Bella Duffy

“ With this in view she toiled and plotted unceasingly, clasping the hands of regicides like Barras, rubbing skirts with such women as Tallien, and sacrificing her own pet ideal of womanly duty, which consisted, as she repeatedly proclaimed, in loving and being loved, and leaving the jarring strife of politics to men.
Had she remained in France, she must inevitably have been betrayed into greater inconsistencies still. But, fortunately for her fame, her intellect, and her character, the period was approaching in which Bonaparte’s aversion was to condemn her to a decade of illustrious exile. ”

“ The livid head of Foulon on the pike; the greasy, filthy, partly drunken populace, who rose as from the depths of the earth to invade the splendid privacy of royal Versailles; the degraded women dragged from shameful obscurity and paraded in the lurid glare of an indecent triumph; Madame de Lamballe’s monstrous and dishonored death; Marat’s hellish accusations, and Robespierre’s diseased suspicions, were things that must have destroyed in those who lived through them all capacity for admiration. ”

“ The fact that Madame de Staël did not lose heart altogether remains an abiding witness to her faith and courage. She was wounded in her tenderest part by the Court’s ingratitude and the Assembly’s indifference towards her father. Every natural and cultivated sentiment in her was wounded by what she saw. Unlike Madame Roland, she had no traditions and no past of her own to attach her, in spite of everything, to the people. She was insensible to the merely physical infection of enthusiasm, and never even for a moment possessed by the vertigo of the revolutionary demon-dance. ”

“ After quitting Sweden Madame de Staël went to England. Some eighteen years or so had passed since she had wept in the lanes at Mickleham at the thought of separating from the charming colony at Juniper Hall. Her heart was still almost as young as in those days; the vivid flame of enthusiasm for all that was good still burnt as brightly in her soul. If her spiritual horizon had widened, and a fervent if rather vague religious sentiment had succeeded to her unquestioning faith in men—that was almost all the change in her. ”

“ Berlin was destined to be associated with the greatest, perhaps the most genuine, grief of her life. She left it pleased with her reception, enriched with new friends, new experiences, and new ideas. She had been happier there than six [138] months previously she would have admitted she could ever be again; far happier than at Coppet, which for years past had only been a place where she tarried and amused herself as she could until the moment came for returning to Paris. ”

“ A revolution suspends every action but that of force. Social order establishes the ascendancy of esteem and virtue, but a revolution limits men’s choice to their physical capacities. The only sort of moral influence that it does not exclude is the fanaticism of such ideas as, not being susceptible of any restraint, are weapons of war and not exercises of the mind. To aspire to distinction in times of revolution one must always outstrip the actual momentum of events, and the consequence of this is a rapid descent which one has no power of staying. ”

“ What a career might then have been his if, instead of being an obedient subject, he had chosen to be a leader!
Madame de Staël thought that it was to the last degree noble and disinterested of him to vanish from the sight of an adoring multitude rather than bring fresh difficulties on the master who had deserted him. But the destinies of a nation are of higher value than the comfort of a monarch, and there are certain responsibilities which no man who does not feel himself incapable (and that was not Necker’s case) is justified in declining. ”

“ Amiable, and even pathetic as it was, Talleyrand was not the man to be moved by it. Like Napoleon, to whom he perhaps showed it, he would be likely to think that Madame de Staël’s “exile” was singularly mitigated. It is one thing to be proscribed and banished, not only from one’s own country but from friends and fortune; to wander, as so many illustrious refugees have done, a lonely stranger in a foreign land, not daring to invoke the protection of any authority, and constantly eking out a miserable existence by teaching or worse. ”

“ Madame de Vernon has a daughter, Mathilde, beautiful and sanctimonious, whom she desires to marry to Léonce de Mondoville, a young Spaniard of noble birth and aristocratic prejudices. Madame de Vernon has in the whole world one friend, Delphine d’Albémar, a miracle of grace, wit, and beauty, who does acts of unheard-of generosity, and generally by some evil chance accomplishes them at the moment when they lead to unlucky results for herself. She is a young widow, and has been left by her elderly and devoted husband a fortune, of which she proceeds to divest herself as rapidly as possible. ”

“ But he was invariably drawn back to her by the spell of her goodness. He appears as a rock of strength amid all the sparkling, moving, changing tide of ideas and feelings that rippled, dashed, recoiled, and returned unceasingly in every hour of the sojourn at Coppet. His steady sense and calm judgment bring out into sharper contrast the unrest of Constant; the flashing splendor of Madame de Staël; the dreamy refinement of Mathieu de Montmorency; the fantastic charm of Madame de Krüdener, and the unfailing grace of the lovely “Juliette.” ”

“ Art, indeed, offering, by its early maturity, an awkward contradiction to her system, she proceeded to get rid of it by describing it as the product of imagination rather than of thought, and by adding that its plastic and sensuous qualities rendered it capable of flourishing under systems of government which necessarily crush every other form of intellectual activity. To prove the perfectibility of the human mind, she then had but poetry and philosophy. ”

“ Characters not only strong but so uniquely strong, genius so supreme, misfortunes so overwhelming, set in its scenery so forlornly picturesque, could not fail to attract all readers, if told even in the most prosaic language. When we add to this, that Miss Robinson has told their story not in prosaic language, but with a literary style exhibiting all the qualities essential to good biography, our readers will understand that this life of Emily Brontë is not only as interesting as a novel, but a great deal more interesting than most novels. ”

“ To say that men and nations would be prosperous and contented without some particular institution or defect, is the same as to say that a human face would be beautiful without features. A blank surface is conceivable as a blank surface, but not as a physiognomy; and to speculate concerning ideal humanity divorced from social systems, imposes on thought the most futile exercise that ever occurred to an enlightened mind. ”

“ M. Necker, who detested literary women, had looked with but scanty favor on his daughter’s passion for writing, and it is probable that, as long as she was exclusively under Madame Necker’s rule, he did not feel for her more than the commonplace sort of affection which a busy and serious-minded father bestows on a little girl.
During her childhood Germaine herself lavished all her warmest affection on her mother, being apparently drawn to her by the subtle attraction which a very deep and reserved nature exercises on an excitable one. ”

“ It is another thing to be wealthy, influential, admired; to be the guest of sovereigns, and the honored friend of the greatest minds in Europe; to be surrounded with sympathy, and followed at every step by the homage of a brilliant and cultured crowd. Such was the existence of Madame de Staël. Her sorrows were great because her fiery [151] temperament rebelled against her grief, at the same time that her great intellect fed it with lofty and lyric thoughts. ”