Now, when the first germ of decay had begun to consume the core of his splendor, his attitude towards Madame de Staël itself altered. His persecution of her ceased to be a capricious thing compounded of spasmodic spite on his side and sporadic fears on hers, and became an organized system of repression which placed its originator in a light all the meaner that the woman against whom it was directed rose from this time to a new and grander moral altitude. CHAPTER XI. MADAME DE STAËL AND AUGUSTE SCHLEGEL AT ROME. Madame de Staël sought to solace her grief for her father’s death by writing “The Private Life of Necker,” a short sketch intended to serve as preface to a volume of his fragmentary writings. Constant spoke very feelingly of this sketch, and pronounced it to be a revelation of all that was best in the writer’s head and heart. He said that all her gifts of mind and feeling were here devoted to express and adorn a single sentiment, one for which she claimed the sympathy of the world. This is all quite true, but it is natural that the sketch should affect us less than it did Madame de Staël’s contemporaries. Necker was a good and intelligent man. He had varied talents of no common order, and an incorruptibility of character which would be rare—given the circumstances—in any age, and, by his admirers, was supposed to be especially so in his. But joined to all these qualities in him were just the foibles which spoil an image for posterity. He had a profound compassion for what he considered the hardships of his lot. It is touching to read the way—so simple, loving, and yet ingenuous—in which Madame de Staël records such facts as the following:—“It was painful to him to be old. His figure, which had grown very stout and made movement irksome to him, gave him a feeling of shyness that prevented his going into society. He hardly ever got into a carriage when anybody was looking at him, and he did not walk where he could be seen. In a word, his imagination loved grace and youth, and he would say to me sometimes, ‘I do not know why I am humiliated by the infirmities of age, but I feel that it is so.’ And it was thanks to this sentiment that he was loved like a young man.” For the rest, the sketch is one long impassioned elegy in prose. One is astonished at the sudden creative force of expression in it. It is graphic by mere power of words without any help from metaphor.