Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (45 page)

Quiberon, said Thérésia, gave people an excuse to tear down the hero of Thermidor, although in truth that process of re-evaluation had already begun. Tallien’s political enemies had remembered his role during the September massacres as secretary to the Commune, and accused him of colluding in the atrocities committed then. Later that autumn Antoine Thibaudeau publicly reminded Tallien that he had defended the bloody events of September 1792. The windows of La Chaumière were smashed. ‘But for me, I could not abandon my duties,’ Thérésia lamented. ‘I could not accuse him who had brought such glory to my name; I would have had to bid farewell to that glory which so intoxicated me.’

Tallien failed to plead for the Quiberon prisoners on the anniversary of 9 Thermidor. Thérésia remembered giving a dinner that night at which she raised a toast: ‘To forget mistakes, to forgive injuries, to the reconciliation of all the French.’ Her guests then raised their glasses, in return, to ‘
Notre Dame de Thermidor
’. But although she was still adored by Parisian society, the backlash had begun. Her enemies had started calling Thérésia ‘
Notre Dame de Septembre
’.

Even a great love would have trembled beneath the pressures imposed on Thérésia and Tallien’s marriage, and theirs was an alliance born of desire, fear and ambition. Tallien had betrayed his revolutionary principles for Thérésia and she had abandoned her caste for him. In Paris, the common ground they had shared in Bordeaux had slipped away from beneath their feet. ‘Tallien’s company repels me, but I cannot pull myself away from it,’ she said to a friend. ‘It is the only way of satisfying my thirst for celebrity.’

Tallien resented the adulation still showered upon his wife; Thérésia could not learn to respect her husband. Watching them together, said one observer, was like seeing ‘a lion sharing a cell with a pet dog’. Tallien was a man ‘with nothing in the way of merit’, said one of his fellow-deputies. Even Thermidor, wrote his accomplice on that day Paul Barras, showed ‘Tallien incapable of rising above the common-place’. His eloquence was contrived, his conversation laborious, his manner vulgar. Barras nicknamed him Robinet d’Eau–‘water tap’–because of the relentless stream of his insipid monologues.

‘Too much blood [stained] the hands of that man,’ Thérésia told a friend later. ‘I was always repelled by him.’ But she never reproached herself for her association with Tallien, considering herself not an accomplice to his crimes, but rather the only thing that had restrained him.

Sensing that he had lost her love, Tallien responded with rage, violence and jealousy. By late 1795 the husband of the most desired woman in Paris was said to be boasting of his encounters with prostitutes. And as Tallien’s marriage turned sour his political career waned; his personal and public fortunes were inextricably linked.

On 22 August, the Convention approved a new constitution which returned control of France to men of property–a return, as some had it, to the state of affairs in 1789. It was, as Furet writes, ‘another attempt to realise the eighteenth-century ideal of enlightened bourgeois liberalism’: happiness was seen as an end to be pursued, not a right to be seized; equality meant equality of opportunity, not equality of rank or wealth. Avoiding tyranny and promoting stability were its twin aims. Former radicals accepted this retreat from their ideals because the Terror’s excesses had been so appalling.

A French citizen was defined at this time as a male taxpayer, born and resident in France and over twenty-one years of age; he had the right to vote for ‘electors’, men of twenty-five and over who possessed disposable incomes equivalent to two hundred days’ ordinary labour. These
perhaps three hundred thousand electors chose the governing houses, made up of the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of the Elders. The Elders would select five Directors (who formed the government’s executive branch) from a list of ten names nominated by the Council of Five Hundred. Tallien was elected to this Council, but given no more prominent role in the new government.

One of the first five Directors was Paul Barras, who assumed office in October 1795. Barras, like Tallien, was a former deputy to the National Convention who had been a
représentant en mission
in 1793, then recalled by the Committee of Public Safety in early 1794. Like Tallien, he had been hailed as one of the architects of Robespierre’s fall. The similarities between them ended there.

Barras was forty when he moved into his official apartments at the Luxembourg, the former palace and revolutionary prison renamed the Palais Égalité. He was an elegant, self-assured
ci-devant
viscount from Provence whose ancient lineage had not hampered his republican ambitions. Tall, dark, unscrupulous and inscrutable, Barras was a dissolute, dandified roué who loved pleasure as much as his mistress, Rose de Beauharnais, and Thérésia. At parties, accosted by colleagues, he would say, ‘
À demain les affaires!
’–‘Leave business till tomorrow!’

At the round of balls, concerts, dinners and card parties of the hedonistic summer of 1795, Barras’s constant companion was a swarthy Corsican soldier, Napoléon Bonaparte, whose career seemed paralysed by his previous support for Robespierre. Barras and Napoléon had met at the siege of Toulon in the autumn of 1793, where Napoléon showed the first signs of the military genius that would propel him to greatness. With his stringy, unwashed hair, bony face and ill-fitting greatcoat, the young general possessed none of the looks, influence or wealth that distinguished the men of Thérésia’s circle; compliments froze in his mouth and he laughed at the wrong moments. But what Bonaparte lacked in polish he made up for in drive and self-belief.

When Barras brought him to La Chaumière, the inexperienced young soldier was captivated by Thérésia: by her fame, her dazzling looks, her casual friendliness. Writing to his young sweetheart in Marseille, he callously described the women he was meeting in Paris in words that vividly evoked Thérésia. They were, he said, as

beautiful as in old romances…as learned as scholars…their
toilette
, the arts and pleasure occupy all their time. They are philosophers, lovers, courtesans and artists. But what all these frivolous women have in common is an astonishing love of bravery and glory. Truly, they inspire the nation with the courage to conquer Europe…their work and their delight is to win brave men to their cause.

Misinterpreting Thérésia’s open informality–when he appeared in a brand-new uniform made of rationed fabric she had requested for him she called out, ‘So, my friend, you have your trousers!’–he dared try to make love to her, declaring his ‘unconquerable passion’. Thérésia responded with an incredulous laugh that Napole Barras had a solution to his protéon would not forget.

Barras had a solution to his protégé’s disappointment–his own mistress, Rose de Beauharnais, of whom he had tired. Placed next to her at dinner
chez
Barras, the ambitious Napoléon was intoxicated by Rose’s sweetness, her graceful elegance and practised admiration. As for Thérésia, ‘
roi Barras
’, as he was becoming known, had plans for her too.

17

RETOURNÉE

Germaine de Staël

MAY 1795–JANUARY 1798

The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing.

G
ERMAINE DE
S
TAËL

I
N
M
AY
1795, Germaine de Staël wrote to a friend that she was ‘
joyeuse, sur la route de Paris
’. After nearly three years of exile, she was returning to the city she loved more than anywhere else in the world, the place that consoled her for the happiness that continued to elude her in her private life. Heavily pregnant, she had left blood-soaked Paris in September 1792, as the massacres spread across the city. She spent three months at her father’s house, Coppet, in Switzerland, waiting for her second son to be born, and five weeks later rushed to England to be with his father, her lover of four years, Louis de Narbonne.

Narbonne had not been waiting for her. Devastated by the news of Louis XVI’s execution, he believed that he had betrayed the royalist cause by not dying at the king’s side; he had little emotional energy left to devote to the woman who had persuaded him to change his political allegiances when they fell in love. The path of their affair, conceived at the start of the revolution, had followed its course from exhilarated optimism through passion and betrayal to resigned futility.

Germaine returned to Switzerland and to Monsieur de Staëlin the early summer of 1793, each brought back to their marriage by necessity rather than affection. Germaine, her reputation destroyed by her public devotion to Narbonne, needed the respectability of a husband; Éric Magnus, ruinously bankrupt and incapable of economy, needed his father-in-law’s millions.

Reluctantly reconciled to their rapprochement and excruciatingly aware that Narbonne no longer loved her, Germaine comforted herself by gathering together a group of friends at the house she rented near Coppet. ‘Talking seemed everybody’s first duty,’ observed a visitor,
describing the way Germaine and her endless stream of house-guests followed no daily routine, instead meeting at meals to discuss, argue, debate and be dazzled by their hostess. ‘The only thing she feared was solitude, and boredom was the scourge of her life.’

For a long time she mourned Narbonne, her first adult love, and poured the pain she felt at the failure of their relationship into her work.
On the Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations
, begun in 1792 and published four years later, meditates with agonizing poignancy on the connection between passion and suffering and the impossibility for women–especially exceptional women–of achieving true happiness in both love and work. After Narbonne, as she put it, she had ‘to begin life anew, but minus hope’.

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 Germaine embarked on an expensive programme of expatriation, helping more than twenty friends and friends of friends escape from Terror-struck France. She paid Swiss men and women, specially selected to resemble the people they were rescuing, to travel to Paris, where they would hand their passports over to the person waiting for them who would then cross the border into Switzerland with legitimate, but wrong, papers. The rescuers would leave France either on forged passports or claiming that they had lost their papers. If there was a problem the Swiss border guard could confirm their identities. ‘There is, in the short span of existence, no greater chance of happiness than to save the life of an innocent man,’ wrote Germaine at this time. It was a sentiment with which Thérésia Tallien would have whole-heartedly agreed.

Mathieu de Montmorency, one of the most distinguished liberals of Germaine’s 1789 salon, was just one of the friends she rescued in this way. In the spring of 1794 he heard news from Paris that his brother had been guillotined; his wife and mother were still in prison. Gradually, Montmorency’s views changed. The former duke who had fought under Lafayette in the United States and demanded the abolition of aristocratic distinctions in France had become a committed monarchist, finding refuge from his political regrets in devout Catholicism. Montmorency’s wife and mother, saved by Robespierre’s fall, joined Germaine’s colony after their release from prison, soon after Narbonne’s long-awaited arrival there. Her heartbreak healing,
Germaine had recently embarked on a liaison with a dashing Swedish count. Narbonne’s pique did not prevent him resuming his former affair with Mathieu de Montmorency’s mother. And so, notwithstanding the unusual circumstances, a strange harmony was restored to Germaine’s unconventional household.

This harmony was upset with the arrival on the scene of the gangling, red-haired Swiss Benjamin Constant, who called at Coppet late one autumn evening in 1794 hoping to meet the celebrated Germaine. On hearing that she had just left, he galloped after her carriage. When he caught up with her, she invited him to continue his journey inside. Thus began a conversation that would last for fifteen years.

Brilliant, precocious, eccentric and unstable, Constant found in Germaine his intellectual match and fell in love with her at once. In his unfinished
roman à clef
,
Cécile
, he described her when they met–she was twenty-eight, he a year younger–as being neither tall nor slender, with an unattractive complexion and strong, irregular features, but ‘the most beautiful eyes in the world, very beautiful arms, her hands a little too big but dazzlingly white, a superb bosom’. Despite her physical flaws, in animation she became ‘irresistibly seductive’, her ‘very sweet voice’ breaking endearingly when she was moved. ‘Her gaiety had an indefinable charm, a kind of childlike goodwill which captivated the heart, establishing between her and those she was talking to a complete intimacy, which broke down all reserve, all mistrust, all those secret restrictions, those invisible barriers which nature puts up between all people’.

Disinclined to relinquish her Swedish count, Germaine admired Constant but was unimpressed by his efforts to make her love him. Benjamin, she wrote to her lover, was dying of love for her ‘and inflicts his unhappiness on me in a way which removes his only charm–a very superior intelligence–and makes me in turn pity him, which in turn tires me’. If Count Ribbing heard that Constant

had killed himself in the woods of Cèry, which he has just rented so that he can spend his life in my garden and in my courtyard, do not in truth think it to be my fault [she continued]. I have praised him sincerely for his work entitled
L’Esprit des religions
, in which he shows a talent like Montesquieu’s, but [he] forgets that his looks
are an invincible obstacle, even for a heart that did not belong to you.

This was harsh from a woman who was so insecure about her own looks that she could not bear to hear other women described as ugly.