a moment the best laid plans of Ministers, and it becomes easy to understand how, in revolutionary France, a new thought emanating from Madame de Staël's salon could prove gravely dangerous to Napoleon. In exiling her, he only treated her as she had been treated already. If he found her in France on coming to power, it was because she had been reconciled to the Directory; but there never was the least chance of her becoming reconciled to him.

There are several very womanly touches in Madame de Staël's own account of her relations with Napoleon. Here is one of them, relating apparently to a time when the aversion between the First Consul and his illustrious foe had become an accomplished but not an acknowledged fact. Madame de Staël was invited to General Berthier's one evening when it was known that Napoleon would be present.

"As I knew," she says, "that he spoke very ill of me, it struck me that he would address me with some of the rude things which he often liked to say to women, even to those who flattered him; and I wrote down on chance, before going to the party, the different stinging and spirited replies which I could make to his speeches. I did not wish to be taken by surprise if he insulted me, for that would have been a greater want

of character even than of wit; and as nobody could be sure of remaining at ease with such a man, I had prepared myself beforehand to defy him. Fortunately, it was unnecessary; he only put the most insignificant question in the world to me, for . . he never attacks except where he feels himself to be the stronger.”

...

The whole of this passage is enchantingly simpleminded. One may be allowed to think, in spite of Madame de Staël's assertion to the contrary, that she was really disappointed at not being able to make some of her defiant retorts to the conqueror; but it was child-like of her to have arranged them in advance!

Napoleon was preparing to invade Switzerland. Madame de Staël flattered herself for a moment that she might deter him from the project, and sought an interview with him for that purpose. The tête-à-tête lasted an hour, and Napoleon listened with the utmost patience, but he did not give himself any trouble to discuss Madame de Staël's arguments, and quickly diverted the conversation to his own love of solitude, country life, and fine arts-three things for which, by the way, his visitor cared almost as little as himself. She came away convinced that the eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes combined would not move him, but captivated, she admits, by the charm of his manner; in other words, by the false bonhomie which he possessed the art of introducing into his Italian garrulity. While Madame de Staël pleaded, and Bonaparte chattered, they were both learning to understand one another, but it is most probable that the first to be enlightened was the man.

Switzerland being threatened with an invasion, Madame de Staël left Paris in 1798 to join her father at Coppet; for he was still on the list of émigrés, and