‘Though her eyes and smile were fine,’ said Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who thought Genlis a spellbinding conversationalist, ‘I do not think her face would have adapted easily to the expression of kindness.’ Genlis's ten volumes of memoirs bear out Vigée-Lebrun's conclusion. A typical anecdote begins, ‘One praise I may venture to give myself, because I am quite sure I deserve it…’ Félicité presents herself as an unrivalled beauty (everybody else's looks are judged and found wanting), a celebrated authoress, a gifted musician, a talented rider (‘I was thought to look so well on horseback’), a skilled nurse who can let blood and set wounds ‘to perfection’, and an expert on education. She seems unaware of her lack of generosity or humour.
Those who attended Félicité's salon in Saint-Germain and her lover's dinners at the Palais Royal were as influenced by England and America as were Germaine's friends in the rue du Bac, but their tone, as Evangeline Bruce points out, was derived less from Rousseau than from Choderlos de Laclos, author of the cynical masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the duc d'Orléans's best friend. Orléans himself, charming, lighthearted and vain, ‘corrupted everything within his reach’. He flattered himself as a liberal patriot, selling paintings to feed the poor in the harsh winter of 1788 and opening the Palais Royal in the spring of 1789 for a night of carousing to celebrate the release of members of the garde française who had been imprisoned for refusing to fire on their fellow-citizens, but he was not at all unhappy to be increasingly often suggested as a constitutional replacement for his absolute cousin Louis on France's throne.
Orléans was quick to relinquish his title in 1790, choosing instead the shamelessly populist name of Philippe Égalité, and reducing his establishment at the Palais Royal in order to demonstrate his modesty and attachment to reform. Félicité began calling herself Citoyenne Brûlart (one of her family names), embracing, like Thérésia, yet another of the fashionable trappings of the revolution. She made more of an effort than Germaine de Staël to cultivate the young radicals of the National Assembly, including Théroigne's friend the future mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, for whom she ‘had a real esteem’, and another progressive deputy, Bertrand Barère, who admired her writing and sent her his own pamphlets. She was seen at a ball in Paris at this time with boldly unpowdered hair, wearing a dress of red, white and blue, dancing wildly to the revolutionary anthem ‘ça Ira’.
This stirring song, dating to the summer of 1790, would accompany the revolution through all its incarnations—later with lyrics calling for the stringing up of all aristocrats. For the moment, its words celebrated the revolution's victories and aims: despite the traitors, the people would triumph; aristocrats and priests regretted their mistakes; the enemies of the state were confounded; equality, liberty and patriotism would prevail. It was a dangerous tune for a woman in Félicité de Genlis's position to sing.
Although Mary Berry, visiting Paris from London in 1790 for the first time in five years, found it neglected and empty, with carts instead of carriages filling the streets, for Thérésia, Félicité and their friends the social seasons of 1790–1 and 1791–2 were particularly glittering. Paris ‘had never been so brilliant. One might have thought that people were accumulating joy to last them all the time they were about to sorrow,’ wrote the marquis de Frénilly afterwards. ‘There was something prophetic in this surfeit of pleasures. We had the art of amusing ourselves out of foresight, like people who lay in a supply of food against famine.’
This frenetic aristocratic hedonism took place against a backdrop of increasing popular menace, directed as much against women as men. Mary Berry was surprised and shaken in the spring of 1791 to find a group of six or seven poissardes, market women, demanding entrance to her room, ostensibly to give her a bouquet but in fact to demand money of her. She gave them six francs, ‘which they desired to have doubled’, and one insisted on embracing her. Afterwards she discovered that her experience was fairly common. Travellers, who the women knew would have ready money on them, were frequent targets, although even the king's brother had been accosted in this way. ‘It seems these ladies now make a practice of going about where or to whom they please…and neither porters nor servants dare to stop them.’
At about the same time a large band of men, some in women's clothes, invaded the convents of Paris, many of which had ties to aristocratic families, stripping and beating nuns of all ages and running them out of their sanctuaries in a brutal rite of humiliation. Even the anticlerical Manon Roland would later lament the fate of her friend Agatha, a nun expelled from her convent in 1791, suffering on her wretched pension ‘when age and ill health make that asylum [the convent] more necessary than ever for her’.
Many royalist aristocrats, marginalized by their views and fearing for their safety, simply left France. After the Bastille fell in 1789, ‘emigration became all the vogue’: people raised money from their estates to take with them; many even welcomed the chance to travel. As Germaine de Staël said, emigration was ‘an act of party’, a statement of aristocratic honour and loyalty to the royal family rather than (at this stage) a flight from active persecution. Elderly men who had retired to their country houses received small parcels containing white feathers, emblems of cowardice, as reproaches for sanctioning the revolution by remaining behind.
Although she respected the émigrés' attachment to the king, in hindsight Germaine was horrified by their desertion of their country. In politics, as in morals, she later wrote, there are certain responsibilities one must never abjure, the first of which is that one must never abandon one's nation to foreigners. She thought the nobility's desertion of France—seeing their country as ‘as a jealous lover wishes his mistress—dead or faithful’—gave the masses more reason to hate aristocrats, as well as demonstrating how unnecessary they were to the running of society.
The pace of change accelerated as 1791 progressed. Germaine, alarmed on the one hand by the increasing radicalization of the Assembly and on the other by the continued resistance of the king and his party to change, published an article called How Can We Determine What Is the Opinion of the Majority of the Nation?, in which she called for moderation, a balance between liberty and order. The central position, she argued, would be ‘stronger, more distinct and more vigorous than the two opposed extremes’. Her efforts were in vain: a poem satirizing her attempts to reconcile all the parties showed her receiving royalists and Jacobins at intervals through the day, ‘and at night, everybody’. In both Jacobin and royalist newspapers she was called a ‘nouvelle Circe’, and her husband was depicted as a foolish cuckold. A play entitled The Intrigues of Mme de Staël appeared, in which she was shown as a nymphomaniac stirring up riots to help advance her lovers' careers.
Despite her desire for a constitution, Germaine was sympathetic to the monarchy and hoped to preserve it. In February 1791, her lover Louis de Narbonne accompanied the king's two aunts, Mmes Adélaïde and Victoire (and perhaps his own great-aunts), to exile in Rome. The king and queen never trusted Germaine. Her radical reputation had stuck, although she was in 1791, by comparison with the Jacobins, a political moderate. Gouverneur Morris shared a mistress with Talleyrand, the intimate friend of Germaine and her lover Narbonne; Morris reported what he learned about Germaine's set from Adèle to his friends in the king's party. In the summer of 1791 Morris was placing royalist spies in the Jacobin Club and urging the king to stand firm against the revolutionaries.
Almost inadvertently, as a member of the set which included