The two friends went into the park where the autumn leaves already were reddening and falling. The wind subsided by degrees, and the sound of a millstream alone broke the stillness. Madame Récamier entered the wood into whose depths the grave is hidden, while Châteaubriand remained looking at the snowy line of the Alps, and at the glittering lake. Above the sombre heights of Jura the sky was covered with golden clouds “like a glory spreading above a bier.” Suddenly Madame Récamier, pale and tearful, phantom-like among phantoms, emerged from the wood. And on her companion’s melancholy spirit fell a sense of all the emptiness of glory, of all the sad reality of life. “_Qu’est-ce que la gloire?_” asked Madame de Staël. “_Ce n’est qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur._” We could wish that the most famous of women might have held a less hopeless creed. CHAPTER XV. HER WORKS. Any notice of Madame de Staël would be imperfect without a review of her works. She did not begin, like so many famous authors, to write at an abnormally early age—it is true, she composed _Portraits_, which were read aloud in her mother’s salon, but everybody did as much in those days, and her attempts were not sufficiently remarkable to stamp her at once as a literary genius. It has been said how much her father discouraged her writing. This may account in part for the tardy development of the taste, although more was doubtless due to the peerless conversations in which, before the Revolution, her young intellect found all that it could need of ideas. However this may be, she was twenty before she wrote _Sophie, ou les Sentiments Secrets_, that elegiac “comedy” which drew down on its authoress’s youthful head the animadversions of her austere mother. Madame Necker was shocked at the subject, which represented a young girl of seventeen struggling against a secret passion for her guardian, a married man, who is in love with her. Sophie (who, by the bye, is English) behaves in the noblest manner as soon as she discovers that her feelings are reciprocated, and leaves the home of which she has unwittingly destroyed the peace. Her guardian and his wife are no less equal to the occasion, and Milord Henri Bedford, Sophie’s slighted swain, is inspired by their example. Everybody expresses his or her sentiments in polished and prolix verse, and the curtain finally falls on four loftily eloquent and magnanimously miserable people. The style is not inflated, but the piece is very dull, and, while betraying little of the writer’s future talent, reveals two of her defects, exaggeration of sentiment and a want of humor. To the same date as _Sophie_ belong _Jane Grey_, a tragedy in five acts, also in verse, of no real merit; another tragedy, _Montmorency_, and three tales—all romantic and tiresome.