Juno & the Peacock

THE PASSIONATE EXILES (354 pp.)--Maurice Levaillant--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.75).

"Mischievous intriguer," "raven," "rascal,"--so Emperor Napoleon called Germaine de Stael, who became almost an obsessional hatred. When Mme. de Stael wrote her famed romance, Corinne, in 1807, the Emperor noted angrily that Corinne's heroine was English and its hero Scottish. He exploded: "I cannot forgive Mme. de Stael for having disparaged the French people." She was already banished from Napoleon's capital; when she appealed to return, he made her exile perpetual and ordered that she might not approach closer to Paris than 40 French leagues (100 miles).

Stoking Napoleon's hatred was the fact that flamboyant, liberty-loving Mme. de Stael had been one of the first to suspect his despotic ambitions. As France's First Consul, Napoleon had guessed, quite rightly, that Mme. de Stael "wanted to put him on guard against himself" and to play the part of mistress-adviser to him. But the Consul already had his eye on sylphish Juliette Recamier, wife of a Paris banker, had sent Minister Joseph Fouche to whisper in her ear: "The First Consul finds you charming." When, after Napoleon had become Emperor, Mme. Recamier still shied away, Bonaparte engraved her name forever in his so-called Great Book of Suspects. Just to top off the awful insult, Mme. Recamier became the bosom friend of the detested Mme. de Stael, thus forming an "alliance of two weak creatures who face their oppressors together."

Flowery Charms. "Weak" was hardly the word for either creature. Mme. de Stael was a carthorse Juno with a passionate imagination: she could talk for hours on any given subject without pausing to breathe. Her lovers were so numerous that they ran concurrently, like prison sentences. Mme. Recamier, on the other hand, was bright and lovely as a peacock and quick as a lizard at dodging through chinks. "She liked to stop everything in April," said Critic Sainte-Beuve with French delicacy--meaning that Mme. Recamier drove men half-crazy by drawing them hopelessly on with her flowery charms (even Husband Recamier was denied his wife's bed). She was 40 before she embarked on her first (and last) grand passion, the 50-year-old Vicomte de Chateaubriand. It was worth waiting for: it won her an immortal place in his famous Memoires.

The two women loved each other "with a love surpassing that of friendship." Their ardent relationship was only intensified by the fact that male admirers fairly swarmed around both of them--readily swooning when the "dazzling Juliette" draped her graceful neck around a harp and plucked a few plangent twangs, readily reaching for underdoses of poison when frustrated amour demanded the appearances ol a tragic exit.

Disturbing Spirit. The near comedy of their joint lives, evocatively recorded in this dual biography by a French scholar, did not deprive the passionate exiles of a place in French history. In a time of dictatorship, they created in exile what Sainte-Beuve called "the intellectual Elysium of a whole generation." The Swiss Chateau de Coppet, where Mme. de Stael wrote romances, produced plays and presided over her interminable salon, drew as pilgrims the intellectual leaders of all "Free Europe." Under Napoleon's very thumb, Mme. de Stael helped keep alive the Voltairean ardor for liberty; against his expressed wishes she introduced into France the disturbing spirit of German mysticism and romanticism that he most deplored.

When Napoleon went into exile at Elba, the long drama was over for the two women. But to each, there remained a little epilogue neatly expressive of their different characters. Mme. de Stael got wind of a plot to murder the deposed Emperor, generously warned him in time. Mme. Recamier displayed her charms before the conquest-bent Duke of Wellington and, bringing all her batteries of "organized coquetry" to bear on him, soon conquered the Iron Duke--but let no spoils pass between them.

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