This passionate woman of genius, twice linked by marriage in a union marked by violent and opposite disparities of age--for the second husband was as much younger as the first was older than she--sought satisfaction for her hungry desire of love in "relations," if not ambiguous, at least apparently ambiguous, with men other than her husbands. One of these men was Benjamin Constant, whose conversational powers, exercised in partnership, never in rivalship, with Madame de Stael, helped make the society in which they shone as twin stars together, the admiration, the envy, the despair, of cultivated Europe. Benjamin Constant, as Madame de Stael's companion of travel in Germany, was no doubt part, though August Wilhelm Schlegel was part still greater, of the vitalizing intellectual influence that helped her produce her work on that country. Schlegel, by the way, had previously accompanied Madame de Stael in that Italian tour and sojourn of hers, the fruit of which was the novel, or the book of travels, or both in one, entitled "Corinne." This book was the first of her books to give its author a European fame. Besides being studied as a text-book in the schools, "Corinne" is still read as a production important in literary history. The "De l'Allemagne" (literally "Concerning Germany") is generally esteemed the masterpiece of its author. From this we draw our illustrations by specimen of the literary quality of Madame de Stael. The "Germany" may be said to have first introduced that country to France, almost to Europe in general. Its scope is comprehensive. It describes Germany in a great variety of aspects; but it is on the literature of Germany that it expends its strength. Madame de Stael's "Preface" to her "Germany," written in England, where, after its arbitrary suppression in France, the volume was finally published, is an interesting bit of reading. Witness one or two extracts: 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 Recamier, who had suffered from Napoleon by her relation with the exiled woman of letters, when still in her preface she writes: