Madame de Stäel - Hardcover

Fairweather, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786713399 ISBN 13: 9780786713394

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2005

Synopsis

The author of The Pilgrim Princess reconstructs the life of the "Jacqueline Kennedy of her day"--Madame de Staël--a woman who transformed herself into the greatest hostess in eighteenth-century Paris.

About this title

About the Author:

Madame de Stael is Maria Fairweather's second biography. The first was The Pilgrim Princess: A Life of Princess Volkonsky published in 1999 of which Victoria Glendinning wrote, "A rich, compelling historical biography—the extraordinary story of a beautfiul princess whose life and loves were intimately interwoven with those of great men at the cataclysmic centre of events in early nineteenth-century Europe." Maria Fairtweather resides in England.

From The Washington Post:

It seems there actually was one celebrated soul whom Mme. de Staël managed not to meet in the course of her pathologically extroverted life. History does not allow for the Bambi-and-Godzilla moment that would have been her introduction to Jane Austen, whose work de Staël wrote off as "vulgaire." The comment speaks volumes. No contemporary woman submitted less to the rules of Austen's universe than Mme. de Staël. Before her, convention crumbled and silence fled; in her wake, decorum lay helpless on the floor. Two centuries later, she has yet to meet her match. It is difficult to name another woman who -- without laying claim to title or throne -- had as much influence on the events of her day. It is impossible to name another woman who, in the early days of the French Revolution, religiously attended sessions of the National Assembly, slipping notes to the deputies from her ringside seat.

Her brain was both Mme. de Staël's most prominent feature and her best. Born Germaine Necker in 1766 to the Swiss banker and French Finance Minister Jacques Necker and his starchy wife, she underwent an intellectual force-feeding from her earliest days. As a result, her mind became a veritable foie gras of erudition. At the age of 11 she was a fixture at her mother's Enlightenment salon. Parisian friends clucked about the education but probably should have grumbled more about what might emerge from the clutches of an ambitious, overweening mother and a doting, ludicrously rich father who considered their only child to be their greatest accomplishment.

In any event, the lessons paid off. Married at 17 to Baron Eric Magnus de Staël Holstein, the Swedish ambassador to France, Mme. de Staël found herself vulnerable and pregnant during the bloody tumult of the Revolution. When the Commune's guards came to search her husband's embassy, she headed them off with a geography tutorial. Sweden would retaliate for their affront within hours, she warned. Everyone knew that the kingdom bordered France.

The Swedish ambassador lent his wife the name by which she would be remembered, but she did little to return the favor. None of the de Staël children was de Staël's. (The gendarmes his wife so effectively headed off had come for her lover, one of Louis XVI's last defenders. He spent the geography lesson cowering behind the altar of the embassy chapel.) The beautifully mannered Swede bore up well under the hail of infidelities, which is more than can be said for some of the lovers. They were legion. Noting that one could lose sight of the woman for the liaisons, previous chroniclers have opted to limit the supporting cast. Maria Fairweather restores them here, an epic cast for an epicurean life.

Fairweather also dips amply into the bubbling political cauldron. Her Mme. de Staël holds court between Revolution and Restoration from an influential perch in the front row. She comports herself at all times as the empress of liberal opinion, one tradition to which she was effortlessly faithful. She had less use for obedience and silence, those staples of the female condition. For all three reasons, she found herself on a collision course with Napoleon. A melancholy decade of exile followed his coronation. Mme. de Staël was more than the emperor could bear; the banishment was more than she could bear. In 1807 her 17-year-old son called on Napoleon to plead her case. She was miserable. "Your mother is always like that," Napoleon replied. "She is not a bad woman; she is clever, she is perhaps much too clever, but she has an unbridled mind, she has never understood the meaning of subordination."

It is on the unbridled mind alone that Fairweather stints, in this, her second biography. (She's also the author of a life of Princess Volonsky.) Like all writers, Mme. de Staël hoped to be judged by her work, but she gets little opportunity to be so evaluated here. Understandably Fairweather has had to draw a line somewhere, and she has opted to leave aside the literary analyses. The result is that the works themselves -- pathbreaking in their time, if little read today -- seem to emerge from nowhere. (In part this is a biographical hazard. Generally the promiscuous make for better biographies than the prolific.) But somewhere between the mad dashes across Europe and the marathons under the sheets, Mme. de Staël turned out a fantastic number of pages -- on the emancipation of women and against Napoleon, liberal tracts as well as romantic novels; she had a rare literary wingspan -- and they deserve a place in her life. The heroines of her novels Delphine and Corinne are women who defy convention, to their peril; the heroines of her nonfiction are intellectual freedom, moderation, the human heart, Italy. The works certainly determined something of her fate, as her contemporaries rarely forgot. "I never go near her," Byron declared of Mme. de Staël. "Her books are very delightful, but in society I see nothing but a very plain woman forcing one to listen and look at her with her pen behind her ear and her mouth full of ink."

That mouth was not always full of ink; it was, however, always full of words, which tumble plentifully onto these pages. Less present is an authorial voice to make sense of them all; there is in this volume much gallivanting about but very little peering within. To an extent, the fault is the subject's. There is a very great deal of Mme. de Staël. Hers is an epic life that is perhaps not best served by an epic biography.

It is, however, thrilling, even in a blurred portrait. Intractable, adulterous, loud, Mme. de Staël was entirely the star of her own show, the anti-Austen all the way. "Tell me, in your opinion, is he as intelligent as I am?" she once challenged Talleyrand, measuring herself against Napoleon. "He isn't as brave as you are," came the response.

Reviewed by Stacy Schiff
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786713399
• ISBN 13: 9780786713394
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400