"certainly the cleverest, though not the most agreeable woman he had ever known. 'She declaimed to you instead of conversing with you,' said he, 'never pausing except to take breath; and if during that interval a rejoinder was put in, it was evident that she did not attend to it, as she resumed the thread of her discourse as though it had not been interrupted'".
(Lady Blessington's
Conversations
, p. 26). Croker (
Croker Papers
, vol. i. p. 327) describes her as
"ugly, and not of an intellectual ugliness. Her features were coarse, and the ordinary expression rather vulgar, she had an ugly mouth, and one or two irregularly prominent teeth, which perhaps gave her countenance an habitual gaiety. Her eye was full, dark, and expressive; and when she declaimed, which was almost whenever she spoke, she looked eloquent, and one forgot that she was plain."
Madame de Staël
"did not affect to conceal her preference for the society of men to that of her own sex,"
and was entirely above, or below, studying the feminine arts of pleasing. In 1802 Miss Berry called on her in Paris.