THE sail of nine miles up the lake to Coppet, the residence, for so long, of Madame de StaËl, is one of the pleasantest short excursions enjoined by custom upon the traveler sojourning for a few days in Geneva.

The village is nothing in itself;—a mere appanage, in olden days, of the Neckar estate. The chÂteau is reached by a short walk up a quiet street—or road—for there is neither side-walk nor curbing. The house-front is lake-ward, but entrance is had from the street through a paved court-yard at the side. A brick wall surrounds this. A pair of great gates admit the passage of carriages. We were met at each visit, in the lower hall, by a plump housekeeper in white cap and black silk, who showed the mansion and received our douceur at parting, with gentle dignity. The main hall is large and nearly square. Wide settees are set against the walls. A bust of Neckar is in one corner. A flight of oaken stairs, broad and easy, ascends to the upper hall. The floors are of polished wood, as slippery as glass. The salon, entered from the second-story hall, is handsomely plenished with antique furniture and pictures, mostly family portraits. Mad. de StaËl is here as Corinne. David was the artist, but the likeness is not pleasing. The “pose” in character is too apparent. The abstracted stare and fixed intellectuality are plainly “done to order.” The Duchess de Broglie, the daughter of the great De StaËl, hangs at the other end of the room. As chÂtelaine of Coppet,—a home preferred by her to Paris salons,—her memory is held in grateful esteem by rich and poor neighbors. Her face is purely and sweetly womanly, with a pensive cast that tells of long-sustained physical or mental pain. She had passed Life’s prime when the portrait was taken, but was still very lovely. In her youth she was far more beautiful and infinitely more amiable than her distinguished mother. Beside the mantel is a painting—cabinet size—of three grandchildren of Madame de StaËl, children of her only son by her first marriage. They died in infancy and early youth, and are here depicted sleeping in the arms and against the knees of the Saviour. Design and painting are exquisite.

This salon communicates with another, not quite so large, but more interesting. Neckar is here, as at the height of his splendid career as the prince of financiers; saviour of the realm from bankruptcy; reverenced by the sovereign and adored by the populace.

“I shall never cease to regret”—says the daughter to whom he was ever the greatest and dearest of men—“that it had not pleased God to make me his wife, instead of his child.”

She who was his wife in law, if not in spirit and affection, is also in this gallery of family-pictures—a haughty dame whose hard, passionless features sustain the stories of the severity of discipline practised in the education of her only child. In looking from her to the noble, frank gentleman who lifted her from the station of governess in a Swiss country-house to rank and wealth, one easily comprehends the daughter’s fond partiality for one of her parents.

“She is well enough!” (“assez bien”—) Madame Neckar would say, with a resigned shrug, when congratulated upon her child’s brilliant success in literature and society. “But nothing to what I would have made her, had not her father interfered.”

The deprecated interference was the result of the decision of the best physician in France that the girl was dying under the mother’s intolerable regimen of study and home-etiquette. She was blooming too rapidly in a social and educational hot-house, and the doctor summoned by the father, earned the mother’s enmity by saving the patient’s life at the price of a long, idle vacation at Coppet.

Madame Neckar was, prior to her marriage, madly beloved by—some say, the betrothed of Gibbon the historian. She wedded Neckar to establish herself well in life. To the same end she married her daughter, at twenty, to Baron de StaËl, a Swedish nobleman.

“Her mother had done wrong,” writes sensible Madame de Genlis of Mademoiselle Neckar at sixteen—“in allowing her to spend three-fourths of her time with the throng of wits who continually surrounded her, and who held dissertations with her upon love and the passions.”

These disquisitions and their subjects did not enter into her calculations in accepting the hand of a man double her age. She was weary of her mother’s tyranny and the restraints of singlehood. Married to this good-natured nobleman, who had engaged not to take her to Sweden, she could begin to live. The Baron’s portrait is in the Coppet salon,—at a reasonable remove from his lady-wife, as she liked to keep him when both were alive. A portly figure and round, florid visage, as blank as to expression, as the wall behind him; a fine court-suit, with plenty of gold and thread-lace—these are what the canvas presents to us. Diagonally opposite is David’s celebrated portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise-Germaine, Baronne de StaËl-Holstein (nÉe Neckar). A Persian shawl is wound, turban-wise, about her head, dark curls falling below it upon her forehead and bare shoulders. Her short-waisted dress is of crimson silk, with short sleeves. A dark-blue Cashmere shawl falls low upon her skirt, and is caught up by one arm. The other is bare, and lies lightly on a table by which she stands, the hand drooping over the edge. In the right hand, the arm crossing her figure horizontally to hold the shawl, is the green spray without which she would not talk in company. Captious critics affirmed that she held and twirled and gesticulated with the leafy scepter to attract admiration to her beautiful hands. These, her eyes, and her finely-moulded arms were all that commended her to the eye. In form she was clumsy; her complexion was muddy and rough; her mouth large, and her teeth were so prominent that the lips hardly met over them. Yet this portrait, not cloaking these defects, is of the queen this woman undoubtedly was. The head is turned slightly, as in listening,—a thing which, by the way, she never did,—and a little upraised; the eyes are full of life and spirit;—the glow of inspiration, as unlike the factitious animation of the “Corinne” in the other room, as day-light to gas-glare, shines through and from the heavily-cast features. The colors are as rich and fresh as if laid on but yesterday.

Auguste de StaËl, her son, at thirty, hangs near, a fresh-colored gentilhomme, without a trace of the refined loveliness of his sister, or of his mother’s genius, in his Swedish physiognomy. Yet, it is related that, when a lad of seventeen, he pleaded well and bravely with Napoleon for the recall of his mother from exile, offering his personal guarantee that she would not meddle with politics were she suffered to return to Paris. Napoleon knew better than to trust her, but he liked the young fellow’s fearlessness so well that he playfully pulled his ear in denying his petition.

Down-stairs are the library and bed-chamber of Madame de StaËl, opening by long windows upon balcony and parterre. The bed-room is large, and furnished in a style befitting the fashion, then popular, of using what we regard as the penetralia of a home,—to wit—“my lady’s chamber”—for morning-receptions. The French single bed in a distant corner alone indicates that the occupant of the apartment really slept there. The walls are hung with tapestry,—Gobelin, or a fair imitation of it;—chairs and sofa are embroidered to match, in designs from Æsop’s Fables. A tall mirror is set between the windows. In the center of the room, on a large Turkish rug, is Madame de StaËl’s escritoire, at which she always wrote, a chair before it, as she used to have it. It is a cumbrous affair,—long and not high,—with pigeon-holes, carved legs and brass-handled drawers. The mistress, as Sappho, looks down upon it from the wall. We liked this portrait least of all. It is a Bacchante, in inflamed complexion and wild eyes. The original preferred it to all others. The library adjoins the bed-room, and is lined with book-shelves to the ceiling. The floor is polished to glassiness,—the dark wood of doors and casement-frames and the ranks of sober-hued volumes reflected in it, as in a somber pool.

We looked back into the shadow and silence from the threshold, thinking of the goodly company of intellectual athletes who frequented it when the most wonderful woman of her age held court here as regally as when in Paris. De Goncourt described her as a “man of genius, by whose hands France signed a treaty of alliance with existing institutions, and, for a period, accepted the Directory. The daughter of Neckar”—he continues—“forbade France to recall the line of kings; she retained the Republic; she condemned the throne.”

Or, as when forbidden to approach within thirty miles of Paris, she established her household at precisely that distance, and her residence was crowded with guests from the Capital.

“She pretends”—growled the Emperor—“to speak neither of public affairs, nor of me. But it happens invariably that every one comes out of her presence less attached to me than when he went in.”

Hunted to Coppet, she was attended there by Benjamin Constant—“the scribe of her dictation; the aid-de-camp of her thought; the man who almost equaled her in conversational power;”—visited there, by Byron, Schlegel, Sismondi, and so many other men of mark and power that a cordon of French police was drawn about the house near enough to watch all comers and goers without revealing their proximity. Madame RÉcamier braved the danger of discovery and the consequent wrath of Napoleon by journeying thither by post-carriage from France, expressly to see her persecuted friend. Arriving under cover of the darkness, she tarried but a night, departing early the next morning. So soon as the news could travel to Paris and a post be sent in reply, a messenger overtook her in her Swiss tour with an order from the Emperor, prohibiting her return to the metropolis under penalty of fine and imprisonment.

Above the broad arch of the doorway, within which the two women—one as eminent for her beauty as was the other for her genius, met and parted, is carved the Neckar coat-of-arms. The court-yard is full of flowers, the high iron fence separating it from lawn and park, wreathed with roses and white jasmine. The central building and two wings of the chÂteau encompass it on three sides. Great iron gates give egress in the direction of the grounds. These are extensive and of much natural beauty. A road bends around a lawn brightened by beds of geraniums and coleas. An oval pond is in the center, a solitary willow drooping above it. Beyond pool and circling drive, is an old stone bench from which we got the best view of the house. It is of gray stone, shaded darkly by age. Above the second story is a high, sloping roof, pierced by dormer windows and many chimneys. The wings are peaked towers, capped by quaint wooden knops and spires that may be seen far up and down the lake. Masses of chestnuts and limes, diversified by a few hemlocks and spruces, embower the mansion. The undulating line of the Juras is visible above it, like another roof-tree. Branching off from the wider road are foot-paths, overhung by trees. A swift brook is the limit of the lawn at the right. The banks are steep and green with turf and the ivy that has strayed downward from the tree-boles. Lime and poplar leafage make the clear water darkly deep. Foot-bridges span it by which one can pass into the meadows beyond.

“Ah, madame!” said Chateaubriand, while walking in the peaceful demesne with its mistress,—“If the Emperor would but banish me, likewise—to Coppet!”

She paced these walks like a caged lioness; ate her heart out in the fine old house yonder.

“I would rather,” she cried, passionately,—“live in the Rue Jean Pain Mollet, with two thousand francs a year, than upon one hundred thousand at Coppet!”

Her egotism was as magnificent as her genius. For the food of one and the display of the other, Paris was the only place upon the globe.

It was while she lived at Coppet that she made her love-match with De Rocca, a young French officer, and an invalid, absent from the army on furlough at Geneva. He was eminently handsome, and she worshiped beauty. The suit of a man of twenty-two to a widow twenty years his senior, was dangerous flattery to one who drew in admiration as the very breath of life. Other men had paid court to her intellect, her position, her wealth. This man loved the woman he would make his wife.

“My name belongs to Europe!” she replied to his first offer.

“I will love you so well as to make you love me!” was his answer.

The marriage was a secret, kept until disclosed in her will after her death. We gain a glimpse of the morals of the day that is a shock to our ideas of decorum, when we read in the same paragraph of his residence at Coppet; his companionship in her travels, and that their son was born without the revelation of their relation as husband and wife.

It was not until our third trip to Coppet that we were able to see the bust of De Rocca in one of the upper rooms not shown to strangers while the family are at home. It is a beautiful head, with a sweet manliness of look that excuses the seemingly absurd union, to susceptible lady-visitors.

Neither then, nor at any other time, could we prevail upon any employÉ of the De Broglies (Madame de StaËl’s grandson now owns the estate) to unlock the rusty gate of the family cemetery across the road. It is environed by neglected commons, and the brick wall is, at least, ten feet high. It looks like a fortified forest, so dense is the unpruned foliage of the tall trees. We walked all around it, each recalling something he, or she had heard or read of the burial-chapel of the Neckars so safely hidden in the heart of the wood. Of Neckar’s tomb and recumbent statue, and his wife’s at his side. Of their daughter’s request that her grave might not be made a show-place, and the pious respect accorded by her son and daughter and their descendants to a wish so incongruous with the passion for notoriety that swayed her from the nursery to the death-bed.

She had suffered intensely in her latest years. Natural nervousness was aggravated by the use of opium in such quantities to dull severe paroxysms of pain, that it lost its effect as a sedative. She seemed to have forgotten how to sleep. But her mind retained its strength and clearness.

“I know now,” she said, “what the passage from life to death is. The goodness of God makes it easy. Our thoughts become indistinct. The pain is not great.”

The habit of analytical thought was strong to the last.

In spite of the sternly-barred gates, prying curiosity has found its way to the sequestered chapel. At one angle of the wall, out of sight of the house, bricks have been picked out at intervals to supply a foothold for the climber, and the coping is fractured. A gentleman of our party put his toe into a crevice and looked over.

“More than one person has passed in this way,” he said. “The grass is trampled and the underbrush broken. The place is a jungle of matted bushes and large trees.”

He stepped back gently to the ground, and we strolled on.

“Hic tandem quiescit, quÆ nunquam quievit,” reads her tombstone. The embosoming trees; the lofty wall; the locked gate are not without their meaning.

God rest her soul in keeping yet more wise and tender!