Women -- Biography; Women -- Social and moral questions
Napoleon having banished Schlegel, the eminent German poet and critic
(who had accompanied her in her travels and been tutor to her son), and
subjected herself to a petty _surveillance_, she rushed restlessly over
Europe to Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburgh, thence through Finland to
Stockholm. In 1813, she arrived in England, and was the lion, or
lioness, of at least one London season, the whig aristocracy fêting
her, and Sir James Mackintosh trumpeting her praises in the _Edinburgh
Review_. She was celebrated for the persecutions she had endured, and
as the only person of note who had stood firm against Napoleon to the
last.
At the Restoration, she returned to her beloved Paris. From Louis
XVIII. she met with the most gracious reception; and restitution was
made to her of two million livres long due to her father from the royal
treasury. But her old foe was only caged. He broke the bars of his
prison, cleared the inconstant court in a few hours, was hailed by the
army and the people, and spared none who had taken part in the
restoration. “I felt,” she says, “when I heard of his coming, as if the
ground yawned beneath my feet.” In the spring of 1816, she was at
Coppet, the centre of a brilliant circle, with Lord Byron near her at
the Villa Diodati. To Madame de Staël, Paris was the centre of the
world, and accordingly in the autumn of this year we find her there
again, the lady-leader of the Constitutionalists. In her saloon might
have been seen Wellington and Blucher, Humboldt and Châteaubriand,
Sismondi and Constant, the two Schlegels, Canova the sculptor, and
Madame Recamier, whom the defeat of Napoleon had once more restored to
liberty.
But she did not long enjoy the society of the metropolis which she
loved so well. In February, 1817, she was seized with a violent fever.
On her deathbed she said to Châteaubriand, “I have loved God, my
father, and liberty.” The royal family were constant inquirers after
her health, and the Duke of Wellington called daily at her door to ask
if hope might yet remain. At two o’clock on Monday, the 14th July, she
died in perfect peace, at the age of fifty-one. The day of her death
was the anniversary of the Revolution which had exerted so great an
influence on her life.
She died at Paris, but her dust was laid beside the dust of her father
at Coppet. Perhaps no one ever felt more strongly the stirrings of the
soul within than Madame de Staël. So long as genius and patriotism and
piety can excite the admiration of the world, so long will her tomb be
one of the holiest shrines of the imagination.
_ANALYSIS OF WRITINGS._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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