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The Woman Who Never Stopped TalkingThe secret of Madame de Stael's success.

By Stacy SchiffUpdated Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, at 7:18 AM ET

Madame de Stael.I'll be honest: "First modern woman" does not constitute what I would call a dream job. Someone had to step up, however, and—assuming royal and Ptolemaic women are off limits—one looks to Enlightenment Europe for volunteers. French residency if not nationality was a plus. A fortune was de rigueur. It helped to be an only child; generally one goes further in the absence of pesky male heirs. And what never hurts—arguably even today—is an adoring, intellectually inclined father. Such were the blessings showered on Germaine de Stael, and though I might argue that Mesdames du Chatelet and de Charrière challenge her title —and the subtitle of Francine du Plessix Gray's new biography—few have done as much with those advantages as Madame de Stael. Certainly no one caused as much trouble.

The prolific writer and thinker was born Germaine Necker in 1766. Neither parent was celebrated for a sense of humor, but both distinguished themselves on other counts. Monsieur Necker was Louis XVI's immensely powerful director general of finances. As financially astute as he was politically obtuse, he did his government few favors; on the other hand, he left his daughter the greatest fortune in France. Madame Necker presided over Paris' most illustrious salon, no mean feat given her mute husband. As Gray notes, Necker's conversation "consisted, at best, of a profound and disdainful silence."

In a manic misreading of Rousseau, the couple force-fed their precocious daughter "math, geography, science, languages, and theology from the time she was three." By 12 she was "a walking encyclopedia of philosophical knowledge." (Where was J.S. Mill when you had the girl for him? Alas, not born yet.) Permanently affixed to her mother's side, Germaine was spared the company of other children. She was allowed to attend Madame Necker's salon on the condition she be seen, not heard, for which the rest of her life could be said to constitute a prolix revenge.

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Naturally the walking encyclopedia suffered a nervous breakdown early on. Playmates were prescribed, along with a separation from Madame Necker. (I was reminded of that haunting moment in Strachey's Queen Victoria, when the newly crowned 18-year-old asks to be left alone for an hour. At its end she issues her first royal edict, essentially amputating her mother from her side.) In this case Gray attributes a yearning insecurity to an oddly unaffectionate brand of maternal smothering. It was either balanced or exacerbated by an "extravagant passion" for her father, the love of Germaine's life.

At 20, Germaine married de Stael, a hapless Swedish nobleman and sometime ambassador—a man so "sterile and inert" that he actually made her miss her mother. Neatly clinching the modernity title in one realm, she never put sex, love, marriage, and progeny in one basket. The first child was de Stael's. The next two were those of the raffish Vicomte de Narbonne. Benjamin Constant, the liberal writer and politician and the proto-Sartre to this 18th-century de Beauvoir, fathered the fourth. At 45, Germaine was pregnant again, by a man young enough to be her son and whom she later secretly married. He was a lover of a different kind, inarticulate in a manner that may have recalled her father. As Madame de Stael explained to one hardworking hostess, "Speech is not his language."

It was entirely hers. She woke with her mouth open, discoursed "as she was being coiffed, manicured, and laced into corsets," fell silent only when asleep. It was a virtuoso performance, at least at those addresses that thrilled to such things. Her aperçus were lost, for example, in Geneva, for whose people she had little patience: "Their love of equality is but a desire to drag everybody down; their liberty is insolence, and their morality is boredom." Generally she set a difficult, relentless pace and was an exhausting companion; Gray may well have a point in diagnosing manic depression. None of which stopped de Stael from wondering why men, in particular, tired of her so quickly. Constant provided one answer: "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."

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Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.
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