Her features were good, but her complexion bad. She had a certain roundness and amplitude of form. She was never at a loss for the happiest expressions; but deviated into anecdotes that might be an offence to American ears!
Baron de Voght, who seemingly had not an American Puritanism of ear, wrote more warmly about the famous lady to a mutual friend, Madame Récamier:
It is to you that I owe my most amiable reception at Coppet. It is no doubt to the favourable expectations aroused by your friendship that I owe my intimate acquaintance with this remarkable woman. I might have met her without your assistance—some casual acquaintance would no doubt have introduced me—but I should never have penetrated to the intimacy of this sublime and beautiful soul, and should never have known how much better she is than her reputation. She is an angel sent from heaven to reveal the divine goodness upon earth. To make her irresistible, a pure ray of celestial light embellishes her spirit and makes her amiable from every point of view.
At once profound and light, whether she is discovering a mysterious secret of the soul or grasping the lightest shadow of a sentiment, her genius shines without dazzling, and when the orb of light has disappeared, it leaves a pleasant twilight to follow it.... No doubt a few faults, a few weaknesses, occasionally veil this celestial apparition; even the initiated must sometimes be troubled by these eclipses, which the Genevan astronomers in vain endeavour to predict.
Still another pen picture of the same lady, from Benjamin Constant, who was her lover for many years and found the burden of maintaining an affection to match hers too great:
Yes, certainly I am more anxious than ever to break it off. She is the most egoistical, the most excitable, the most ungrateful, the most vain, and the most vindictive of women. Why didn't I break it off long ago? She is odious and intolerable to me. I must have done with her or die. She is more volcanic than all the volcanoes in the world put together. She is like an old procureur, with serpents in her hair, demanding the fulfilment of a contract in Alexandrine verse.
Byron was one of the famous men who visited the salon of Madame de Staël. He was drawn to Switzerland in the course of his "parade of the pageant of his bleeding heart," and found much prompting in Swiss scenery to proclaim his sorrows:
Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.
To Madame de Staël he presented a copy of Glenarvon, an English novel in which his "devilish" character had been exposed. It was an effective introduction; and was aided in its theatrical effect by the fact that an English lady fainted in Madame de Staël's drawing-room when Byron's name was announced as a visitor. But evidently Byron failed sadly to live up to his wicked reputation. Whether it was his famous hostess who was disappointed or some one else, he made no fame at Coppet. The de Staëls' son-in-law, Duke Victor de Broglie, writes with palpable sourness of the visit of this ineffectual Satan:
CHÂTEAU DE PRANGINS.