My bookseller took upon himself the responsibility of the publication of my book, after submitting it to the censors....
At the moment when the work was about to appear, and when the 10,000 copies of the first edition had been actually printed off, the minister of the police, known under the name of General Savary, sent his officers to the bookseller’s, with orders to tear the whole edition in pieces, and to place sentinels at the different entrances to the warehouse, for fear a single copy of this dangerous writing should escape.
What a glimpse is there incidentally afforded of the intolerable despotism of Napoleon!
Madame de Stael thinks silently of her lovely and beloved friend Madame Récamier, who had suffered from Napoleon by her relation with the exiled woman of letters, when still in her preface she writes:
Some of my friends were banished, because they had had the generosity to come and see me; this was too much: to carry with us the contagion of misfortune, not to dare to associate with those we love, to be afraid to write to them, or pronounce their names, to be the object by turns, either of affectionate attentions which make us tremble for those who show them, or of those refinements of baseness which terror inspires, is a situation from which every one, who still values life, would withdraw!
We advance into the body of the work.
The German Lessing had himself found in his literary countrymen the same fault that Madame de Stael, near the beginning of her book, points out as follows:
In literature, as in politics, the Germans have too much respect for foreigners, and not enough of national prejudices. In individuals it is a virtue, this denial of self, and this esteem of others; but the patriotism of nations ought to be selfish.
Bismarck and Moltke in politics and in war, Herman Grimm, for example, in literature, with his appalling claim for Goethe’s “Faust,” as the “greatest work of the greatest poet of all nations and times,” have lately “changed all that.” The fault of Germany now is not over-modesty.