Miss Berry, in her memoirs, accuses her of a “passion” for Talleyrand, and spoke as though concluding it to be a theme of common gossip. She certainly liked to absorb a great deal of her friends’ affection, and was avowedly displeased when they married. Her sentiments towards Baron de Staël, full of a sweet and fresh cordiality at first, seems rapidly to have changed to aversion. As far as it is possible to judge, she unhesitatingly sacrificed him on all occasions to her filial love or her intellectual aims. When he was in Paris she left him in order to console M. Necker in his mournful retirement at Coppet. When he was at Coppet she remained in Paris, there to form and electrify a constitutional salon. Various anecdotes attest to the scandal uttered about her, and the truth of some of these stories admits of little doubt. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that detraction is ever busiest with the greatest names; that Madame de Staël, always preoccupied with her subject and never with herself, irritated the nerves and stirred the bile of inferior people who were proportionately gratified to hear her attacked; and that she lived in the midst of a society where conjugal fidelity was rare enough to be hardly believed in. Countless passages in her writings prove how exalted was her ideal of family life; and if they also prove her constant, restless yearning after some unattained, unattainable good, there is at least no sign of the satiety of exhausted emotion in them. Let us be content, then, that in many instances a veil should hide from us the deeper recesses of Madame de Staël’s heart. Grant that there were two Germaines—one her father’s daughter, lofty-minded, pure, catching the infection of exalted feelings, and incapable of error; the other her husband’s wife, thrust into the fiery circle of human passion, thence to emerge a little scorched and harmed. The hidden centre of that dual self cannot be revealed to us; but what we do know is sometimes so grand and always so great that we can afford to be indulgent when reduced to conjecture.