whom she ever really loved, but, unluckily, a man whom it was by no means good to love.  For some years she oscillated contentedly enough between Coppet and Paris.  But the return of Bonaparte from Egypt was unlucky for her.  Her boundless ambition, which, with her love of society, was her strongest passion, made her conceive the idea of fascinating him, and through him ruling the world.  Napoleon, to use familiar English, “did not see it.”  When he liked women he liked them pretty and feminine; he had not the faintest idea of admitting any kind of partner in his glory; he had no literary taste; and not only did Madame de Stael herself meddle with politics, but her friend, Constant, under the Consulate, chose to give himself airs of opposition in the English sense.  Moreover, she still wrote, and Bonaparte disliked and dreaded everyone who wrote with any freedom.  Her book, De la Litterature, in 1800, was taken as a covert attack on the Napoleonic regime; her father shortly after republished another on finance and politics, which was disliked; and the success of Delphine, in 1803, put the finishing touch to the petty hatred of any kind of rival superiority which distinguished the Corsican more than any other man of equal genius.  Madame de Stael was ordered not to approach within forty leagues of Paris, and this exile, with little softening and some excesses of rigour, lasted till the return of the Bourbons.

Then it was that the German and Italian journeys already mentioned (the death of M. Necker happening between them and recalling his daughter from the first) led to the writing of Corinne.

A very few words before we turn to the consideration of the book, as a book and by itself, may appropriately finish all that need be said here about the author’s life.  After the publication of Corinne she returned to Germany, and completed the observation which she thought necessary for the companion book De l’Allemagne.  Its publication in 1810, when she had foolishly kindled afresh the Emperor’s jealousy by appearing with her usual “tail” of worshippers or parasites as near Paris as she was permitted, completed her disgrace.  She was ordered back to Coppet:  her book was seized and destroyed.  Then Albert de Rocca, a youth of twenty-three, who had seen some service, made his appearance at Geneva.  Early in 1811, Madame de Stael, now aged forty-five, married him secretly.  She was, or thought herself, more and more persecuted by Napoleon; she feared that Rocca might be ordered off on active duty, and she fled first to Vienna, then to St Petersburg, then to Stockholm, and so to England.  Here she was received with ostentatious welcome and praises by the Whigs; with politeness by everybody; with more or less concealed terror by the best people, who found her rhapsodies and her political dissertations equally boring.  Here too she was unlucky enough to express the opinion that Miss Austen’s books were vulgar.  The