9 THE END OF AN EMPIRE (1812–1816)
Constant’s life gradually slipped month by month into a calmer routine,
interspersed with the occasional treat, such as five days on his own in
Kassel (29 March–1 April 1812) or getting so drunk he could not stand up
(3 April).
1
But always there was work, or the thought of work, and of
course an unending series of quarrels and reconciliations with the often
domineering Charlotte. He managed to contain and hide the boredom he
felt with her better as time went by, but regularly confided it in his diary
(for example on 24 June 1812: ‘Charlotte is the most boring creature who
ever walked the earth’
2
). In his complete isolation a letter from Madame
de Staël became a longed-for event, much as his own letters had been to
Isabelle de Charrière years before. Unbeknown to him, Germaine gave
birth in secret to a son, Louis-Alphonse Rocca (1812–42), during the night
of 7–8 April 1812.^3 On 23 May she slipped past her guards and, having
obtained passports near Berne, travelled as quickly as possible via Zurich
and Bavaria to Vienna. Although Austria was now subject to the wishes of
France, and the Austrian police had her under constant surveillance, she
was left unhindered. Her objective now was to reach England and
freedom.
Napoleon’s Grand Army had crossed the Niemen and was massing for the assault on
Russia. There was absolutely no time to lose: by mid-July Madame de Staël was across
the Russian border and on the road to Moscow. She found the sheer vastness of the
landscape around her awe-inspiring. She reached Moscow, the ‘Rome of the Tartars’, as
she called it, on 2 August—a city of gleaming domes arrayed in a Byzantine glory that
was so soon to be destroyed by fire. She was generally well received there, though
essentially as a curiosity. In any case she could not afford to linger in Moscow as the
French were advancing towards the city, and on 13 August she reached the relative safety
of St Petersburg in whose Europeanized elegance she felt rather more at home, and where
she spoke to the British Ambassador about her wish to cross to England. She was also
granted an audience with Tsar Alexander I.Madame de Staël’s political objective was
now the future establishment of a constitutional monarchy in France under Bernadotte,
Crown Prince of Sweden, as an alternative to a Bourbon restoration; it was a subject she
The end of an empire 215