When she reached marriageable age, many ambitions of her parents were frustrated by her independent will.  Pitt, Mirabeau, Bonaparte, were considered, but destiny had in store for her a Swedish ambassador, Stael-Holstein, a man of good family, but with little money and plenty of debts, who had been looking out for a comfortable dowry.  In 1786, at the time when Marie Antoinette was at the height of her popularity, this girl of twenty years was married to a man seventeen years her senior, who had no affection for her and whom she could not love.

At Paris she immediately opened a salon, which soon eclipsed, both in beauty and wit, that of her mother; there her eloquence, enthusiasm, and conversational gifts captivated all, but her imprudent language, the recklessness of her conduct, her scorn of all etiquette, her outspoken preferences, frightened away women and stunned men.  Her sympathy for her friends, Talleyrand, Narbonne, De Montmorency, together with the approaching Revolution, drew her into politics.  When her father was called by the nation to the control of its finances, his daughter shared his glories.

Her salon was the centre of the elite and of all literary and political discussions; but as the majority of its frequenters were partisans of the English constitution and expressed their views openly and freely, her enemies became numerous.  When Narbonne was made minister of war, a great triumph for her and her party, the eloquence of his reports was attributed to her, and when he fell into disgrace she rescued him.  However, the atmosphere of Paris was too unfriendly, so she left in 1792 for her home at Coppet, which became an asylum for all the proscribed.  When she visited England, she began a thorough study of its mode of life, its customs, and its parliamentary institutions.  Upon her return to Coppet she wrote Reflexions sur le Proces de la Reine, to excite the commiseration of the judges.  After the death of her mother in 1794, she devoted her energies to the education of her two boys.

After the violence of her love for Benjamin Constant, who drew her back to politics, was somewhat cooled, she became an ardent Republican, writing her treatise Reflexions sur la Paix adressees a M. Pitt et aux Anglais, which facilitated her return in 1795 to Paris, where she found her husband reinstalled as ambassador.  Her hotel in the Rue de Bac was reopened, and she proceeded to form a salon from the debris of society floating about in Paris.  It was an assembly of queer characters—­elements of the old and new regime, but not at all reconciled, converts of the Jacobin party returning for the first time into society, surrounded by the women of the old regime, using all imaginable efforts and flattery to obtain the rentree of a brother, a son, or a lover; it was composed of the most moderate Revolutionists, of former Constitutionalists, of exiles of the Monarchy, whom she endeavored to bring over to the Republican cause.