Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France Read Free Page A

Germaine remembered how intoxicated she was by the accolades showered on her father, the bliss of basking in his popularity. Women working in the fields fell to their knees as the Neckers’ coach passed by; as they entered each town, their carriage was unhitched from the horses and drawn through the streets by the inhabitants. When they reached the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where a massive crowd was waiting to greet the man on whom their hopes for reform and prosperity rested, Germaine fainted, feeling she had ‘touched the extreme limits of happiness’.
    The excitement even made her write affectionately to her husband, uncharacteristically sending him in a note, soon after they returned to Paris, ‘ mille et mille tendresses ’. The same letter concluded, more characteristically, with a message for her father: ‘Tell my father that all of France does not love or admire him as much as I do today.’
     
    It was in this heady atmosphere that Germaine de Staël’s salon became the most important in Paris. The tradition of the salon, in which an intelligent woman (never her husband) held regular ‘evenings’ for a circle of friends and acquaintances, was a long-established one in France and had ordained Woman, according to the Goncourt brothers a century later, as ‘the governing principle, the directing reason and the commanding voice’ of eighteenth-century high society. The salon may have brought women extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence; but this influence came at a price.
    On the surface, salons might seem nothing more than parties attended by bored, frivolous socialites whose daily lives were governed by their toilettes–aristocratic women changed their clothes several times a day, often while receiving favoured visitors–but the details of these lives in fact reveal the social developments of the times. In an age of rigorous formality, for example, in which behaviour itself seemed bound up in whalebone stays, the ritual of the toilette provided a release, allowing people to see each other in relaxed circumstances. Inan age that had almost institutionalized extramarital affairs, it also gave women the chance to display themselves to current or potential lovers beyond the citadel of their petticoats, hoops and corsets: in 1790 it was fashionable to receive friends from the luxury of one’s milk-bath.
    Although she was famously badly dressed, Germaine never lost the ancien régime custom of receiving visitors during her toilette, all through her life carrying on metaphysical conversations with a horde of people while one maid dressed her hair and another did her nails. Her doctor in England in 1792 was surprised to be greeted by Germaine in her bedroom wearing ‘a short petticoat and a thin shirt’, and astonished by her energy. She talked and wrote all day long, he reported, her green leather portable writing-desk permanently open on her knees, whether she was in bed or at dinner. Even when she gave birth there were fifteen people in her bedroom and within three days she was talking as much as ever.
    Before the revolution, every different outfit served a different purpose, and each one minutely indicated the wearer’s status. Wearing unsuitable clothes was an implicit rejection of the hierarchy that controlled society. Inelegant Germaine, who always showed too much flesh–even her travelling dresses had plunging necklines–was by these criteria deeply suspect. Riding-habits were worn to ride or drive in the Bois de Boulogne or go out hunting with the court; day dresses were worn to receive guests at home, to go shopping in the Palais Royal or to attend lectures in the thrilling new sciences of electricity and botany; in the evening, to attend the theatre or a court ball, three-inch heels, heavy makeup and elaborate, pomaded headdresses, snowy-white with powder and sprinkled with jewels, flowers and feathers were de rigueur. Their hair arrangements were often so tall that women had to travel crouching