Corinne, Volume 1 | Page 3

social faculties, a kind of puritanical
coquette, but devoted to her (by all accounts not particularly interesting)
husband. Indeed, mother and daughter are said to have been from a
very early period jealous of 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