Germaine de Staël - Salons at Coppet and Paris

Salons At Coppet and Paris

She then moved to Coppet, and there gathered round her a considerable number of friends and fellow-refugees, the beginning of the salon which at intervals during the next 25 years made the place so famous. However, in 1793 she made a long visit to England, and established a connection with other emigrants: Talleyrand, Narbonne, Montmorency, Jaucourt and others. There was not a little scandal about her relations with Narbonne; and this Mickleham sojourn (the details of which are known from, among other sources, the letters of Fanny Burney) has never been altogether satisfactorily accounted for.

In the summer, she returned to Coppet and wrote a pamphlet on the queen's execution. The next year, her mother died, and the fall of Robespierre opened the way back to Paris. Her husband (whose mission had been in abeyance and himself in Holland for three years) was accredited to the French republic by the regent of Sweden; his wife reopened her salon and for a time was conspicuous in the motley and eccentric society of the Directory. She also published several small works, the chief being the essays Sur l'influence des passions "On the influence of passions" (1796), and Sur la litérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800).

It was during these years that Mme de Staël was of chief political importance. Narbonne's place had been supplanted by Benjamin Constant, whom she first met at Coppet in 1794, and who had a very great influence over her, as in return she had over him. Both personal and political reasons threw her into opposition to Bonaparte. Her own preference for a moderate republic or a constitutional monarchy was quite sincere, and, even if it had not been so, her own character and Napoleon's were too much alike in some points to admit of their getting on together. For some years, she was able to alternate between Coppet and Paris without difficulty, though not without knowing that the First Consul disliked her. In 1797 she, as above mentioned, separated formally from her husband. In 1799, he was recalled by the king of Sweden, and in 1802 he died, duly attended by her. Besides a daughter (Gustavine, 1787–1789) who died in infancy and the eldest son Auguste Louis (1790–1827), they had two other children — a son Albert (1792–1813), and a daughter Albertine (1797–1838), who afterwards married Victor, 3rd duc de Broglie. The paternity of these children is uncertain.