From her youth she had been such an enthusiast on the subject of equality that even in the matter of ability she regarded all men as essentially equal, assuming only the most trifling difference between the genius and the ordinary man. From the time she sat upon her father's knee she had cherished the strongest faith in the power of liberty to make men happy and to call forth all that is good in them, and her faith did not waver even on the September day when she was compelled to flee from that Reign of Terror which was the result of an experiment in equality, or when, under the Consulate, she was banished by the dictatorship into which liberty had resolved itself. But it is small wonder that a veil woven of sadness and despondency early dimmed the brightness of her spirit. At the close of a letter to Talleyrand, whom in the days of her power she had saved from banishment, but who was not sufficiently grateful to attempt to make her any return, she writes: "Farewell! Are you happy? with so superior an intellect do you not penetrate to what is at the core of everything--unhappiness?" And in _Corinne_ the heroine repeats what Mme. de Staël herself often said: "Of all the capacities with which nature endowed me, the capacity of suffering is the only one I have developed to its full extent." Healthy-minded as she was, she came in time to take a brighter view of life. A relative who knew her well writes: "Possibly there was a time when life, death, melancholy, and passionate self-sacrifice played too great a part in her conversation; but when these words spread like a contagion throughout her whole circle, and actually began to be heard amongst the servants, she took a deadly loathing to them."[1] She succeeded in advancing beyond the intellectual stage at which so many of her French contemporaries stopped short. It is, indeed, one of the most noticeable things about her, this development of her critical faculty in the spirit and direction of the nineteenth century. Originally she was a true Parisian, with no real appreciation of the beauties of nature. When, after her first flight from Paris, she saw the Lake of Geneva for the first time, she exclaimed in her home-sickness: "How much more beautiful were the gutters of the Rue du Bac!" Not many years later she described the scenery of Italy, in _Corinne_, in truly glowing language. In her earlier years she was in love with, infatuated with, Paris, which to her represented civilisation, yet it was she who first taught the Frenchman to appreciate the characteristic and the good qualities of the other European nations. For she possessed the true critical gift, that is, she had the power of steadily enlarging her mind, increasing her receptivity, and destroying her prejudices in the bud, thereby holding herself in constant preparedness to understand.