=Books recently read=

"I have never known a woman who was more continuously exacting...Everybody's entire existence, every hour, every minute, for years on end, must be at her disposition, or else there is an explosion like all thunderstorms and earthquakes put together." --Benjamin Constant

"There is no more kind, loving, intelligent, and devoted creature." --Benjamin Constant

Madame DeStael: The First Modern Woman by Francine Du Plessix Gray. She was a large, blowsy, ungainly woman given to dressing in off-the-shoulder gowns and turbans that more than one contemporary noted didn't really suit her, especially as she grew older and stouter. She had an opinion on virtually every topic and thought it her duty to let that opinion be known to everyone within earshot. Indeed, many noted that she quite literally never kept her mouth shut, even on the rare occasions when she wasn't talking, and she made a virtue of it, believing that continual conversation and what she called "enthusiasm" were both an art-form and a civilizing factor essential to a fully-realized humanity. 

She may have been manic-depressive before that term was invented, as well as an obsessive-compulsive. Or she may have simply been a self-centered, self-absorbed, supremely spoiled, narcissistic egomaniac. She became addicted to opium, as, to be fair, were many other people of her time—the drug being considered something of a cure-all. She was melodramatic and manipulative always, in love more than ever, passive-aggressive, hysterical, even pathologically so, throwing tantrums and repeatedly threatening suicide if anyone tried to break things off before it suited her—a Grade AAA drama queen; meanwhile, she took on lovers with impunity whether she was involved in a committed relationship or not and these lovers followed her around Europe during her multiple exiles like a pack of puppies. 

She drove men to the end of their rope and somehow managed to reel them back in again; the above quotations from her long-time lover Benjamin Constant are typical of the bi-polar reactions this possibly bi-polar woman inspired in those caught in her orbit. She was married to a man twenty years her junior when she died at the age of 51 following what seems to have been a cerebral hemorrhage and possibly some sort of spinal cancer. 

Germaine DeStael was an aristocrat, which was a good thing, since if she'd been born into a lower strata of society and married to a blacksmith, for instance, she probably would have been brained with a horseshoe and no one would have blamed the poor guy. She was the daughter of Jacques Necker, the famous/disgraced/famous again/disgraced again finance minister of Louis XVI. She lived from 1766-1817, in time to see the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon. 

But what makes her a fit subject for a biography is that she led what author Francine Du Plessix Gray describes as the most accomplished salon of her time, which in itself is saying something. DeStael's salons attracted many of the brightest literary and political minds of the day. But she did more than talk. Germaine DeStael also wrote: political pamphlets, travelogues, novels, all of which were much-discussed and celebrated during and for some time after her life. She was for the Revolution, but not too much, still believing in a social and intellectual hierarchy in which, naturally, she felt herself entitled to occupy a place of privilege. She was what we would probably think of now as a left-of-center centrist—a well-meaning, if ultimately patronizing patrician, like a Kennedy.

She eventually incurred the wrath of Napoleon Bonaparte himself, of whose rise to power and autocratic rule she was highly critical. It didn't help that Napoleon was one of the apparently few men upon whom DeStael's spell was utterly ineffective; he found her repulsive in every way. So repulsive did he find her that Bonaparte wanted her permanently banished from France. Unfortunately for him, Madame DeStael had so many fans among Bonaparte's inner circle, even his brothers were fans, willing to intercede on her behalf that she remained a thorn in Napoleon's side for the better part of his reign. You might accurately say that the only two forces that Napoleon couldn't overcome were Russia and Madame DeStael. 

I'd recently read Du Plessix Gray's fictionalized account of Marie Antoinette, "The Queen's Lover," which led me to this nonfiction biography. Like the book on Antoinette, Du Plessix Gray does her best to make her subject sympathetic, but never quite manages to make her universally likable. Which is to say, she presents DeStael, as she presented Marie Antoinette and her lover Count Axel von Fersen, as entirely human, with all the flaws that humans typically possess. For this, Du Plessix Gray is to be commended, as it is a real risk to expect a reader to stick with a book about someone who can so often be really unpleasant company, as one can imagine Madame DeStael to have been. 

In the end, the formula of Madame DeStael's strange allure remains elusive. She seems to have had that magical quality of charisma that some people have whether they are rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, smart or ignorant. People, both men and women, were simply drawn to her—and drawn to the fact, perhaps, that so many illustrious people were drawn to her. 

As literary history goes, DeStael isn't very important as a writer and, as a historical subject, she is more a curiosity and off-stage catalyst than a major player during her tumultuous times. But if nothing else, her life—and this book—is worth reading for the historical context in which it is set and the brief, but still illuminating, recreation of  pre- and post-revolutionary France.