Madame de Staël thought that it was to the last degree noble and disinterested of him to vanish from the sight of an adoring multitude rather than bring fresh difficulties on the master who had deserted him. But the destinies of a nation are of higher value than the comfort of a monarch, and there are certain responsibilities which no man who does not feel himself incapable (and that was not Necker’s case) is justified in declining. To throw back the love and influence offered him then for the last time by France, to sympathize with the popular cause and yet to abandon it, and to do all this out of obedience to the senseless caprice of a faction and the arbitrary command of a king, was to behave like a Court chamberlain, but in no sense like a statesman. The taking of the Bastille, and the King’s declaration at the Hôtel de Ville, followed immediately on Necker’s retirement. Madame de Staël records these events in a very few words, and shows herself, at the moment and henceforward through all the opening scenes of the Revolution, more alive to the humiliation and dismay of the Royal Family than to the apocalyptic grandeur of the catastrophe. The acts committed, as one reads of them quietly now, are revolting in their mingled grotesqueness and terror. To those who witnessed them, they sickened where they did not deprave. The livid head of Foulon on the pike; the greasy, filthy, partly drunken populace, who rose as from the depths of the earth to invade the splendid privacy of royal Versailles; the degraded women dragged from shameful obscurity and paraded in the lurid glare of an indecent triumph; Madame de Lamballe’s monstrous and dishonored death; Marat’s hellish accusations, and Robespierre’s diseased suspicions, were things that must have destroyed in those who lived through them all capacity for admiration. The fact that Madame de Staël did not lose heart altogether remains an abiding witness to her faith and courage. She was wounded in her tenderest part by the Court’s ingratitude and the Assembly’s indifference towards her father. Every natural and cultivated sentiment in her was wounded by what she saw. Unlike Madame Roland, she had no traditions and no past of her own to attach her, in spite of everything, to the people. She was insensible to the merely physical infection of enthusiasm, and never even for a moment possessed by the vertigo of the revolutionary demon-dance. She remained, from first to last, an absolute stranger to every act and every consideration that was not either manifest to her intellect or strong in appeal to her heart; and yet such was her force of mind and rectitude of insight that, under the Directory, we shall find her no less interested in public events than under the Monarchy.