But behind the ready wit and the facility of expression which are the qualities developed by a social age, lay much of the fervour and the soul which the nineteenth century has not failed to appreciate. The much admired châtelaine of Coppet, the fêted, fascinating leader of society, was a genuine, natural woman. The want of sympathy between her and her mother had, as already noted, early strengthened her tendency to believe in and love human nature. The idea of duty as conflicting with nature rather than guiding it was repulsive to her. In her work _De l'Influence des Passions_, she considers the passions in their relation, not to the idea of duty, but to the idea of happiness, investigating into the proportionate infringement of each upon our happiness. In Corinne she says: "Nothing is easier than to make a grand pretence of morality while condemning all that is noble and great. The idea of duty ... can be turned into a weapon of offence, which the mediocre, perfectly satisfied with their mediocrity and narrow-mindedness, employ to impose silence upon the gifted, and to rid themselves of enthusiasm, of genius, in short, of all their enemies." The temperamental foundation upon which Mme. de Staël built was genuinely feminine. The final ideal of this undeniably ambitious woman was a purely personal, purely idyllic one--happiness in love. It is upon this that her two great novels, _Delphine_ and _Corinne_, turn; the improbability of finding it in marriage as ordained by society, and the impossibility of finding it outside marriage, are her fundamental ideas; and the perpetual conflict between domestic happiness and noble ambitions or free love, is merely the expression of her constant complaint, that neither genius nor passion is compatible with that domestic happiness which is her heart's eternal desire. In her books the woman only seeks the path of fame when she has been disappointed in all her dearest hopes. To Mme. de Staël the heart is everything; even fame was to her only a means of conquering hearts. Corinne says: "When I sought glory, I always had the hope that it would make people love me," and Mme. de Staël herself exclaims: "Do not let us give our unjust enemies and our ungrateful friends the triumph of crushing, of suppressing our powers. It is they who force those who would so willingly have been content with feeling, to seek fame." It is this warm-heartedness, one might almost say motherliness, which, in her case, gives the melancholy of the age a peculiar imprint. Hers is not only that universal human melancholy that arises from the certainty with which two human beings who love one another can say: "The day is coming when I shall lay you in the grave, or you me." Still less is it the egotistical despondency to be found in so many of the male writers of the day. It is a depression connected with the struggle for ideal equality and liberty of those revolutionary times, it is the sadness of the enthusiastic reformer.