Chateau de Coppet near Geneva, Switzerland.(history of the chateau)

When Napoleon I, then first consul, forced the liberal novelist and essayist Madame de Stael (nee Anne Louise Germaine Necker) into exile from Paris in 1803, she settled just north of Geneva in the Chateau de Coppet on the banks of the lake. Declaring that "Geneva is Europe." [1] Napoleon realized that Madame de Stael continued to gather the world around her at Coppet, making it a literal crossroads for writers across the Continent. Stendhal (1783-1842) later called Coppet "the Estates General of European thought." [2] Even today, the visitor to Geneva senses that the city is the magnetic center of intellectual Europe.

Madame de Stael inherited Coppet from her father, the Genevan banker Jacques Necker (1732-1804), on his death and often spent the summer there before Napoleon forced her into exile, first at Coppet, and then, beginning in 1812, on a journey that took her across Austria, Russia, Finland, and Sweden before arriving in England. She traveled through Russia just ahead of Napoleon's Grande Armee, and soon after she was presented to Czar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) in Saint Petersburg, the French captured Moscow.

Nothing about the picturesque lakeside village of Coppet, with its arcaded main street and tiled roofs suggests the turbulent years in the chateau that looms over it. Madame de Stael's descendants, Othenin, comte d'Haussonville, and his family still live in the chateau and travel back and forth to Paris much as she did. They maintain the rooms as they have evolved over several generations, retaining for the public the hospitable ambience that Madame de Stael cultivated for her illustrious guests, including such favorites as the writers Benjamin Constant; August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who was her children's German tutor; vicomte Francois Rene de Chateaubriand; and the great beauty Juliette Recamier.

Like other chateaux by the shores of Lake Geneva, Coppet retains the character of vernacular Savoyard architecture, when the medieval counts of Savoy would skirmish with their neighbors from their fortified castles. The chateau incorporates one of the original thirteenth-century drum towers that survived a ruinous fire. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, archives were discovered in Germany that had belonged to the Prussian owners of the chateau in the seventeenth century. These date the present configuration to that time, with an entrance stable yard facing south, a symmetrical inner courtyard facing west, and a new tower constructed to balance the medieval one (see P1. I).

For all its architectural elegance Coppet has a comfortable plainness that makes it seem homelike. In summer, masses of lavender grow against the stable block, and a vigorous growth of Virginia creeper, wisteria, honeysuckle, and jasmine cling to the walls. An immense iron grille flanked by roses bars the path from the inner courtyard to a park once planted with symmetrical flower beds in the French manner. This gave way to English-style lawns after Jacques Necker purchased the chateau in 1784. A round basin of water, which the French call a miroir d'eau, remains from the earlier formal design to provide a perfect reflection of the chateau from the distant allee (see Pl. II). Sitting in the park for a summer evening concert, one still hears the rushing of the cascade filtered romantically through the music.

By the time he bought and retired to Coppet, Necker had made his fortune in banking and served as finance minister to Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792). He was born in Geneva and married a talented governess. The couple became a brilliant success in Paris, he accumulating wealth, and she establishing an influential salon. Their only daughter was born and educated in this rarifide atmosphere and acceded to her parents' unfortunate choice of a husband among the few high-born Protestants in Paris, Erik Magnus (1749-1802), bama de Stael-Holstein, Sweden's ambassador to France. The marriage amounted to little more than a title and a position, so Madame de Stael began to establish what became a stellar literary career, both in revolutionary France and abroad. By two confidants she had three children: Auguste (1790-1827), Albert (1792-1813), and Albertine (1797-1838). Long after her separation from her husband and his subsequent death, she secretly married John Rocca (1788-1818), a much younger although well-born Genevan, t o legitimize the son she had had by him, Louis Alphonse (b. 1812). The de Stael line continued through Albertine, who married Achille Leon Victor (1785-1870), duc de Broglie, in 1816. [3] Albertine's daughter Louise, princesse de Broglie, was the mistress of Coppet between 1876 and 1882. She married Othenin (1809-1884), comte d'Haussonville, a senator and member of the Academie francaise, and wrote several novels and a biography of Lord Byron (1788-1824), who had been a guest of her grandmother's 'when he lived across the lake. But Louise d greatest distinction is to have been the subject of the portrait of 1845 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (Pl. VI). In many ways the story of the chateau de Coppet is best told through the excellent collection of portraits of former residents that adorns the public rooms. A fine copy of the Ingres portrait hangs in an anteroom to the summer dining room on the ground floor, above a Pleyel piano and near a scallop-shell basin where guests would have rinsed their hands (see P l. V).

The summer dining room emphasizes the human scale of the chateau with its oval table seating twelve in Louis XVI chairs (see Pl. IV). A gilt-bronze mirror plateau on the table is adorned with flowers from the cutting garden across the road from the chateau. A cabinet at the far end of the room contains Auguste's monogrammed porcelain. On the walls are sixteen prints executed in the 1770s documenting the victory of the Chinese emperor Qianlong (r. 1736-1795) over the invading Mongols. They are based on paintings executed in China by Jesuit priests and redrawn and engraved in France by artists such as Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780) and Jean Michel Moreau le Jeune (1741-1814).