Madame de Stýel
- Book Review,
by Maria Fairweather
From Publishers Weekly
"At Madame de Stael's this evening I meet the world," wrote early American statesman Gouverneur Morris, and British biographer Fairweather's expansive biography of Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) rightly focuses on the salon as backdrop to French literary and political intrigues of the 18th and 19th centuries. The salons—where the great men of politics and culture gathered during and after the ancien régime—were often a woman's only avenue of influence, and Mme. de Staël's gatherings included the most brilliant politicians, writers and artists of her day, including Chateaubriand, Talleyrand and Lafayette. Fairweather digs deep into de Staël's past to contextualize her rise from daughter of a self-made Swiss banker, a former finance minister to Louis XVI, and a Protestant governess whom he married, to author and hostess of one of Paris's leading salons. The result is a complicated portrait of a passionate woman well versed in Enlightenment philosophy, German literature and Calvinism, whose outspokenness pitted her against France's extreme factions—the royalists, the Jacobins—and eventually Napoleon, leading to her exile in Geneva. But this did not deter her from challenging France's leaders from afar or continuing her fruitful literary life. Fairweather (The Pilgrim Princess) offers an extensively researched history; however, only dedicated students of French culture and literature may have the fortitude to wade into this almost over-rich tome. Illus. not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.
From Booklist
Writer and salonniere Germaine de Stael hovers in the background of so much late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century history and biography, but here she takes center stage. The daughter of Louis XVI's finance minister, she became acquainted with some of the great minds of Enlightenment Europe while she was still a girl, and later the sheer force of her personality propelled her into the center of French political and cultural life. Headstrong and fiercely intelligent, she was exiled by the government for her outspokenness, and she made an enemy of Napoleon, who preferred women who kept quiet. A marriage of convenience did not prevent her from having numerous lovers and several illegitimate children. Despite a propensity for annoying the authorities and a lifestyle that many condemned, de Stael always managed to be in the thick of things during a tumultuous period of European history. Although some readers may be daunted by the 560 pages and the heavy doses of political history, this is a readable account of an extraordinary life. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
The influence of the salons of Paris on the thought and culture of the eighteenth century would be difficult to overstate. These meeting places for the vanguard of society were presided over by a succession of clever women, and the most brilliant of all of them was Madame de Stäel. Born Germaine Necker in Paris on April 22, 1766, her father was a powerful banker and her mother a Swiss pastor's daughter who never got over her good fortune in marrying a rich man. In 1786 Germaine was married to a secretary in the Swedish embassy called de Stäel. Although she thought him "a perfect gentleman," she also found him dull and clumsy. She began to take lovers-the Vicomte de Narbonne and possibly Talleyrand-and then Benjamin Constant, in whom she at last met her intellectual equal. In 1806 her novel Delphine was published. It was an instant success and praised by Goethe and Byron, among others. Her salon thronged with glittering visitors, among them the tsar, Talleyrand, Madame Recalmier, Chateaubriand, Lafayette, and Wellington. Maria Fairweather gives an entrancing, illustrated account of this vanished world, so merciless to outsiders, but for those of the inner circle incomparably glamorous and exciting.
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