Needless to say that opinions such as these never found their way into Madame de Staël’s mind. On occasions—perhaps too frequently renewed—the portals of that enchanted palace were guarded by her heart. In her view, everything might yet be saved, were Necker only listened to and obeyed. “Every day he will do something good and prevent something bad,” she wrote to the reactionary and angry Gustavus, and thus betrayed that preoccupation with the individual, his virtues or his crimes, which, for all her intellect, blinded her not rarely to the essential significance of things. With breathless interest and varied feelings of sympathy and indignation she watched the great events which now followed in rapid succession. Her father was monarchical, and believed that a representative monarchy on the English model was the true remedy for France. Madame de Staël—incapable of differing with so great a man—endorsed this opinion at the time, although eventually she became republican. But nobody was republican then—that is in name; people had not yet realized to what logical conclusions their opinions would carry them. Madame de Staël, hating oppression, blamed the sightless obstinacy of the nobles, but, on the other hand, was but little moved by the famous _Serment du Jeu de Paume_. She deplored the rejection of Necker’s plan—that happy medium which was to settle everything, and stigmatized as it deserved the imbecility of the Court party, as illustrated by confidence in foreign regiments and the Declaration of the 23d June. Always optimist, and confident of the inevitable triumph of Right over Might, she clung to the belief that a thoroughly pure character, in such a crisis, was the one indispensable element of success. The mysterious nature of Sièyes repelled her; she preferred the virtuous Malouet to the titanic Mirabeau, and was almost as blind as her father to the enormous electric force of the tribune’s undisciplined genius. For if often prejudiced, she rarely was morbid, and false ideas did not dazzle her. No splendor of achievement unaccompanied by loftiness of principle could win her applause. But she failed to grasp the fact that perfection of moral character, by its very scruples and hesitations, is necessarily handicapped in any race with the velocity of public events. No man can bring his entire self—very rarely can he even bring all that is best of himself—into a struggle with warring forces and contradictory individualities. In such a contest, swiftness of insight, power of expression, and force of organic impulse are the only factors of value. In supreme moments of action, men are greater than themselves—made so by the sudden, unconscious contraction of their complex personality into one flame-point of consuming will.