Madame de Staël’s appearance has been much discussed, but a magnificent glance, a sweet smile, and an habitual expression of kindness, the absence of all minute affectation and of all embarrassing reserve, flattering words, praise a little direct but apparently dictated by enthusiasm, an inexhaustible variety in conversation, astonish, attract, and reconcile almost everybody who approaches her. I know no woman, and even no man, who is more convinced of her immense superiority over the whole world, and who renders this conviction less oppressive to others. Nothing could be more charming than the conversations between Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier. The rapidity of the one in expressing a thousand new thoughts, the rapidity of the second in seizing and judging them; on the one side a strong and masculine intelligence which unmasked everything, on the other a delicate and penetrating mind which understood everything. All this formed a whole impossible to render for those who did not enjoy the privilege of witnessing it. Madame de Staël scattered golden rain of the frankest and sincerest praise over Madame Récamier every time that she addressed her. “You are exquisite,” “you are beautiful,” “you reign as a queen over sentiment,” are among the sentences that stud every other line of her letters. Another of her female friends was she whom she named the “sweet Annette de Gérando,” the wife of the author of _The Signs and Art of Thinking in their Mutual Relations_, the _Origin of Human Intelligence_, the _Comparative History of Philosophic Systems_, etc. He was a philanthropist as well as a philosopher, and Madame de Staël in later years once made rather a bitter allusion to this fact. As time went on, and Napoleon’s star blazed brighter, De Gérando was unable to resist the general infection of idolatry; moreover, he had accepted a post under the new Government, and the withering blight of officialism fell to a certain extent on his spirit. “There is too much philanthropy in his friendship,” wrote Madame de Staël to Jordan. “One is afraid of being treated by him like a pauper.”