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Count d'Haussonville, who now owns Coppet, our guide informed us, is not the grandson of Madame de Staël, as Lydia and I had thought, but her great-grandson. Albertine de Staël married Victor, Duc de Broglie, and their daughter became the wife of Count Othenin d'Haussonville, to whom we are indebted for the story of the early love affair of his ancestress with the historian of the Roman Empire.
The story that her parents at one time contemplated a marriage between her and William Pitt, on the occasion of his visit to France in 1783, was discredited by Lord Stanhope; but M. d'Haussonville pronounces it to be quite true, though there is no clear evidence that Pitt was apprised of the wish of the Neckers.
But the De Broglies are a serious family, as their record in history proves. Madame d'Haussonville, without renouncing her place in the world of fashion, devoted herself more and more to good works, her superior brain and executive abilities forcing her from year to year into positions of heavier responsibility.
This has been admirably done by the Comte d'Haussonville. George Sand is said to have possessed a dual nature, which seemed to contradict itself, but which explains her works—a dreamy and meditative, and a lively, frolicsome nature; the first might throw light upon her religious crisis, the second, upon her social side.
The Red Cross was too old and too taken-for-granted an organization, and too like our own, for all I knew to the contrary, to tempt me to give it any of the limited time at my disposal in France; so, as it happened, of these three distinguished chiefs the only one I met was Madame d'Haussonville.
But to an acute observer it was plain that the pomps of the coronation and the fetes that followed it pleased the people of the court more than the bourgeoisie. The Count d'Haussonville says, apropos of the nobility at that time:
Count d'Haussonville in his remarkable book, The Church of Rome and the First Empire, says on this subject: "Setting aside the religious feeling with regard to the sanctity of marriage, it is hard to understand how such a man could have been willing to represent himself as having desired, on the eve of this great ceremony of consecration, to deceive at the same time his uncle who married him, his wife whom he seemed pleased to associate with his glory, and the venerable pontiff who, in spite of his age and infirmities, had come from a long distance, to call down upon him the blessing of the Most High.
What is known of her is so enveloped in calumny and falsehood and made so uncertain by dispute, that to disentangle the actual facts is almost an impossibility, despite the glowing tribute paid to her in the immense work published recently by the Comte d'Haussonville and M. Gabriel Hanotaux.
After quoting this conversation between Cambaceres and M. Pasquier in his admirable book, The Church of Rome and the First Empire, the Count d'Haussonville indulges in some philosophic reflections: "If it is curious to come upon this profound and accurate summary, compressed into a few clear and precise words by a man of remarkable sagacity dealing with a future still completely hidden, it is no less strange to think that the prospect of the Austrian marriage, destined to be so fatal to the Empire, should be suddenly discussed in a five minutes' talk between two men who met by chance on the steps of the Tuileries, at the very moment when the unhappy Josephine was about to leave this spot which had been so long her home.
B. de Cleron d'Haussonville, L'eglise romaine et le premier empire, 1800-1814, 5 vols. Special campaigns: Albert Vandal, Napoleon et Alexander Ier, 3d ed., 3 vols.
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