“‘Madame de Staël is a queen, and all the intelligent men who live in her circle are unable to leave it, for she holds them by a magic spell. They are not all, as is foolishly believed in Germany, occupied in forming her literary character; on the contrary, they receive a social education at her hands. She possesses to admiration the secret of uniting the most unlikely elements, and all who come near her, however different their opinions may be, agree in adoring this idol. Madame de Staël is of middling height, and, without possessing the elegance of a nymph, is of noble proportions.... She is healthy, a brunette, and her face is not exactly beautiful; but this is not observed, for at sight of her eyes all else is forgotten; they are superb; a great soul not only shines in them, but shoots forth flame and fire. And when, as so often happens, she speaks straight from her heart, we see how this noble heart is hedged round by all that is great and profound in her mind, and then one must adore her, as do my friends A. W. Schlegel and Benjamin Constant.’
“It is not difficult to imagine to oneself the sprightly author of this picture. Werner, in his uncouth dress, purposely besmeared with snuff, furnished as he was with an enormous snuff-box, which he used plentifully during his long, erotic, and platonic digressions on androgyne; his fate was, he said, to be dragged hither and thither in fruitless search for that other half of himself, and from one attempt to another, from divorce after divorce, he never despaired of, in the end, reconstituting his original self.
“As for portraits of Madame de Staël, we see how all who try to limn her agree in the chief points, from M. de Guibert to [OE]hlenschlæger and Werner. Two faithful and trustworthy portraits from the brush allow us to dispense with literary word-painting,—the portrait painted by Madame Lebrun in 1807, which presents Madame de Staël to us as Corinne, bare-headed, her hair in curls, a lyre in her hand; and the picture by Gérard, painted after her death, but from perfect, unerring remembrance. However, in collecting together several sketches from various contemporaneous pens, we think we have not done a useless thing; one is never weary of harmonizing many reminiscences of those beloved and admired ones who are no more.
“English poetry, which, during the Continental wars, was unrepresented at this long congress of thought of which Coppet was the abiding-place, appeared there in 1816, in the persons of Lewis and Byron. The latter has spoken of Madame de Staël in his Memoirs in an affectionate and admiring manner, despite a certain levity the oracle indulges in. Blasé as he is, he admits that she has made Coppet the most pleasant place in the world, through the society she chooses to receive there, and which her own talent animates. On her side, she pronounced him to be the most seductive man in England, always adding: ‘I credit him with just sufficient tenderness to destroy the happiness of a woman.’”
Higher and higher grow the shores of the lake. We left Coppet and its memories of that brilliant and unhappy genius behind and were soon skirting Nyon, which the Romans knew as Noviodunum. Now that name is most interesting. It contains in it the noun dun which as a Saxon word means a hill and is seen in its simplest form in the expression, sand-dunes; it also appears as “downs;” but it is also a Keltic word and means a fortified hill; both Saxon and Keltic words are etymologically the same as ton or town. Cæsar made it a garrison forty-five years before Christ and called it Colonia Equestris.
There is often a wonderful germ of history hidden away in proper names. Who would ever dream that the little town of Gstaad which, of course, is the same as Gestade, meaning shore or bank, represents its ancient Latin name of Ripa Barbarorum? In the same way the Roman Mons Saccarum was pronounced by the Germans Masox or Meysachs, the Rhetii called it Misanc and from that came the name of the Barons of Misaucus who inhabited a magnificent castle built before the middle of the Tenth Century. The Germans call the Italian the Wälsche, which is the same as calling them Welch, meaning strangers; that name is seen in the town of Wahlenstadt and in the people Walloons. Vaud itself means Valli, which is Walli, the same as Welch. So Montigl is monticulus, a little mountain; Rinegg is Rheni angulum, a bend of the Rhine; Gräppelen comes from c zappa longa, meaning long rocks.
There is a pretty little French characterization of Nyon in four lines. It reads:—
“A Nyon, la riante ville
Qui se dresse sur son coteau,