"She thanked Lord Nelvil in the name of the people, and did it with such grace and nobility that all the inhabitants of Ancona were enraptured." And, adds the authoress with feminine subtlety, she said we in speaking for them. "You have saved us." "_We_ owe you our lives." This _we_ makes the more impression because of the authoress, earlier in the book, having dwelt upon the moment when Corinne and Oswald first used the word we, in arranging a walk in Rome, feeling all the happiness of the timid declaration of love therein implied. Now Corinne dissolves that _we_, that she may range herself on the side of those who owe him everything. And the story goes on to tell that when she approached to offer Lord Nelvil in the name of the people the wreath of oak and laurel leaves which they had woven for him, she was overcome by an indescribable emotion, and felt almost afraid as she drew near him. At the moment of her offering the wreath, the whole populace, in Italy so susceptible and so ready to worship, fell on their knees, and Corinne involuntarily followed their example. It is in the delineation of feminine emotions that Mme. de Staël excels, the emotions of a gifted woman who pays dearly for her gifts. Domestic happiness and feminine purity are what touch Corinne most deeply. She, the Sibyl, is moved when she reads the inscription on a Roman woman's sarcophagus: "No stain has soiled my life from wedding festival to funeral pyre. I have lived chastely between the two torches." But wedded happiness was not to be hers. It was not for Corinne as it was not for Mignon, the two children of longing who, the one in French, the other in German literature, as it were personify enthusiasm for Italy. Corinne herself says that only through suffering can our poor human nature attain to an understanding of the infinite; and she is as if created to suffer. But before she perishes as the last victim in the ancient arena, she is adorned for the sacrifice and led in triumphal procession. When we first meet her, on her progress to the Capitol, she is simply but picturesquely clad, with antique cameos in her hair, and a fine red shawl wound turbanwise about her head, as in Gérard's well-known portrait of Mme. de Staël. The costume suits Corinne: she is the child of the land of colour, and she has not lost her love of colour; even in stiff conventional England she has retained her fresh natural tastes, her joy in what Gautier has called the trinity of beautiful things--gold, purple, and marble. Like all the other great types of the period, she must be seen in the surroundings with which she harmonises, among which she is at home, as René is in the primeval forest, Obermann upon the heights of the Alps, and Saint-Preux by the Lake of Geneva. Her appearance has been preserved to posterity in the painting which engravings have made so familiar: Corinne improvising at Cape Miseno.