One is not much surprised to divine from subsequent circumstances that this appeal produced no effect. Amiable, and even pathetic as it was, Talleyrand was not the man to be moved by it. Like Napoleon, to whom he perhaps showed it, he would be likely to think that Madame de Staël’s “exile” was singularly mitigated. It is one thing to be proscribed and banished, not only from one’s own country but from friends and fortune; to wander, as so many illustrious refugees have done, a lonely stranger in a foreign land, not daring to invoke the protection of any authority, and constantly eking out a miserable existence by teaching or worse. It is another thing to be wealthy, influential, admired; to be the guest of sovereigns, and the honored friend of the greatest minds in Europe; to be surrounded with sympathy, and followed at every step by the homage of a brilliant and cultured crowd. Such was the existence of Madame de Staël. Her sorrows were great because her fiery temperament rebelled against her grief, at the same time that her great intellect fed it with lofty and lyric thoughts. But her sorrows were of the affections exclusively. She never felt the sting of the world’s scorn, nor knew the bitter days and sleepless nights of poverty. If she ever “ate her bread with tears,” they were not those saltest tears of all which are wrung from burning eyes by unachieved hopes and frustrated endeavor. Every field of social and intellectual activity was open to her except the salons of Paris, and those were very different under the blight of Napoleonic bureaucracy from what they had been even during the mingled vulgarity and ferment of the Directory. She returned to Weimar, and had a touching meeting with the Grand Duchess, whose recent troubles, and the courage she displayed under them, had not only endeared her to her subjects and her friends, but had won the applause of the world. On her way thither she presumably delayed a short while in Berlin, and it must have been to that period that Ticknor refers when relating a very amusing anecdote in his _Life and Letters_. She asked Fichte to give her in a quarter of an hour a summarized idea of his famous _Ego_, professing to be, as she doubtless was, entirely in the dark about it. Fichte’s consternation may be imagined, for he had been all his life developing his system, and intended it to comprehend the universe. Moreover he spoke very bad French, and even if Madame de Staël were momentarily silent in speech, we may fancy how voluble she _looked_, and how nervous the prescience of her imminent rapid speech must have made the philosopher. However, he made up his mind to the attempt, and began. In a very few moments Madame de Staël burst out: