finally succeeded in obtaining an audience with Tsar Alexander I, one of the architects of
the new political order which the Allies had drawn up for France: it seems that little came
of the interview, and certainly no appointment for Constant. Indeed he was now totally
eclipsed by Madame de Staël who arrived in Paris from London on 12 May 1814.
Germaine was already a friend of the Tsar and highly thought of by all those influential in
shaping the future of France—British members of parliament, the Bourbons (had she not
risked everything to rescue émigrés from France during the Terror?) and enemies of
Napoleon everywhere. Constant, however, though no less an enemy of the Corsican
tyrant, had burnt his boats with her—the one person who could help him most to re-enter
French political life. When he visited her on 13 May and on subsequent days she was
understandably cool with him, still resentful no doubt at the humiliation she had suffered
as a result of his marriage.^27 On 18 May Constant wrote in his journal:
Dined with Madame de Staël. She has changed completely. She is
absent-minded, almost offhand with people, thinks only of herself,
hardly listens to others, only bothers with people—even her
daughter—out of a sense of duty, hardly bothering with me at all.^28He was galled by her treatment of him, as he had been by her treatment of
his De l’esprit de conquête when she had been in London. She had written
to him on 8 January 1814 apropos of a memoir he had drawn up for
Bernadotte:
It was written in the manner of everything that flows from your
pen. I don’t believe that that style, that firmness of control, that
clarity of language can be found anywhere else. You were born for
high office, if only you had been able to be faithful to yourself and
to others.^29She had been in London with Constant’s old friend Sir James Mackintosh
who told her of the regard Constant was still held in by his former fellow
students at Edinburgh University, a fact she passed on to Constant to
remind him none too subtly of how little he had so far achieved in his
life.^30 She was visibly savouring her revenge. Then, when she had
received De l’esprit de conquête for John Murray to publish, she
expressed her own and Mackintosh’s admiration for it before proceeding
to tell him that he was endangering France:
Is this a time to be speaking ill of the French, when the flames of
Moscow are menacing Paris? ...It is no longer the moment to whip
up people’s feelings against the French, they are already hated
enough. As for the man [i.e. Napoleon], could any freedom-lovingThe end of an empire 221