Toast of Europe

Witty, incisive, thoughtful, Mme. de Stael was one of a kind, 
says B. N. Goswamy about this woman of many hues

nnn

"Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end."

nnn

"To know all is to forgive all."

The above words, all so intense but also all so different in their tenor, come from a woman who some 200 years ago was the toast of Europe: Mme. de Stael, more properly Madame Anne Louise Germaine de Sta`EBl-Holstein. The name is pronounced more like ‘style’ rather than ‘stale’ (which she definitely wasn’t), and sits nicely on "a life containing a superabundance of that glamorous quality", as Richard Holmes says in a review of a clutch of recent books on her. She seems to have been one of a kind even in that age so enlightened, so rich in talent, and so crowded with names that reverberated all over the continent and beyond.

Born in 1766, de Stael was witness to turbulent times. Swiss by birth, and daughter of the famous banker Necker, who was finance minister to King Louis XVI of France, she saw the French Revolution, almost at first hand, married a Swedish ambassador, became a critic of Napoleon, took on a series of lovers, some of them famous men, travelled all over Europe, and authored a number of works, including the celebrated Corinne, a work of fiction that palpably moulded the lives of young women all over Europe. Great names came into her ken, or had sometimes more than a brush with her: thus, Talleyrand the statesman, Byron the poet, Goethe the thinker, Benjamin Constant the writer, Schlegel the critic, Heinrich Heine, another poet, Fanny Burney, the diarist, Juliette Recamier, the social leader. De Stael was witty, incisive, thoughtful, and obviously most engaging. But she could also be acerbic, and could speak her mind out with the kind of vehemence and clarity that requires great courage. Napoleon fought what could be called an intellectual duel with her and ordered her to be exiled from France even as he is said to have admitted grudgingly that she "teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think."

Tired of the tyranny in Europe, she wrote, in the days of her exile, to Thomas Jefferson in distant America: "You will tell me that America has nothing to do with the European continent, but has it nothing to do with the human race? Can you be indifferent to the cause of free nations, you, the most republican of all?"

Where, one could wonder, all her wealth and station in life notwithstanding, did Mme. de Stael derive her ‘power’ from, for she obviously wielded it in abundant measure? And the answer lies perhaps in the lively salon she ‘presided over’ at the palatial chateau of Coppet on the Lake of Geneva upon which the brilliant and the powerful converged. Originating in Italy, but coming to flower in France more than anywhere else, the salon — a typically European institution, one needs to recall — was "a gathering of stimulating people of quality under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings".

Astonishingly, the most influential of salons were founded or dominated by women, such as were of distinction and wealth, and Mme. de Stael was certainly one of them. From inside hers at Coppet, she formed friendships, challenged ideas, made pronouncements. But she did it all with panache, and a sense of style. In looks, she was by no means one of the great beauties of the age, but in style she was not lacking. Carefully, very carefully, she nurtured an image of herself, part of it helped by a large, flamboyant turban she began to wear.

The turban — woven out of ‘vividly coloured silks, often topped with declamatory ostrich or peacock feathers’ — became her style signature as it were, men and women "often standing on their chairs to catch a glimpse of that dark and brilliant physiognomy". One sees her wearing that turban in her portraits, including the one painted by Anne-Louis Girodet, a pupil of the famous David. Perhaps she saw herself as the ‘Sultana of Thought", as a friend of hers wrote.

Whether or not Mme. de Stael had deep interest in the visual arts is something to speculate about.

"Doubtless the human face is the grandest of all mysteries", she once wrote, "yet fixed on canvas it can hardly tell of more than one sensation; no struggle, no successive contrasts accessible to dramatic art, can painting give, as neither time nor motion exists for her." All the same she was very interested in how the painter made her look in her portraits. When the celebrated woman painter, Vig`E9e Le Brun, was summoned to Coppet to paint her portrait, Mme de Stael’s book Corinne was the talk of the continent.

It was in this heroine’s role that Vigée Le Brun decided to portray her, sitting with a lyre in her hands, using the character of her Greek poetess and suggesting that she herself was a muse of the arts. But the portrait did not meet Mme de Stael’s approval: too much bulk she thought, too much flesh. And promptly she invited a local, Geneva artist to paint a more flattering likeness of hers, using Le Brun’s painting as a base. Perhaps the thoughts of the heroine of one of her novels, Delphine, were coursing through her own head: "I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. These two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life." Who knows?

HOME