[8] Congrès de Vérone, ii. 527.
[9] Buonaparte et les Bourbons, pp. 36, 37.
[10] Mémoires d'outre-tombe, 1849, iv. 452, &c., vi. I, &c.
[11] Et il se rengorgea d'un air capable et goguenard; mais je ne prétendais disputer au Roi aucune puissance."
[12] Mémoires d'outre-tombe, viii. 216, 222; Congrès de Vérone, i. 172, ii. 525.
[VIII]
MADAME DE KRÜDENER
Amongst the personages of the day we come upon one class peculiarly characteristic of this period, namely, the converts. In an anxiously religious age following upon one of little faith this class was inevitably a numerous one. Laharpe's conversion during the very course of the Revolution had excited much attention. Chateaubriand himself was a convert. It is possibly the converts who help us to the clearest understanding of the nature of the new spirit, for in them we see it striving with and overcoming the old. The convert is, moreover, always ardent; he is full of his new belief, and consequently has, or affects, a peculiarly expressive countenance. The rule that the spirit of a period mirrors itself typically in that period's leading characters holds doubly good in the case of the individual whose character it is to be converted, especially if that individual is a woman. History contains no record of a woman, with her receptive nature, having led her age onward to new development, but some woman generally presents us with a specially marked type of the character of her age. The émigrés group themselves round Madame de Staël, the leaders of Romanticism rally round Caroline Schlegel, and the age of the rehabilitation of religion finds poetically pious expression in Madame de Krüdener.
In Madame de Staël's Delphine there is a scene in which the heroine enchants a large company with her graceful and expressive performance of a certain foreign dance, the shawl-dance. This scene had a foundation of reality. Her beautiful dancing was one of the many things for which the young and charming Baroness de Krüdener was remarkable. In Delphine we read: "Never did grace and beauty produce a more remarkable effect upon a numerous assembly. This foreign dance has a charm of which nothing we are accustomed to see can give any idea. It is an altogether Asiatic mixture of indolence and vivacity, of melancholy and gaiety.... Sometimes when the music became softer Delphine walked a few steps with head bent and arms crossed, as if some memory or some regret had suddenly intermingled itself with the joyousness of a festival; but, soon recommencing her light and lively dance, she enveloped herself in an Indian shawl, which, showing the contours of her figure and falling back with her long hair, made of her a perfectly enchanting picture." The word Asiatic is unmistakably the characterising word. In 1803 Joubert writes of Madame de Krüdener: "She is charming, with something Asiatic about her—nature exaggerated. Such extreme tenderness of feeling can hardly exist without a touch of extravagance."