Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 3

each other in relation to Necker. Germaine, as she was generally called, had, unluckily for her, inherited nothing of her mother's delicacy of form and feature; indeed, her most rapturous admirers never dared to claim much physical beauty for her, except a pair of fine, though unfeminine, eyes. She was rather short than tall; her figure was square-set and heavy; her features, though not exactly ill-formed, matched her figure; her arms were massive, though not ill-shaped; and she was altogether distinctly what the French call hommasse. Nevertheless, her great wealth, and the high position of her father, attracted suitors, some of whom at least may not have overlooked the intellectual ability which she began very early to display. There was talk of her marrying William Pitt, but either Pitt's well-known "dislike of the fair," or some other reason, foiled the project. After one or two other negotiations she made a match which was not destined to good fortune, and which does not strike most observers as a very tempting one in any respect, though it carried with it some exceptional and rather eccentric guarantees for that position at court and in society on which Germaine was set. The King of Sweden, Gustavus, whose family oddity had taken, among less excusable forms, that of a platonic devotion to Marie Antoinette, gave a sort of perpetual brevet of his ministry at Paris to the Baron de Stael-Holstein, a nobleman of little fortune and fair family. This served, using clerical language, as his "title" to marriage with Germaine Necker. Such a marriage could not be expected to, and did not, turn out very well; but it did not turn out as ill as it might have done. Except that M. de Stael was rather extravagant (which he probably supposed he had bought the right to be) nothing serious is alleged against him; and though more than one thing serious might be alleged against his wife, it is doubtful whether either contracting party thought this out of the bargain. For business reasons, chiefly, a separation was effected between the pair in 1798, but they were nominally reconciled four years later, just before Stael's death.
Meanwhile the Revolution broke out, and Madame de Stael, who, as she was bound to do, had at first approved it, disapproved totally of the Terror, tried to save the Queen, and fled herself from France to England. Here she lived in Surrey with a questionable set of _émigrés_, made the acquaintance of Miss Burney, and in consequence of the unconventionalities of her relations, especially with M. de Narbonne, received, from English society generally, a cold shoulder, which she has partly avenged, or tried to avenge, in Corinne itself. She had already written, or was soon to write, a good deal, but nothing of the first importance. Then she went to Coppet, her father's place, on the Lake of Geneva, which she was later to render so famous; and under the Directory was enabled to resume residence in Paris, though she was more than once under suspicion. It was at this time that she met Benjamin Constant, the future brilliant orator, and author of Adolphe, the only man perhaps whom she ever really loved, but, unluckily, a man whom it was by no means good to love. For some years she oscillated contentedly enough between Coppet and Paris. But the return of Bonaparte from Egypt was unlucky for her. Her boundless ambition, which, with her love of society, was her strongest passion, made her conceive the idea of fascinating him, and through him ruling the world. Napoleon, to use familiar English, "did not see it." When he liked women he liked them pretty and feminine; he had not the faintest idea of admitting any kind of partner in his glory; he had no literary taste; and not only did Madame de Stael herself meddle with politics, but her friend, Constant, under the Consulate, chose to give himself airs of opposition in the English sense. Moreover, she still wrote, and Bonaparte disliked and dreaded everyone who wrote with any freedom. Her book, _De la Littérature_, in 1800, was taken as a covert attack on the Napoleonic _régime_; her father shortly after republished another on finance and politics, which was disliked; and the success of Delphine, in 1803, put the finishing touch to the petty hatred of any kind of rival superiority which distinguished the Corsican more than any other man of equal genius. Madame de Stael was ordered not to approach within forty leagues of Paris, and this exile, with little softening and some excesses of rigour, lasted till the return of the Bourbons.
Then it was that the German and Italian journeys already mentioned (the death of M. Necker happening between them and recalling his daughter from the first) led to the