305—to Thomas Moore
June 22, 1813.
Yesterday
I dined in company with Stael, the "Epicene,"
whose politics are sadly changed. She is for the Lord of Israel and the Lord of Liverpool—a vile antithesis of a Methodist and a Tory—talks of nothing but devotion and the ministry, and, I presume, expects that God and the government will help her to a pension.
Murray
, the
Greek: anax
of publishers, the Anak of stationers, has a design upon you in the paper line. He wants you to become the staple and stipendiary editor of a periodical work. What say you? Will you be bound, like "Kit Smart, to write for ninety-nine years in the "
Universal Visitor?
"
Seriously, he talks of hundreds a year, and—though I hate prating of the beggarly elements —his proposal may be to your honour and profit, and, I am very sure, will be to our pleasure.
I don't know what to say about "friendship." I never was in friendship but once, in my nineteenth year, and then it gave me as much trouble as love. I am afraid, as Whitbread's sire said to the king, when he wanted to knight him, that I am "too old;
but nevertheless, no one wishes you more friends, fame, and felicity, than
Yours, etc.
Footnote 1:
"'And ah! what verse can grace thy stately mien,
Guide of the world, preferment's golden queen,
Neckar's fair daughter, Staël the Epicene!
Bright o'er whose flaming cheek and pumple nose
The bloom of young desire unceasing glows!
Fain would the Muse—but ah! she dares no more,
A mournful voice from lone Guyana's shore,
Sad Quatremer, the bold presumption checks,
Forbid to question thy ambiguous sex.'
"These lines contain the Secret History of Quatremer's deportation. He presumed, in the Council of Five Hundred, to arraign Madame de Staël's conduct, and even to hint a doubt of her sex. He was sent to Guyana. The transaction naturally brings to one's mind the dialogue between Falstaff and Hostess Quickly in Shakespeare's Henry IV."
Canning's New Morality
, lines 293-301 (Edmonds' edition of the
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin
, pp. 282, 283).
Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766-1817), only child of the Minister Necker and his wife Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon's early love, married, in 1786, the Swedish Ambassador Baron de Staël Holstein, who died in 1802. She married, as her second husband, in 1811, M. de Rocca, a young French officer, who had been severely wounded in Spain, but survived her by a year (Madame de Récamier,
Souvenirs
, vol. i. p. 272). Her book,
De l'Allemagne
, seized and destroyed by Napoleon, was brought out in June, 1813, by John Murray. Byron thought her
"certainly the cleverest, though not the most agreeable woman he had ever known. 'She declaimed to you instead of conversing with you,' said he, 'never pausing except to take breath; and if during that interval a rejoinder was put in, it was evident that she did not attend to it, as she resumed the thread of her discourse as though it had not been interrupted'".
(Lady Blessington's
Conversations
, p. 26). Croker (
Croker Papers
, vol. i. p. 327) describes her as
"ugly, and not of an intellectual ugliness. Her features were coarse, and the ordinary expression rather vulgar, she had an ugly mouth, and one or two irregularly prominent teeth, which perhaps gave her countenance an habitual gaiety. Her eye was full, dark, and expressive; and when she declaimed, which was almost whenever she spoke, she looked eloquent, and one forgot that she was plain."
Madame de Staël
"did not affect to conceal her preference for the society of men to that of her own sex,"
and was entirely above, or below, studying the feminine arts of pleasing. In 1802 Miss Berry called on her in Paris.
"Found her in an excessively dirty cabinet—sofa singularly so; her own dress, a loose spencer with a bare neck,"
(
Journal
, vol. ii. p. 145). A similar experience is mentioned by Crabb Robinson (
Diary
, 1804).
"On the 28th of January," he writes, "I first waited on Madame de Staël. I was shown into her bedroom, for which, not knowing Parisian customs, I was unprepared. She was sitting, most decorously, in her bed, and writing. She had her night-cap on, and her face was not made up for the day. It was by no means a captivating spectacle; but I had a very cordial reception, and two bright black eyes smiled benignantly on me."
Of her political opinions Sir John Bowring (
Autobiographical Recollections
, pp. 375, 376) has left a sketch.
"Madame de Staël was a perfect aristocrat, and her sympathies were wholly with the great and prosperous. She saw nothing in England but the luxury, stupidity, and pride of the Tory aristocracy, and the intelligence and magnificence of the Whig aristocracy. These latter talked about truth, and liberty and herself, and she supposed it was all as it should be. As to the millions, the people, she never inquired into their situation. She had a horror of the canaille, but anything of sangre asul had a charm for her. When she was dying she said, 'Let me die in peace; let my last moments be undisturbed.' Yet she ordered the cards of every visitor to be brought to her. Among them was one from the Duc de Richelieu. 'What!' exclaimed she indignantly, 'What! have you sent away the Duke? Hurry! Fly after him. Bring him back. Tell him that, though I die for all the world, I live for him.'"
Napoleon's hatred of her was intense. "Do not allow that jade, Madame de Staël," he writes to Fouché, December 31, 1806 (
New Letters of Napoleon I.
, p. 35), "to come near Paris." Again, March 15, 1807 (
ibid.
, p. 39), "You are not to allow Madame de Staël to come within forty leagues of Paris. That wicked schemer ought to make up her mind to behave herself at last." In a third letter, April 19, 1807 (
ibid.
, p. 40), he speaks of her as "paying court, one day to the great—a patriot, a democrat, the next!... a fright, ... a worthless woman" (Léon Lecestre's
Lettres inédites de Napoléon I'er
, 2nd ed. vol. i. pp. 84, 88, 93).
Footnote 2:
"Old Gardner the bookseller employed Rolt and Smart to write a monthly miscellany called the Universal Visitor. There was a formal written contract, which Allen the printer saw.... They were bound to write nothing else; they were to have, I think, a third of the profits of his sixpenny pamphlet; and the contract was for ninety-nine years"
(Boswell's
Life of Dr. Johnson
, ed. Birrell, vol. iii. p. 192).
Footnote 3:
"But first the Monarch, so polite,
Ask'd Mister Whitbread if he'd be a Knight.
Unwilling in the list to be enroll'd,
Whitbread contemplated the Knights of Peg,
Then to his generous Sov'reign made a leg,
And said, 'He was afraid he was too old,'" etc.
Peter Pindar's
Instructions to a Laureat
.
