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Perhaps the reason of it is that one divines in her at this time a sentiment which, if erring, was simple and true, while many of her later sorrows gained a kind of factitious grandeur from the train of political circumstances attendant on them. Mrs. Phillips was present when Madame de Staël received the letter which summoned her to rejoin her husband at Coppet, and relates the effect produced upon her. She was most frankly inconsolable, spoke again and again of her sorrow at going, and made endless entreaties to Mrs. Phillips to attend to the wants, spirits, and affairs of the friends. whom she was leaving. She even charged her with a message of forgiveness for the ungrateful Fanny, and fairly sobbed when parting with Mrs. Folk.

Madame de Staël did not leave Coppet again until after the Revolution. Her life seems to have passed with a monotony that the long drama of horror slowly culminating in Paris rendered tragically sombre. She continued her efforts-every day more difficult of accomplishment and sterile of results-to save her friends and foes; and when the Queen was arraigned, she wrote, in a few days, that eloquent and wellknown defence of her which called down upon the writer the applause of every generous heart in Europe.

The Neckers during this period seem to have seen very little society. Gibbon was almost their only friend; and in 1794 he went to England, and a few months later died. The next to go was Madame Necker herself. She had long been ill, and her last few months of life were embittered by cruel pain. She had prepared for her end with the minute and morbid care that might have been expected from her. The tomb at Coppet in which she rests, together with her husband and daughter, was built in conformity with

her wishes, and in great part under her eyes. She died on 6th May 1794. M. Necker felt her death acutely, and for months not even his daughter's sympathy could console him. Madame Necker had one of those selftormenting natures which poison the existence of others in embittering their own. Too noble to be slighted, and too exacting to be appeased, they work out the doom of unachieved desires; and when they go to be wrapt in eternal mystery, their parting gift to their loved ones is a vague remorse and doubting. Silent themselves when they might have spoken, they leave an unanswered question in the hearts of their survivors. Monsieur Necker, with his exaggerated consciousness, must have asked himself repeatedly if he had cared for his strange and loving wife enough. Madame de Staël mourned her mother sincerely, but it is clear that the keenest edge of her grief came from contemplation of her father's.

Three months had not elapsed after Madame Necker's death when the 9th Thermidor dawned, and at its close, all sanguinary as that appalling termination was, France drew one long sigh of inconceivable relief, for Robespierre had fallen. The Directory followed, and Baron de Staël having been re-nominated to his post, his wife lost no time in hurrying back to Paris. There, true to her indefatigable self, she immediately set about obtaining the eradication of her friends' names from the list of the proscribed émigrés. From this moment her opinions, and with them her character, underwent a certain change. She had been a moderate royalist; she became avowedly a republican. But her republicanism was of a strangely abstract and eclectic sort, and it was dashed with so many personal leanings towards

monarchists, that it resulted in nothing better than a spirit of intrigue.

She could not understand that the law, whatever it may be, which governs circumstances, makes no account of individuals. She believed that, by causing Mathieu de Montmorency and Talleyrand to be recalled from exile, and inspiring Benjamin Constant with the loftiest ideals, she could obliterate the bloodstained past and reverse the logic of events. When everybody (everybody, that is, whom she cared about) should have been restored to peace, prosperity, and the air of France, she conceived that the study of metaphysical systems and the cultivation of the affections would alone be needed to re-model and perfect humanity.

With this in view she toiled and plotted unceasingly, clasping the hands of regicides like Barras, rubbing skirts with such women as Madame 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.

63

CHAPTER VII.

THE TRANSFORMED CAPITAL.

In all its varied story, the world probably never offered a stranger spectacle than that presented by Paris when Madame de Staël returned to it in 1795. The mixture of classes was only equalled by the confusion of opinions, and these, in their turn, were proclaimed by the oddest contrasts in costumes. Muscadins in grey coats and green cravats, twirled their canes insolently in the faces of wearers of greasy carmagnoles; while the powdered pigtails of reactionaries announced the aristocratic contempt of their wearers for the close-cropped heads of the Jacobins.

To the squalid orgies in the streets, illuminated by stinking oil-lamps, and varied by the rumble of the tumbrils, had succeeded the salons where Josephine Beauharnais displayed her Creole grace, and NotreDame de Thermidor sought to wield the social sceptre of decapitated princesses. Already royalism had revived, although furtively, and fans on which the name of the coming King could be read but by initiated eyes, were passed from hand to hand in the cafés of "Coblentz." A strange light-hearted nervous gaiety -intoxicating as champagne-had dissipated the lurid

gloom of the Terror; the dumbness of horror had given way to a reckless contempt for tyranny. A sordid, demented mania for speculation had invaded all classes, and refined and delicate women trafficked in pounds of sugar or yards of cloth.

An enormous sensation was produced by Ducancel's Nouveaux Aristides, ou l'Intérieur des Comités Révolutionnaires, a comedy in which its author distilled into every line the hoarded bitterness of his soul against the Jacobins.

Barras flaunted his cynical sensuality and shameless waste in the face of a bankrupt society; and austere revolutionaries, beguiled into the enervating atmosphere of the gilded salons, sold their principles with a stroke of the same pen that restored some illustrious proscribed one to his family. "Every one of us was soliciting the return of some émigré among his friends," writes Madame de Staël. "I obtained several recalls at this period; deputy Legendre, almost a denounced me from the tribune of the Convention. The influence of women, and the power of good society, seemed very dangerous to those who were excluded, but whose colleagues were invited to be seduced. One saw on decadis, for Sundays existed no longer, all the elements of the old and new régime united, but not reconciled."

and in consequence the man of the people,

Into this seething world Madame de Staël threw herself with characteristic activity. Legendre's attack upon her, foiled by Barras, could not deter her from interference. Her mind being fixed upon some ideal Republic, she was anxious to blot out all record of past intolerance. The prospect of restoring an aristocrat to his home, or of shielding him from fresh

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