Nodier mingles his voice in the chorus. Subtle, versatile, fantastic, possessed by the spirit of opposition, he attacks Napoleon and the existing state of society, and panegyrises Klopstock and conventual life. Naive as a child and learned as an old man, he seeks martyrdom for the pleasure of being persecuted and for the sake of being able to pursue his studies in solitude. Constantly progressing, he makes belief in progress the subject of incessant satire. Constant makes his appearance as a politician, and also as a dilettante in fiction who puts masters to shame. His mind sways like a pendulum between the ideas of two periods. By nature he is the child of the eighteenth century, but his culture and his aims are those of the period of the syntheses and the constitutions. In his one imaginative work he presents his contemporaries with a model of psychological character-drawing, and directs their attention to all the good feelings and energies that are sacrificed to the laws of modern society. But it is in Mme. de Staël that the Emigrant Literature first becomes conscious of its aims and its best tendencies. It is this woman whose figure dominates the group. In her writings there is collected the best of that which is valid in the productions of the exiles. The tendency to return to the past, and the tendency to press onwards to the future, which produce discordancy in the actions and writings of the other members of the group, in her case combine to produce an endeavour which is neither reactionary nor revolutionary, but reformatory. Like the others, she draws her first inspiration from Rousseau, like the others, she deplores the excesses of the Revolution, but better than any of the others, she loves personal and political freedom. She wages war with absolutism in the State and hypocrisy in society, with national arrogance and religious prejudice. She teaches her countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hand the wall of self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and completes her work.