She returned for the summer to Coppet—a very welcome refuge to her now that she went thither of her own free will. Her health was beginning to fail about this time, while that of M. Rocca gave her constant anxiety. Originally she had been blest, if not with a splendid constitution, at least with a royal disdain of physical influences. She had felt neither heat nor cold, and spoke even with a certain impatience of invalid considerations. But she had lived at such high pressure intellectually from her very earliest years; had thought, felt, talked, and done so much, that her existence could not be counted, like most people’s, by years. In the sense of accumulated efforts and results it had been a very long life, and the expenditure of nervous energy so constantly kept up was beginning to tell at last. Even Bonstetten, the optimist, saw a change in her when in July, 1814, he visited her at Coppet. She was, indeed, very depressed in spirits; but he appeared to allude only to a physical alteration, for he declared her to be as brilliant and good as ever. He might have added as indefatigable. She found somebody to translate Wilberforce’s work on the Slave Trade, and wrote a preface to the French edition. Also she published, in pamphlet form, an appeal for Abolition addressed to the Sovereigns met together at that time in Paris; and she was busy with her work, _Considerations_, of which the first two parts alone were eventually revised by herself. In July, from Coppet, she wrote a characteristic letter to Madame Récamier, telling what difficulty she experienced in keeping up the fine love of solitude, which had beguiled her momentarily into seeking that picturesque and sacred but monotonous retreat. “My soul is not sufficiently rural,” she writes. “I regret your little apartment and our quarrels and conversations, and all that life which is yours.” In this sturdy love of streets Madame de Staël resembled Dr. Johnson and, perhaps, if the truth were known, she resembled all good talkers. She returned to Paris in the winter of 1814-15, and, conscious that her strength was failing, she became extremely anxious to marry her darling daughter to some man who would be worthy of her. Her circumstances had been recently much improved by the repayment from the Treasury of the two millions which Necker had left there. Such wealth, joined to her own brilliant social position, entitled her to look out for a good _parti_ for Albertine; but she was resolute that the match should be a happy one. Her ideal of felicity was conjugal love. She preached, indeed, a code of wifely submission that would seem very insipid to some emancipated damsels in our days, and was perhaps a little too perfect to be possible. But she put into it all her own rare faith in good, and often laughingly declared that “she would _force_ her daughter to make a marriage of the heart.”