What Constant’s feelings were she does not say, and speaks of his accompanying her as a spontaneous act of friendship. But he had been exiled as well as herself; and although his desire to go to Germany had partly determined hers, and neither wished to separate from the other, there are indications that Constant quitted France as reluctantly as his companion. Their relations were already varied by alternate periods of shine and storm; and although her influence over him was still immense, it had begun, as was inevitable with such a man, to fret him. And probably some doubts that were not political, and some sufferings that had their root in another cause than exile, played their part in the extreme agitation of Madame de Staël’s mind at this period. CHAPTER X. MADAME DE STAËL VISITS GERMANY. At Metz Madame de Staël was received in triumph. The Prefect of the Moselle entertained her, parties were given in her honor, and all the literary big-wigs of the place hastened to do her homage. She there, for the first time, came into personal contact with Charles de Villers, with whom she had previously corresponded on the subject of Kant. Of course she was charmed with him, her first impulse invariably being to find every clever or distinguished person delightful. Her friendship with him resembled all her friendships. She began by expecting to have inspired as much enthusiasm as she felt, possibly a little more, seeing that she was a woman, and such a woman, and exiled to boot. Villers, a cross-grained kind of Teuton, had no idea of allowing his theories, which were extremely sturdy on all subjects, to be spirited away by any of Madame de Staël’s conversational conjuring tricks. They discussed philosophy, and he railed sourly at French taste; and, perhaps by way of proving his final emancipation from all such fetters, he had obtained the companionship of a certain Madame de Rodde, whom Madame de Staël described, with some asperity, as a “fat German.” But she separated from the philosopher still quite charmed with his appreciation of the good and true, and not in the least repulsed by his ways. On the contrary, she wrote to him shortly afterwards, reproaching him passionately with his silence. One can imagine how absurd such exactions must have seemed to the good Villers, with his head full of Kant and Madame de Rodde to attend to his comforts; but the truth was that Madame de Staël’s mood just then caused her to make herself needlessly miserable about everything. To Mathieu de Montmorency she wrote that she was filled with terror, and fancied that death must shortly overtake her father, children, friends, everybody dear to her.