Bella Duffy - Madame de Staël

Famous Women.

MADAME DE STAL.

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Decorative header containing the legend Famous Women

MADAME DE STAL.

BY
BELLA DUFFY.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1887.

Copyright, 1887,
By Roberts Brothers .

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

Unpublished correspondencethat delight of the eager biographeris not to be had in the case of Madame de Stal, for, as is well known, the De Broglie family either destroyed or successfully hid all the papers which might have revealed any facts not already in possession of the world.

The writer of the present brief memoir has, consequently, had to fall back upon the following well-known works:

The Correspondance of the Abb Galiani, of Mme. Du Deffand, of Rahel Varnhagen, and of Schiller; the Memoirs of Marmontel, of Mme. DArblay, of Mme. de Rmusat, of Mme. dAbrant, of Bourrienne, and of the Comte de Montlosier; Ticknors Letters; Chteaubriands Mmoires dOutre Tombe; De Goncourts Histoire de la Socit Franaise pendant la Rvolution, and Histoire de la Socit Franaise pendant le Directoire; Lacretelles Dix Annes dpreuve; Michelets Le Directoire, Le Dix-huit Brumaire, and Jusqu Waterloo; Le Salon de Madame Necker, by Vicomte dHaussonville; Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, by Vernon Lee; Byrons Letters; Benjamin Constants Letters to Mme. Rcamier; Coppet and Weimar; Les Correspondants de Joubert, by Paul Raynal; Les Causeries du Lundi, and other studies by Ste. Beuve; Droz Histoire du Rgne de Louis XVI.; Villemains Cours de Littrature Franaise; the fragments from Constants Journals, recently published in the Revue Internationale; Sismondis Journals and letters; and sundry old articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes; besides various other volumes, of which the list would be long and wearisome to detail.

BELLA DUFFY.

My dear friend having the same tastes as myself, would certainly wish always for my chair, and, like his little daughter, would beat me to make me give it up to him. To keep peace between our hearts, I send a chair for him also. The two are of suitable height and their lightness renders them easy to carry. They are made of the most simple material, and were bought at the sale of Philemon and Baucis.

Thus wrote Madame Geoffrin to Madame Necker when the intimacy between them had reached such a pitch as to warrant the introduction into the Necker salons of the only sort of chair in which the little old lady cared to sit.

The dear friend was M. Necker, and the little daughter of the house must then have been about four or five years old, for it was in the very year of her birth (1766) that Madame Geoffrin took her celebrated journey to Poland, and it was some little time after her return that she became intimate with Germaine Neckers parents.

They were still in the Rue de Clry. M. Neckers elevation to the Contrle Gnral was in the future and had probably not been foreseen; it is possible that even the loge de Colbert, which betrayed his desire for power, had not yet appeared; nevertheless, he was already a great man. His controversy with the Abb Morellet, on the subject of the East India Company, had brought him very much into notice; and, although his arguments in favor of that monopoly had not saved it from extinction, they had caused his name to be in everybodys mouth.

His position as Minister for the Republic of Geneva gave him the entry to the Court of Versailles, and brought him into contact with illustrious personages, who otherwise might have disdained a mere wealthy foreigner, neither a noble nor a Catholic. His well-filled purse completed his popularity, for it was not seldom at the service of abject place-hunters and needy literati. Moreover, he had been fortunate in his choice of a wife.

By the time that the King of Polands bonne maman wrote that little note to Madame Necker, the wife of the Genevese banker had founded a salon as brilliant and crowded as Madame Geoffrins own. She had achieved this in a few years, whereas Madame Geoffrin for the same task, and in spite of her wealth and generosity, had required a quarter of a century.

But Madame Necker, besides being young, rich and handsome, was bitten with the prevailing craze for literature, could listen unweariedly for hours to the most labored portraits and loges, and, although herself the purest and most austere of women, would open her salon to any reprobate, provided only he were witty.

Madame Necker, first known to us as Suzanne Curchod, was the daughter of a Swiss pastor, and saw the light in the Presbytery of Crassier in the Pays de Vaud. The simple white house, with its green shutters, is still to be seen, separated from the road by a little garden planted with fruit trees. The Curchods were an ancient and respectable family whom Madame Necker (it was one of her weaknesses) would fain have proved entitled to patents of nobility. Some Curchods or Curchodis are found mentioned in old chronicles as fighting beneath the banners of Savoy, and it was from these that Madame Necker sought vainly to trace her descent. She held a secret consultation for this cherished object with the Sieur Chrin, genealogist to the King; but his decision disappointed her. Chagrined, but not convincedfor her opinions were not easily shakenshe carried home the precious papers and locked them up without erasing the endorsement, Titres de noblesse de la famille Curchod, which she had written with her own hand.

M. Curchod took pains to give his only daughter an unusually thorough and liberal education. She knew Latin and a little Greek, swept with extreme flounce the circle of the sciences, and was accomplished enough in every way to attract the admiration, very often even the love, of sundry grave and learned personages.