Madame de Staël suffered dreadfully during the period that Maximilien Robespierre headed the populace in the Champ de Mars. All the brilliant society to which she had been accustomed from the cradle were proscribed, or hiding in holes or corners of the city they had made so glorious. Liberty, the theme of her childish pen, had been metamorphosed into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Before midnight on the 9th of August, 1792, the forty-eight tocsins of the sections began to sound. Madame de Staël might have secured her own safety by a flight into Switzerland, but she could not leave Paris while her friends were in danger, and she might be of use to them. The words “Swedish Embassy,” on her door, gave her some security. By her passionate eloquence and consummate diplomacy she saved M. de Narbonne, and several other distinguished persons. On the morning of the 2nd of September, she set out from Paris in all the state of an ambassadress. In a few minutes her carriage was stopped, her servants overpowered, and she herself compelled to drive to the Hotel de Ville. When she alighted, one fiend in human shape made a thrust at her, and she was saved from death only by the policeman who accompanied her. She was taken before Robespierre, and her carriage might have been torn to pieces and herself murdered, but for the interference of a republican named Manuel, who on a former occasion had felt the power of her eloquence. Next day Manuel sent her a policeman to escort her to the frontier, and thus Madame de Staël escaped to Coppet.

Early in 1793, she went to England, and took up her residence at Juniper Hall, near Richmond, Surrey. No one has been able to assign a very distinct reason for this journey. Perhaps she came simply to breathe the air of liberty, and to become better acquainted with a country she had always loved. At all events, she became the centre of a little colony of French emigrants. Among the refugees were many illustrious people. Their funds were not in a flourishing condition, but they managed to purchase one small carriage, and ex-ministers took their turn to act as footmen, when they rode out to see the country. The little party was soon scattered. In the summer of 1793, Madame de Staël rejoined her father in Switzerland. At Coppet she devoted her great energy to the succour of exiles, and the reconciliation of France and England.

The earliest intercourse between Madame de Staël and Napoleon Bonaparte occurred between his return from Italy and his departure for Egypt, towards the end of 1797. At first she submitted as willingly as France—as indeed the whole world, to the fascination of his genius; but she was one of the earliest to discover that he was merely a skilful chess-player, who had chosen the human race as his adversary, and expected to checkmate it. She expressed her opinions openly and with all the force for which she was celebrated, and they left upon the first man of the day many unpleasant impressions. The future emperor gathered something from his brother Joseph concerning the principles of the most popular saloon in Paris, and watched for an opportunity to get rid of such an influential foe. Her father wrote a book which gave great umbrage. It was not deemed safe to touch him; but he who was reckoned the greatest hero of the modern world, was cowardly enough to visit the sin of the father upon the daughter; and so Madame de Staël was informed that her presence would be tolerated in Paris no longer. In 1802, she was exiled from France itself. Rejoining her sick husband, she closed his eyes in death at Poligny, and became an eligible widow.

The death of her father in 1804, recalled her to Coppet. Subsequently, she was permitted to return to Paris. But fresh difficulties occurred with Napoleon, and she was banished anew to Coppet. In 1808, the Baron de Staël, secured an interview with the master of the world, and pleaded eloquently on behalf of his mother. The inexorable deliverance of the emperor is too characteristic and amusing to be omitted. “Let her go to Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Lyons; if she wants to publish libels, let her go to London. I should think of her with pleasure in any of those cities; but Paris, you see, is where I live myself, and I want none but those who love me there.” The Baron de Staël renewed his entreaties. “You are very young; if you were as old as I, you would judge more accurately; but I like to see a son pleading for his mother. If I had put her in prison, I would liberate her, but I will not recall her from exile. Every one knows that imprisonment is misery; but your mother need not be miserable when all Europe is left to her.” The man of destiny acted on the dictate of a sound prudential policy. A woman so uncompromising and fearless—of such weight of genius and reputation—was not to be tolerated in Paris by the head of a government more or less the sport of the hour.

During this stay at Coppet she made the acquaintance (1810) of a young Italian of good family named Rocca, who had fought in the French army in Spain, and had gone to Geneva to recover from his wounds. The young officer of hussars, aged twenty-five, worshipped Madame de Staël; and she, a mature matron of forty-six, married him, but the marriage was kept secret, in order, it is said, that she should not be obliged to change her celebrated name.

Napoleon having banished Schlegel, the eminent German poet and critic (who had accompanied her in her travels and been tutor to her son), and subjected herself to a petty surveillance, she rushed restlessly over Europe to Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburgh, thence through Finland to Stockholm. In 1813, she arrived in England, and was the lion, or lioness, of at least one London season, the whig aristocracy fêting her, and Sir James Mackintosh trumpeting her praises in the Edinburgh Review. She was celebrated for the persecutions she had endured, and as the only person of note who had stood firm against Napoleon to the last.

At the Restoration, she returned to her beloved Paris. From Louis XVIII. she met with the most gracious reception; and restitution was made to her of two million livres long due to her father from the royal treasury. But her old foe was only caged. He broke the bars of his prison, cleared the inconstant court in a few hours, was hailed by the army and the people, and spared none who had taken part in the restoration. “I felt,” she says, “when I heard of his coming, as if the ground yawned beneath my feet.” In the spring of 1816, she was at Coppet, the centre of a brilliant circle, with Lord Byron near her at the Villa Diodati. To Madame de Staël, Paris was the centre of the world, and accordingly in the autumn of this year we find her there again, the lady-leader of the Constitutionalists. In her saloon might have been seen Wellington and Blucher, Humboldt and Châteaubriand, Sismondi and Constant, the two Schlegels, Canova the sculptor, and Madame Recamier, whom the defeat of Napoleon had once more restored to liberty.

But she did not long enjoy the society of the metropolis which she loved so well. In February, 1817, she was seized with a violent fever. On her deathbed she said to Châteaubriand, “I have loved God, my father, and liberty.” The royal family were constant inquirers after her health, and the Duke of Wellington called daily at her door to ask if hope might yet remain. At two o’clock on Monday, the 14th July, she died in perfect peace, at the age of fifty-one. The day of her death was the anniversary of the Revolution which had exerted so great an influence on her life.

She died at Paris, but her dust was laid beside the dust of her father at Coppet. Perhaps no one ever felt more strongly the stirrings of the soul within than Madame de Staël. So long as genius and patriotism and piety can excite the admiration of the world, so long will her tomb be one of the holiest shrines of the imagination.

ANALYSIS OF WRITINGS.