"'And ah! what verse can grace thy stately mien,
Guide of the world, preferment's golden queen,
Neckar's fair daughter, Staël the Epicene!
Bright o'er whose flaming cheek and pumple nose
The bloom of young desire unceasing glows!
Fain would the Muse—but ah! she dares no more,
A mournful voice from lone Guyana's shore,
Sad Quatremer, the bold presumption checks,
Forbid to question thy ambiguous sex.'
"These lines contain the Secret History of Quatremer's deportation. He presumed, in the Council of Five Hundred, to arraign Madame de Staël's conduct, and even to hint a doubt of her sex. He was sent to Guyana. The transaction naturally brings to one's mind the dialogue between Falstaff and Hostess Quickly in Shakespeare's Henry IV."
Canning's New Morality
, lines 293-301 (Edmonds' edition of the
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin
, pp. 282, 283).
Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766-1817), only child of the Minister Necker and his wife Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon's early love, married, in 1786, the Swedish Ambassador Baron de Staël Holstein, who died in 1802. She married, as her second husband, in 1811, M. de Rocca, a young French officer, who had been severely wounded in Spain, but survived her by a year (Madame de Récamier,
Souvenirs
, vol. i. p. 272). Her book,
De l'Allemagne
, seized and destroyed by Napoleon, was brought out in June, 1813, by John Murray. Byron thought her