When writing to her friend that she did not wish to see her,çoisRené from apprehension of the evil which she might bring upon her, Madame de Staël did not say all: she was secretly married to M. de Rocca[392], whence resulted a complication of difficulties by which the imperial police profited. Madame Récamier, from whom Madame de Staël thought it right to conceal her new cares, was astonished, with good reason, at the stubbornness which she displayed in forbidding her the entry of her place at Coppet: though wounded by the resistance of Madame de Staël, for whom she had already sacrificed herself, she persisted in her resolve to join her.
All the letters which ought to have restrained Madame Récamier only served to confirm her in her intention; she started and, at Dijon, received this fatal note:
"I bid you adieu, dear angel of my life, with all the tenderness of my soul. I recommend Auguste[393] to you: let him see you and then let him see me again. You are a celestial creature. If I had lived in your company, I should have been too happy: fate carries me away. Adieu[394]."
Madame de Staël was to meet Juliet again only to die. Her note struck the traveller with a thunder-bolt: to fly suddenly, to depart before pressing in her arms her who was hastening to fling herself into her adversity, was not that a cruel resolution on Madame de Staël's part? It appeared to Madame Récamier that friendship might have been less "carried away by fate."
Madame de Staël went in search of England by way of Germany and Sweden: the power of Napoleon was a second sea separating Albion from Europe, even as the Ocean separates her from the world.
Auguste, Madame de Staël's son, had lost his brother killed by a sword-thrust in a duel[395]; he married and had a son: this son, a few months old, followed him into the tomb. With Auguste de Staël the male posterity of an illustrious woman died out, for it does not revive in the honourable, but unknown name of Rocca.
Madame Récamier, left alone and full of regret, first sought a refuge in her native town of Lyons[396]: there she met Madame de Chevreuse[397], another exile. Madame de Chevreuse had been forced by the Emperor and, afterwards, by her own family to enter the new society. You would scarce find an historic name which did not consent to lose its honour rather than a single forest. Once engaged at the Tuileries, Madame de Chevreuse thought she would be able to hold sway in a Court newly-issued from the camps: that Court, it is true, sought to acquaint itself with the airs of olden times, in the hope of covering its recent origin; but the plebeian manner was still too rough to receive lessons from aristocratic impertinence. In a revolution which endures and which has taken its last step, as for instance in Rome, the Patricians, a century after the fall of the Republic, could resign themselves to being no more than the Senate of the Emperors; the past had nought wherewith to reproach the Emperors of the present, since that past was finished; every existence was branded with a like stigma. But in France the nobles who converted themselves into chamberlains were in too great a hurry; the new-born Empire disappeared before them, and they found themselves face to face with the old Monarchy raised to life again.