It was, then, by the pure dry light of her intellect and her wit that Madame de Stael dazzled so in conversation--dazzled so, and so attracted. Wherever she was, there was the center. She made a _salon_ anywhere, by simply being there. And Madame de Stael's _salon_ was felt by the ruler of Europe to be a formidable political power implacably hostile to himself. "Somehow," said Napoleon, "I observe that, whatever is talked about at Madame de Stael's, those who go there come away thinking less favorably of me." It seems to have been in part because she said nothing, and would say nothing, of Napoleon in her "Germany," that he finally suppressed that book. "You will speak ill of me when you get back to your academy," said to Plato the tyrant of Syracuse. "In the academy we shall not have time to speak of you at all," was the philosopher's reply. Madame de Stael was singularly fortunate in heredity on both sides of her parentage. Her father was an eminent banker and minister of finance, who enjoyed the noblest and clearest renown as a man both of talent and of character. Her mother was that beautiful and gifted daughter of a Swiss pastor whom the historian Gibbon once thought he loved, but whom he dutifully gave up at the will of his father. "I sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son," Gibbon says in his "Autobiography." This was after years had passed with him--"years that bring the philosophic mind!" The obese but famous English historian, still a bachelor, was a frequent guest at the house of M. Necker, where he had the opportunity gallantly to admire the brilliant daughter of the woman who might have been his wife. We have said enough to show that, with the exception of personal beauty, Madame de Stael enjoyed every external advantage that could help to give her a shining career. Her wealth was something more than a mere accessory advantage; she needed it to sustain her in the waste of money made necessary by her wanderings through Europe to escape the tyrannous hand of Napoleon. Her exile was agony to her, for she loved France, and she loved Paris with inextinguishable affection. It is impossible to deny to the obstinacy that refused to burn even a pinch of incense to the god of her nation's idolatry, for the sake of permission to return to every thing that she loved--it is impossible, we say, to deny to this obstinacy in Madame de Stael the title of a true and heroic virtue. How costly-brave was the attitude that Madame de Stael steadfastly kept toward Napoleon, during the fifteen years of his unparalleled sway, may be guessed from the account that she gives of the unnerving, the prostrating effect upon her of the presence, the character, and the genius of that extraordinary man. In her "Reflections on the French Revolution" she has the following passage, almost equally striking whether taken as a description or as a confession: