however, although both parties dreaded ridicule, and kept it secret.  The romance of the thing—­if romance there was—­has been equalled in our day by the marriages of George Eliot and Miss Burdett Coutts.  Only very strong characters can afford to run such risks.  The caprices of the great are among the unsolved mysteries of life.  A poor, wounded, unknown young man would never have aspired to such an audacity had he not been sure of his ground; and the probability is that she, not he, is to be blamed for that folly,—­if a woman is to be blamed for an attachment which the world calls an absurdity.

The wrath of Napoleon waxing stronger and stronger, Madame de Stael felt obliged to flee even from Switzerland.  She sought a rest in England; but England was hard to be reached, as all the Continent save Russia was in bondage and fear.  She succeeded in reaching Vienna, then Russia, and finally Sweden, where she lingered, as it was the fashion, to receive attentions and admiration from all who were great in position or eminent for attainments in the northern capitals of Europe.  She liked even Russia; she saw good everywhere, something to praise and enjoy wherever she went.  Moscow and St. Petersburg were equally interesting,—­the old and the new, the Oriental magnificence of the one, the stupendous palaces and churches of the other.  Romanzoff, Orloff, the Empress Elizabeth, and the Emperor Alexander himself gave her distinguished honors and hospitalities, and she saw and recorded their greatness, and abandoned herself to pleasures which were new.

After a delightful winter in Stockholm, she sailed for England, where she arrived in safety, 1813, twenty years after her first visit, and in the ninth of her exile.  Her reception in the highest circles was enthusiastic.  She was recognized as the greatest literary woman who had lived.  The Prince Regent sought her acquaintance; the greatest nobles feted her in their princely palaces.  At the house of the Marquis of Lansdowne, at Lord Jersey’s, at Rogers’s literary dinners, at the reunions of Holland House, everywhere, she was admired and honored.  Sir James Mackintosh, the idol and oracle of English society at that time, pronounced her the most intellectual woman who had adorned the world,—­not as a novelist and poet merely, but as philosopher and critic, grappling with the highest questions that ever tasked the intellect of man.  Byron alone stood aloof; he did not like strong-minded women, any more than Goethe did, especially if they were not beautiful.  But he was constrained to admire her at last.  Nobody could resist the fascination and brilliancy of her conversation.  It is to be regretted that she did not write a book on England, which on the whole she admired, although it was a little too conventional for her.  But she was now nearly worn out by the excitements and the sorrows of her life.  She was no longer young.  Her literary work was done.  And she had to resort to opium to rally from the exhaustion of her nervous energies.