Castles -- France; Touraine (France) -- Description and travel
From this room instinct with the atmosphere of culture, a fit setting
for the profoundly intellectual woman who inhabited it, we stepped
through one of the long windows to the terrace which commands a glorious
view. In the distance, yet not seeming very far away in this clear air,
is that well-known group of which Mont Blanc is the central peak, with
the Dent du Geant and the Aiguilles du Glacier and D'Argentiere standing
guard over its crystalline purity. We had seen Mont Blanc and its
attendant mountains from the heights of Mont Revard, and knew its
majestic beauty as seen from Chamounix; but we all agreed that nothing
could be lovelier than these white peaks rising above the sapphire
lake, with the blue cloud-flecked sky over all. Yet, with this perfect
picture spread before her, Madame de Stael longed for the very gutters
of Paris, its sights and sounds, which were inseparably associated in
her mind with the joyous chatter of the salon to which she had been
introduced at an age when most children are in the nursery. Seated upon
a high chair in her mother's salon, little Anne Germaine Necker listened
eagerly to the discourses of the great men of her day. Listening was not
destined to be her _role_ in later years; but to pace up and down the
long drawing room at Coppet, with the invariable green branch in her
beautiful hands, uttering words that charmed such guests as Schlegel,
Sismondi, Bonstetten of Geneva and Chateaubriand. It was Chateaubriand
who said that the two magical charms of Coppet were the conversation of
Madame de Stael and the beauty of Madame Recamier.
Madame de Stael's library opens into her bedroom, and beyond this is the
charming little apartment dedicated to Madame Recamier. This small,
dainty room, with hand-made paper upon its walls of delicate green
decorated with flowers and birds, seemed a fit setting for the
flower-like beauty who occupied it, a lily that preserved its purity
amid the almost incredible corruption of the social life of the period.
Madame de Stael's own bedroom is filled with pictures, and souvenirs of
the _vie intime_ of one who with all her faults was dowered with a
limitless affection for her family and friends. Here is a marble bust of
the beautiful daughter Albertine in her girlhood, and on the right of
Madame de Stael's bed is a portrait of her mother, in water color
painted during her last illness, the fine, delicate old face framed in
by a lace cap. On the margin of this picture is written, "Elle m'aimera
toujours." Under this lovely water color is the same picture reproduced
in black and white, beneath which some crude hand has written in English
the trite phrase, "Not lost, but gone before."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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